(The Center Square) – The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has explained why student test score data suddenly vanished from its website.
“The data were taken down from the website because they were multiple years out of date and had not been updated since the amendment to our state’s federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan, which extended the timeframe for the targets,” OSPI Communications Director Katy Payne emailed The Center Square.
Todd Myers, vice president for research at the conservative Washington Policy Center think tank, says it was his insistence that OSPI update test score data over time for comparison that led to the agency “scrubbing” the data.
He suggests it is an example of officials hiding data when they are failing Washington’s children.
“There were targets that were set in 2017 for the year 2027 to have 90% of students proficient in a number of different areas,” Myers explained. “Those were pushed back to 2029 for COVID, which I don’t have any problem with. But we’re supposed to meet these targets by 2029.
“So, they had a page on there that said, ‘How are we doing in terms of meeting these targets?’ And if you go there, what it used to say is the most recent data is from 2018-2019. So, I emailed the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s office and said, ‘Have you just not updated this? What’s going on here?’ And what they said is, ‘No, we have our report card. You can see some current data. But I’ll get back to you on this.’”
Myers said a week went by, and he emailed OSPI again.
“I said, ‘Any news on this? Any news on this webpage which shows how we’re doing at meeting those targets?’ And about a week later, the superintendent had a press conference. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, this is interesting because he’s talking about these metrics.’ I went back to that page to see if anything had been done. And in fact, it had. They removed it. They completely scrubbed the webpage of that section that was supposed to show how we’re doing toward meeting those goals.”
Payne said OSPI’s slow response to Myers’ request for information was not intentional.
“I do my best to respond to all requests/inquiries in a reasonable time, and unfortunately, some slip through the cracks. It wasn’t intentional,” she said, adding that given Myers later put in a public records request for more information, she knew he would get responses to his questions through that process, so she did not respond to other email inquiries.
Myers says the data now available lacks context.
“So, for 2024-25, the report card notes that 70.9% of students achieve ‘Levels 2,3 and 4’ in English Language Arts. This would be well below the previously stated goal of ‘getting each student group to 90% proficiency in English language arts…’ as was stated on the now-removed State Targets web page. The same is true for math, where only 63.3% are achieving at Level 2, 3, or 4.”
As reported by The Center Square, in OSPI’s latest release of student test score data, proficiency measures appeared to be adjusted, such that year-over-year comparisons were not a good gauge of improvement or decline.
Myers contends OSPI took down the data to hide the fact that Washington students in public schools are not meeting improvement goals.
“They clearly removed this because they wanted to make it more difficult for people to understand how we’re doing at meeting those targets,” he said. “Unfortunately, I see it all too often. When the data are inconvenient to the government, they simply hide the data.”
Myers argues that significant increases in education spending have not improved student outcomes.
“We’ve spent a lot of money. We compensate our teachers well, but during that same period of time, the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores have gone down. It indicates that what we’re doing is not working, and that just simply throwing more money at the problem is not working,” he said. “That’s my area of interest. Holding people, holding politicians, holding government accountable for how it spends money and the promises that it makes. In this case, we’re not spending money, obviously, effectively, and we’re not living up to our promises.”
