Latest ND K-12 student math and English proficiency data delayed

Legislators and state officials hoping to get a look at the latest math and English proficiency rates for North Dakota’s K-12 students will need to wait due to a number of issues related to compiling the data. 

Student proficiency data is important for lawmakers to help set education policy and help understand if students are rebounding from the low proficiency levels seen during the pandemic.  Data is expected to be ready before the next legislative session starting in January. 

The main issue in the delay was an error that occurred at the test provider level, Stanley Schauer, assistant superintendent of public instruction at the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction (DPI), told a Legislative Council committee Sept. 16 in Bismarck. 

DPI partnered with provider Pearson to create a new assessment system and provide testing, which was implemented after 2024. 

Schauer said the issue arose when sixth through eighth grade math students were allowed to use on-screen calculators on an entire test when that use was meant to be confined to just a few questions. 

Schauer said “human error on the back end” allowed “all of our sixth through eighth graders to use a calculator on the entire test, which I'm sure they probably enjoyed, but was not the intention.” 

Pearson has since covered the cost of the error for that segment of students, he said. 

Other issues arose because school systems were still implementing the North Dakota Writing Rubric that led to some small changes in the English testing, as well as factors in high school math testing that made it difficult to assess between testing levels. 

The DPI established a new baseline for measuring student achievement and changed the scoring standards for its new statewide assessment, which means data from the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 periods is still being reviewed.

Testing, standards and other aspects of assessment replaced the older system as of the spring of 2025, so the latest data cannot be easily compared to older data. 

Schauer said it will take a few years of “using the same tool twice” to assess whether students are progressing or not, and that the numbers used now can’t be automatically compared to earlier ones. 

“There will be a caveat, there will be a break, and 25-26 will be the new benchmark, the new starting point for comparisons moving forward in the future,” Schauer said. 

“You will be able to (compare) 25-26 and 26-27, and hopefully 10 more years beyond that, we will have that longitudinal comparable data,” he told legislators. 

DPI is currently working to bring all the data together from the 2024-through-2026 periods and is expected to provide an update later this fall, according to Schauer. 

Initial raw data from the 2025-2026 school year publicly released at the meeting appears to show a continued rebound in math and English proficiency from pandemic-era lows. 

That raw data “hasn’t gone through accountability yet,” Schauer said, so final numbers could change.

Under the revised system, third-grade students showed the most proficiency in math and English for their level, while 10th-grade students showed the least proficiency in those areas. 

Data running through the end of the 2024 school year, before the new baseline and assessment system, also showed that younger students were recovering to pre-pandemic levels faster than older students, particularly when it comes to math proficiency. 

Those older figures showed third-grade math scores rebounding to above pre-pandemic levels (52% then up to 55% in 2024), though they remained below for English proficiency (50% vs. 45% in 2024). 

For sixth graders, English proficiency also increased above the pre-pandemic assessment (50% up to 56% in 2024), but math proficiency remained below (52% vs. 46%) in those older numbers.