Scores on the state’s LEAP tests for the recently completed school year show a modest uptick in performance for many Louisiana students. Though this year’s scores might seem less promising than expected given other recent gains, there is a bigger picture that must also be considered.
[View Louisiana Department of Education LEAP Presentation]
The good news from the latest LEAP report is that on average, students in Louisiana in grades 3-8 are performing slightly better than last year and have surpassed where they were just prior to the pandemic. For the 2024-25 school year, 35% of students scored at a level of “Mastery” or above. That compares with 34% the previous year as well as in 2019, just before COVID triggered a significant decline in test scores here and across the country. The level of Mastery indicates a student is proficient in the subject matter and ready to move to the next grade without the need for remediation or additional support. By subject, student performance held steady in English, improved slightly in science, and moved up two points in math.
When it comes to school districts, 36 improved their rate of students in grades 3-8 scoring at Mastery or above, 19 stayed the same and 14 declined.
While overall student performance is still low, and the increase in elementary and middle school is not huge, it is significant that it continues to trend upward.
Unfortunately, that improvement did not translate to high schools where performance above Mastery edged down a point to 35%. That doesn’t necessarily negate the longer trend upward since the pandemic, but it might raise questions about how this compares with the good news we’ve been hearing about Louisiana’s recent climb up the national rankings, especially in reading.
There are a lot of things to analyze here, but the simple answer is Louisiana has generally been making progress, though the steep rise in the rankings doesn’t necessarily equate to the same type of increase in student performance.
The biggest headlines have come from Louisiana’s rise in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. That test is given every two years to a random sampling of students across the state and country.
Between 2022 and 2024, the percentage of Louisiana’s 4th grade students performing at “proficient” or above in reading rose four points, or an average of two points per year, on NAEP. But that annualized two-point increase, coupled with a similar increase in average scale points, catapulted Louisiana from 41st overall in the country to 15th among states. Why? Because the national average and the scores in most states went down. That made Louisiana’s modest increase in student performance yield a high increase in its rankings.
This year’s LEAP scores mirror those same results. The percentage of 4th grade students performing at Mastery or above, which is similar to the NAEP measurement, also rose by two percentage points, from 41% to 43%. But there is no direct national comparison to LEAP scores, so what you see is more or less the same trend of incremental growth that’s occurred over the last few years.
To be sure, it’s more complicated than that. When you take out the pandemic years of decline you see a pattern, much like in the stock market, where scores go up, they sometimes plateau or tick down, and then continue to grow in small steps creating a generally improving trend. Sometimes, performance varies by grade and some grades go up while others stay about the same or see slight declines. But the goal is to have a trendline that’s moving upward.
That might make Louisiana’s progress this year seem less significant, but in many ways it’s not. Students in all states experienced learning loss during COVID and in the aftermath of the pandemic they are all dealing with a new and very serious problem – increases in truancy and chronic absenteeism.
Louisiana has not been immune from either. Test scores here went down during COVID and today one-in-four students in the state are considered chronically absent – a huge obstacle to student learning. But Louisiana also embraced reforms that a lot of other states are just now considering, notably a new approach to how students are taught to read and a major investment in high-dosage tutoring.
Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics says that has made Louisiana stand out, but she notes, “they didn’t start yesterday. They were able to pull this off, and not only improve to pre-pandemic levels, but exceed them, and bring their lower performers along.”
So, to put this in a broader context, schools across the country are facing evolving challenges and some states, like Louisiana, have been adapting to try to meet what’s coming at them. But it’s not perfect. Each year is a snapshot in time. This year performance ticked up in elementary and middle schools and ticked down in high schools.
And while we would like to see large growth every year in every grade, the reality is that rarely shows up in the data. The lesson learned out of this year’s LEAP scores seems to be that when you consider scores in grades K-12, Louisiana is basically holding steady in the face of headwinds that are pushing students in other states farther behind. We have implemented policies and made investments that have distinguished us as a positive outlier. But we must do all we can to continue to build on those efforts to ensure that we don’t fall back.