Our educators and students continue to work hard to recover from COVID-19, Kansas Education Commissioner Randy Watson said this week when summing up the 2023-24 annual report prepared by the Kansas State Department of Education. 

“We’re progressing in our post-pandemic recovery process,” he said. “That’s the good news. COVID set us back but we’re still on target.” 

More specifically, Watson said incremental progress is being made on one of the Kansas State Board of Education’s goals to move more students out of the lowest level of reading on the spring state assessments. 

• The 2024 reading assessment results show a decrease in the number of students scoring at Level 1 to 32.8%. That’s down from 32.9% in 2023 and 33.9% in 2022.   
• The 2024 reading assessment results show that 33.6% of all students assessed scored at Levels 3 and 4, an increase from 33.2% in 2023 and 32.1% in 2022. 

• The 2024 math assessment results also show 33.2% of students scored at Level 1, a slight increase from 33.1% in 2023 but down from 34.2% in 2022.  
• The 2024 math assessment results show 31.6% of all students scored at Levels 3 and 4, an increase from 31.3% in 2023 and 29.4% in 2022.   

Since 2018, the state board of education has been committed to the science of reading structured literacy initiative. That investment, Watson said, is showing dividends in the increasing number of Kansas educators who are taking Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS®) training - 12,141 – and those who have completed the training as of? – 3,242. A total of $25 million of federal ESSER money has also been provided so the structured literacy training can be taken at no cost to educators which includes early childhood professionals and district administrators.  

The state board continued its commitment to structured literacy this past year. In June, board members approved the structured literacy license requirement that will have some Kansas educators either testing out or getting trained in the science of reading by July 2028. The next month, board members approved the new school improvement model that includes structured literacy as one of the four fundamentals of the foundation for the second iteration of the Kansas Education System Accreditation, known as KESA 2.0. Then in October, board members approved the literacy tests and the passing scores for those tests. Click here for more information on the science of reading licensure requirements. 

Chronic absenteeism rates continued to decline from their COVID-19 levels for a third year in a row, Watson said. The 2024 rate was 19.8%, down from 21.8% in 2023 and down from a high of 25.7% in 2022. He said the 19.8% rate is still higher than pre-pandemic rates, but the numbers are trending down in the right direction. 

The 2023 graduation rate (a lag indicator because students have until October to fulfill their high school graduation requirements from the previous school year) declined by 1.2 percentage points to 88.1%, including a 1.3 percentage point decrease for students with disabilities. However, the graduation rate for English language learners (ELL) increased by one percentage point.  

Watson said a leading contributor to the drop in the graduation rate was a result of a loss of freshmen and sophomore students during COVID. He said the May 2023 graduates would have been sophomores at the beginning of the pandemic. He said he expects the 2024 graduation rate also will show a slight dip since those seniors would have been freshmen at the start of COVID.  

Special education continues to have the highest number of teacher vacancies in the state with 480, up 82 from 398 this past spring, according to the fall 2024 vacancy report, which is included in the annual report. 

Elementary teachers had the second highest number of vacancies, followed by math, English language arts and then science. There was a total of 1,954 vacancies in the fall vacancy report across all categories compared to 1,810 this past spring, an increase of 144. 

The postsecondary effectiveness rate declined slightly in 2024 to 49.5%, down from 51% in 2023. Watson said that percentage is not close to the ideal 73% that would meet the needs of the Kansas workforce; however, he said he is encouraged by the steadily increasing number of Kansas high school students who are taking postsecondary courses and the number of credits they are earning from concurrent, dual enrolled and Excel in CTE classes.