By admin 
About half of Colorado elementary school students are on track with reading, or even excelling beyond literacy expectations, before they move on to middle school. That represents a record percentage of young readers on par with reading goals in Colorado, according to state education officials, who on Wednesday released results of the state standardized tests taken in the spring.
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It’s a stroke of good news for schools across the state that have spent the last few years trying to get many students on more stable academic ground following disruptions during the pandemic, which derailed progress in core subjects like reading and math.
Still, struggles persist for some students, including middle schoolers whose reading scores plummeted and middle school students with disabilities whose reading scores also dipped.
“The overall story of this year’s assessment release is one of progress but also one of continued work ahead,” Christina Wirth-Hawkins, chief assessment and state accountability officer for the state education department said Tuesday during a virtual media conference.
Schools administer CMAS tests to students starting in third grade every spring as a way to measure skills in reading, writing, math, science and social studies and whether students as a whole are meeting state standards in those subjects.
Assessments test students in grades 3 through 8 in reading, writing and math while students in grades 5, 8 and 11 are tested in science. Students in grades 4 and 7 from select schools also take a social studies exam.
In high school, ninth and 10th graders take the PSAT, which covers reading, writing and math, and students in 11th grade are tested in those same subjects on the SAT.
The CMAS tests “give us the only consistent measure of student achievement across schools statewide,” Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said Tuesday. “They help us see where students in schools are making progress, where challenges and achievement gaps persist and where additional support and attention may be needed.”
The assessments measure student achievement and their growth in individual subjects. Achievement gives an indication of whether students are behind in meeting expectations for state academic standards, whether they are approaching those expectations or meeting or exceeding them.
Achievement plays out on what Wirth-Hawkins calls “a learning continuum.”
“Students demonstrate increasing levels of knowledge and skill as they move from the ‘did not meet’ performance level through the ‘exceeded expectations’ performance level,” she said. “Meeting expectations is our benchmark for being on track for Colorado’s grade-level expectations. However, we know that students also demonstrate really important knowledge and skills and performance levels below expectations, and so we want to make sure that we’re pointing that out, that it’s not just black and white.”
Growth, meanwhile, illustrates how much progress students are making in school from year to year and it compares students with their peers who began at a similar achievement level in the previous year.
Participation on CMAS, the PSAT and the SAT in the spring resembled or was higher than participation rates on the assessments in 2025 in most grades, state education officials noted.
More than 92% of students in third, fourth and fifth grades took the reading and math CMAS exams while middle school participation in those subjects ranged from just over 80% to close to 90%. In ninth grade, just over 87% of students sat for the PSAT while close to 85% of 10th graders and nearly 90% of 11th graders took the SAT.
Fewer 11th graders are taking science exams, with only about half of students taking the test in the spring.
Here are three big takeaways from how Colorado students are performing.
Younger kids improved in reading while older students had setbacks
Some of Colorado’s youngest readers, in grades 4 and 5, largely outperformed students tested in 2025, with the percentage of kids who met or surpassed expectations jumping in both grades.
The bigger boost was among fourth graders — 47% of students met or exceeded reading and writing expectations last spring, up from 42% in 2025. Reading gains among fifth graders showed that close to half of kids could read and write at grade level, with some demonstrating more advanced skills, compared with 48% the year before.
Reading and writing proficiency among third graders stayed relatively flat year over year — 40.8% of third graders proved they could meet or exceed reading and writing expectations last year, compared with 42% in 2025.
Third grade is an especially important year for students to build a strong foundation for reading and writing. By the time they enter fourth grade, students shift from learning to read to reading to learn.
State education officials pointed out that students who fell short of the state’s benchmarks for reading can still read but likely struggle with specific literacy skills.
Students can “read independently” whether their scores signaled that they met expectations or only approached them, Wirth-Hawkins said.
“We know that students can read independently at both levels,” she said. “The difference is the consistency, depth and quality of their comprehension and communication.”
Meanwhile, middle school students had a harder time hitting reading and writing proficiency marks during spring assessments — sixth, seventh and eighth graders lagged behind peers who took CMAS in 2025.
Among sixth graders, rates of reading and writing on grade level, or better, fell to 41.6% from 44.1% the year before. In seventh grade, 46.6% of students met or surpassed standards last spring, down from 48.6% in 2025. And 42.2% of eight grade students’ reading and writing ability matched or exceeded state expectations, a slight dip from 43.9% the previous year.
Córdova said the state education department is analyzing how support, training and resources allocated to schools through a 2012 law, the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act, has impacted students’ literacy over time.
Older students’ pitfalls with reading and writing might be shaped by what educators are trained to teach — and what they’re lacking in their instruction, Córdova said.
Middle and high school teachers aren’t as well versed in working with students behind in reading, she noted. Teaching phonics and filling in gaps when kids stumble through reading is less of a focus for those educators.
Schools need a well-rounded approach to successfully teach kids to master reading, including quality materials, teacher training and reviews of interim assessment results, Córdova said. The department is looking at schools and districts that are making strides in helping their students read with that system of support in place.
“When all of those pieces are in place, what we are tending to see is sustained improvement over time,” she said. “It can be really frustrating, I think, when we look at our third grade results because our third grade results have pretty much been flat. And we are seeing improvement from third to fourth, fourth to fifth. And so I think that’s a place where we really want to lean in to understand what are we getting right in sustained improvement over time at elementary school and how can we build on that for our middle school and high school students?”
High schoolers’ grasp of reading and writing was a mixed bag on the PSAT and the SAT. Proficiency stayed flat among ninth graders, with 65.6% of test-takers meeting and exceeding reading and writing expectations. Those in 10th grade improved over their peers from 2025, with 65.1% of students achieving or surpassing expectations, up from 63.5%.
Students who sat for the SAT, however, fared worse. Test results show that 59.6% of 11th graders who took the test in the spring were on pace to meet or exceed expectations, down from 61.5% the year before.
Math gains spanned grades
Many Colorado students have continued to hone their math skills, contributing to significant leaps in statewide achievement and showing higher levels of growth than in other subjects like reading and writing.
Math “continues to be one of the largest or clearest positive trends” in 2026 test results, Wirth-Hawkins said.
The progress marks a sharp turnaround from widespread math struggles in the years coming out of the pandemic, which drew the eye of Gov. Jared Polis. He set aside funds in his 2023-24 budget proposal specifically to help schools coach their students in math.
Nearly four years later, students’ understanding of math has blossomed in many grades, particularly in eighth grade. According to the latest CMAS results, 37.8% of eighth graders met or exceeded expectations, up from 34.7% in 2025. In 2022, the percentage of eighth graders in line with expectations, or above them, was at 32.4%.
“We definitely are really proud of the consistent year-over-year gains,” Córdova said. “In part, I think that is an artifact of how significantly we saw declines during COVID. So we saw a big drop in mathematics achievement. I think for many students, math might have been harder to stick with during the school disruptions of the pandemic.”
Students in grades 4 and 6 also outperformed their peers from 2025 — 39% of fourth graders demonstrated proficiency in the spring, up from 36.5% in 2025. The percentage of sixth graders who met and exceeded expectations climbed 1.3 percentage points to 32.7%.
Math performance in grades 3, 5 and 7 remained relatively stable, with students in each grade slightly improving over those who completed CMAS exams the previous year.
Math outcomes in high school similarly improved or stayed flat. Ninth and 10th graders focused on the PSAT had a better handle on math concepts than their peers in 2025. The proficiency rate for ninth grade students ticked up 3 percentage points to 40.5% while 38.9% of 10th grade students met or exceeded expectations, up 2.5 percentage points from results the previous year.
Eleventh grade students’ math skills mirrored those of students who sat for the SAT in 2025, with the rate of students reaching and surpassing benchmarks down by less than 1 percentage point to 31.6%.
The rebound in math is moving students in the right direction, but the work is not over, Córdova said, noting proficiency rates in math are lower than in reading and writing.
“We have farther to go in math,” she said. “We saw more significant declines (because of pandemic disruptions). We’re seeing more regular improvement over time and we still have a long way to go when it comes to mathematics in Colorado.”
“Longstanding achievement gaps still remain too wide”
While poring over CMAS and SAT results, schools and state education officials took a closer look at performance trends among students who came to school with more significant learning needs and who relied on extra support to stay the course. That includes students living in poverty — measured by those who qualify for free and reduced lunch — as well as students with disabilities and kids learning English.
Gaps in achievement between student groups and their peers have long persisted and results from 2026 tests show those gaps remain far from closing.
Performance in reading and math varied among student groups in different grades. In reading, for instance, the percentage of kids living in poverty who matched or exceeded expectations improved in grades 4 and 5 but decreased in third grade and among middle schoolers.
Students with disabilities showed reading progress in grades 4 and 5 but performed worse than their peers in 2025 in grades 3, 6, 7 and 8.
And they remain far behind their classmates. In third grade, for example, while 40.8% of all students met or exceeded reading expectations, 23.8% of third grade students living in poverty met or exceeded expectations and 13.8% of students with a disability demonstrated reading proficiency.
Math results showed that students living in poverty in every grade except fifth grade demonstrated higher proficiency rates than students from the year before.
Kids with disabilities in all grades performed better or the same in math as students in 2025.
Still, students in poverty and those with a disability haven’t caught up to their classmates in math — compared to 41.5% of all third graders who hit or exceeded math benchmarks, 23.9% of third graders living in poverty met or surpassed expectations and 17.2% of third grade test-takers with a disability cleared or passed expectations.
“Many student groups also made progress, but longstanding achievement gaps still remain too wide,” Wirth-Hawkins said. “We know that closing those gaps will require more than typical annual growth and we know that we need accelerated progress for students who are furthest from grade-level expectations.”
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