Minnesota students’ standardized test scores continue to stagnate

Fewer than half of Minnesota students who take the state’s standardized test are able to read and do math at grade-level expectations, according to data released Wednesday by the state’s education department.

Performance on the test, called the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, declined drastically over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which schools closed or held classes remotely. Proficiency rates continue to be over 10 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, when over half of students were proficient in math and reading.

Most Minnesota school districts haven’t recovered test scores after the pandemic

The exams are given in May to students in grades 3-8 in reading and math, with additional reading and math exams in grades 10 and 11, respectively. The results account for over 90% of students in the state, once opt-outs, absences and other reasons are accounted for.

Students and parents are able to opt out of exams. Around 4% of students or their parents opted out of the math exam, for example. Non-participation rates vary widely by school, making test scores much harder to interpret in some cases. In a few schools, over half of students opt out of the exam; on the extreme end, at Farmington High School, around 80% of juniors opted out of the math test.

The reading exams in 2026 are based off of new standards and differ from past exams, education officials said, making them not comparable to old results. The 2026 reading proficiency rate is over one percentage point lower than 2025.

“While results from updated assessments cannot be compared to previous versions, it is common for updated assessments to reflect a ‘drop’ in proficiency due to limited instruction time of the new standards,” the department said in a press release.

At the same time that exams are getting revamped, the Walz administration is creating a task force to review whether they accurately measure student progress.

The task force comes amid a broader national debate over the role of standardized testing and how schools can best measure student learning, including calls for a system that provides more timely information to educators and families instead of relying on results from a single test often completed months ago.

Wide gaps in proficiency persist between white students and students of other races and ethnicities. While around 52% of white students in Minnesota met grade-level standards in math, just 21% of Black students reached grade-level proficiency. Similarly large gaps exist in reading proficiency.

Students also took this year’s exams after Operation Metro Surge, which left some immigrant families afraid to send their kids to school, fearing immigration agents who detained students near their schools. Though federal immigration enforcement largely targeted Hispanic and Latino immigrants, test scores for Hispanic and Latino kids remained steady.