MN: More students skip state tests; "lower-performing students" may be missing
- 12 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Heading inside your schools, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS is looking at the number of Minnesota students who are not taking the state assessment exams. According to a new study, that number continues to grow.
“They want schools to hit 95% of their students taking the test, and the number of schools in Minnesota that isn’t hitting that 95% mark has tripled, more than tripled since 2019,” said Jake Schwitzer with NorthStar Policy Action.
Schwitzer headed up the review of last year’s Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) report on the 2024-2025 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA).
The researchers found not only are more and more districts falling below the federally mandated number of students taking the state assessments, but as many as 60% of students are opting out of, or just not showing up to take, the reading tests and almost 75% for the math tests.
“Minnesota is not alone. Participation below the federal 95% benchmark has been an issue in other states as well, and state opt-out policies differ considerably,” said Kim Gibbons, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. “What is noteworthy in Minnesota is the increase documented in the brief, particularly at the high school level. That is worth monitoring, even though it is not uniquely a Minnesota issue.”
Why does this matter?
They’re talking about the same tests many educators, legislators and parents use to determine how well, or poorly, a particular school is doing.
“The data is so poor at this point, because of the numbers of students who aren’t taking it, we can’t really draw conclusions,” Schwitzer said. “It’s getting high enough that it calls into question the entire statewide testing regime.”
Gibbons cautions this isn’t about your child’s scores. Those are still accurate. It’s about what the collective scores at a school can tell us about how well that school, or district, is performing.
“If lower-performing students are disproportionately missing, reported proficiency may look higher. If higher-performing students are disproportionately missing, it may look lower. The direction of the bias depends on who does not participate,” she said. “The key issue is confidence in the results: as participation declines, we become less certain that the students who tested accurately represent the full student population.”
Digging deeper
Across the state, 10th-grade students at Farmington High School had the highest rate of non-participation in state testing at 59.5%.
Eighth and 7th grades at Menahga High School came in as a close second and third with 59.2% and 53.2% non-participation rates, respectively.
Another standout is 10th grade at Camden High School, which is 9th on the overall list, but has the highest absence rate with 27.8%.
“The two biggest categories are absences, students just didn’t go to school the day that the test was taken, or refusal,” said Schwitzer. “So you can go to school that day, and the student is allowed to refuse to take the test. You can’t force a student to take a test. So schools are required to put on this test, but you can’t do anything to force a student to take it.”
He added that there’s no way to tell if the lack of participation is artificially increasing or decreasing school or district-level scores, just that it’s impacting them.
“Our concern is that it’s making the data unreliable,” he said.
“They tell us more about the quality of the measurement than about the quality of Minnesota schools,” Gibbons said. “Lower participation does not demonstrate that schools are performing better or worse. It does mean we should be more cautious about assuming that reported proficiency rates represent all students, particularly in schools or grades where participation is substantially below the expected level.”
She added that the MCA does still provide useful information.
“But as participation falls, confidence in school-level comparisons and broader conclusions about student achievement also falls,” she said.
A problem for years
The researchers emphasize that this has been an issue for years, even before the pandemic.
“The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor wrote a report back in 2017 saying that these tests were becoming increasingly unreliable as a result of students not taking them, and the problem has only gotten far worse since then,” Schwitzer said. . . .
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