September is full of school rituals — back-to-school nights, club fairs and the Oregon Department of Education’s annual release of standardized test results from the previous spring.

But not this year.

Instead, the state is delaying release of the much-watched metric because it needs more time to make the presentation of test data more user-friendly.

The change comes after The Oregonian reported on a national study that ranked Oregon among the worst states in the country for student achievement transparency. The study, by the nonpartisan Center for Reinventing Public Education, said the state’s presentation of test results made it needlessly difficult for parents and state lawmakers alike to decipher the pandemic’s toll on reading and math performance.

Top leaders, including Gov. Tina Kotek, took notice.

“I am not happy about that grade that we have from that national group saying we are not as transparent,” Kotek said during a press conference this month. “We have a lot of information, but it is not as user-friendly as it could be. We have a new dashboard coming by the end of the year to track these things.”

Currently, as state schools chief Charlene Williams noted in the same press conference, finding and comparing test results for an individual school or district pre- and post-pandemic requires locating and downloading multiple spreadsheets or PDF documents. That makes it difficult for many people to compare school performance over time, which matters because the pandemic’s year-plus of online schooling took an enormous toll on student academic performance.

Without clear data, families, district leaders, teachers and state lawmakers can all get lulled into a false sense of security about students’ academic prowess, dulling the urgency to grapple with learning loss, said Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who was an author of the study.

Williams said that her agency is now working on new data visualizations, such as tables embedded on its website, to improve transparency and accessibility.

Marc Siegel, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education, would not specify how long it might now take the agency to release spring 2024 testing data.

Those results carry crucial implications for Oregon’s public school system, which consumes around 30% of the state’s budget. In 2022 and 2023, the state was a national outlier where reading and math scores failed to budge from pandemic lows. Hopes are high that the tide will turn with the 2024 scores.

But the 2023-2024 school year was also a disrupted one, marred by a prolonged strike in Portland, the state’s largest school district, and by a January storm that closed schools in the Willamette Valley for a week. Oregon schools on average already have among the nation’s shortest school years.

Neighboring Washington state has already released its spring 2024 test results. Its students showed significant progress in math and more incremental gains in English. Washington students’ achievement remains well below pre-pandemic achievement levels, and gains were most concentrated among elementary students.