2024 CMAS tests: These are Colorado's best schools in reading, math

Five-year-old Urysohn Streit plays on the playground equipment outside Polaris Elementary in Denver on Aug. 19, 2024. Urysohn will be starting 1st grade this year. He and many other Denver Public School students headed back to the classroom today for the first day of school. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

By Jessica Seaman | jseaman@denverpost.com | The Denver Post

UPDATED: August 29, 2024 at 4:50 p.m.

Students at Polaris Elementary in Denver continue to earn the highest scores on the annual Colorado Measures of Academic Success test, according to data released by the Colorado Department of Education on Thursday.

As it did last year, the school, part of Denver Public Schools, recorded the highest overall scores in both the math and English language arts categories.

The education department released statewide CMAS results last week, which showed that test scores are rebounding to pre-pandemic levels.

At the district level, Liberty School District J-4 in eastern Colorado had the highest percentage of students (75.8%) who “met or exceeded expectation” in English language arts, while the Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado Springs saw the highest percentage of students (59.9%) meet or exceed expectations in math.

The Boulder Valley School District had the highest percentage of students meet or exceed expectations in metro Denver on both the math (53.5%) and English language arts (63.2%) tests.

Across DPS, 40.7% of students met or exceeded expectations in English language arts, up less than the percentage point from 2023. The state’s largest school district has yet to see literacy scores recover to pre-pandemic levels, as 42.8% of students met or exceeded expectations in 2019.

Only 31.2% of DPS students met or exceeded expectations in math, which is up almost a percentage point from last year but still below 2019 levels. Overall, the district had fewer students take CMAS exams in both math and literacy this year compared to 2019 and 2023.

At DPS’s district-run schools, 34.2% of students met or exceeded expectations in math, which not only surpassed pre-pandemic levels but is the highest percentage the district has ever achieved, said Simone Wright, chief of academics.

“We’ve seen some tremendous bright spots that show us the work we are doing is the right work,” Deputy Superintendent Tony Smith said.

CMAS tests are offered to students in third to eighth grade. Children who score at least 750 on the exams are considered to have “met or exceeded expectations,” which means they are on the path to being college- or career-ready.

Statewide, about 500,000 children took CMAS tests this year, a figure that was similar to 2023 but down from before the pandemic.

Here are the schools that ranked the highest in both the literacy and math categories based on their mean scale score, which is the average performance of the students who took the exam: