Nearly half of Beaufort Co. high school students failing in U.S. History, state testing shows
Nearly half of Beaufort County high school or high school-level students are failing in U.S. History and the Constitution, according to a statewide assessment taken at the end of last academic year and released Monday.
The test, The End of Course Examination Program, is mandatory and administered to high school or high school-level students across the state by the South Carolina Department of Education.
According to the assessment, 43.82% — or 673 out of the 1,536 students — tested on the U.S. History and the Constitution subject failed the assessment. This is 12.82 percentage points more than pre-pandemic levels in 2019 and 6.96 percentage points more than in 2021. Students weren’t tested in 2020 due to the pandemic.
The mean, or average, for Beaufort County high schoolers was 65.02%, which is in the D range. By comparison, just 15.76 percent of those students tested scored an A, or 90-100%.
For all South Carolina students, 43.55% failed the U.S. History and the Constitution subject, 10.4 percentage points more than in 2019 and 1.73 percentage points more than in 2021.
The EOCEP also showed that for Beaufort County students
▪ 37.18% failed Biology compared with 26.46% in 2019
▪ 29.05% failed Algebra compared with 19.96% in 2019
▪ 16.16% failed English 2, which wasn’t tested in 2019
Since 2021, Algebra and English 2 failure rates showed improvement and Biology stayed the same.
“I’m pleased that we’re seeing growth, but at the same time we know that we have a lot of work to do still,” Beaufort County Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said.
Beaufort County administrators partially attribute the U.S. history and constitution scores to the changes in standards from the South Carolina Department of Education in 2019.
“In 2011, our standards were written as content-based standards. And in 2019, the state pushed forward a new set of standards that are concept skill-based standards,” said Karen McKenzie, Beaufort County director of teaching and learning. “That’s a completely different look for standards.”
Content-based learning teaches facts, while concept skill learning teaches understanding what those facts mean and applying them, according to Rodriguez.
“In the past, it was more of a memorization type of assessment or just a comprehension type of assessment,” he said. “It has evolved significantly.”
Did the pandemic affect test scores?
Beaufort County Director of Accountability Daniel Fallon said the pandemic also impacted the scores.
“In the 2021 and 2022 school year, we would have loved to think we were out of the pandemic, but we still had large amounts of students and teachers and the public in quarantine,” he said. “There were still interruptions to learning.”
President of the South Carolina Education Association Sherry East said that these results aren’t representative of teachers and students’ performance.
“People are judging us based on this one single score that’s out there that’s not really effective at all,” she said. “We really put too much emphasis on testing right now, especially during a pandemic.”
When asked what schools are doing to improve statistics, Rodriguez said they are engaging students outside of the classroom with programs like community tutoring sites for students that can’t stay after school.
Rodriguez said teachers are also continuously reviewing students’ performance to make any needed adjustments to their instruction.
“They’re looking at information along the way about the progress of the students and the impact of their instruction,” he said. “If they have to remediate, accelerate, they can make those decisions much sooner than half way throughout the school year.”
