The St. Louis Park school district is trying to convince high school students that state standardized tests are worth their time, at a moment when many districts are trying to measure pandemic learning loss and figure out where they still need to make up ground.

The rate at which St. Louis Park students opt out of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) outpaces neighboring suburbs: Only about half of high school students took the test in 2019, according to district data, down from about three-quarters of students in 2017. In Hopkins, Eden Prairie and Edina, well over 80% of students took the tests in 2019, as did more than 90% of students in Minnetonka and Wayzata.

There are many reasons students and families might choose not to take another standardized test, but the more students opt out, the more murky the view teachers and the district have of how they are serving students.

“The MCA data, as a high school teacher, really is used for us to assess: Are we meeting what the state of Minnesota says we need to be doing?” said St. Louis Park High School math teacher Kristin Johnson. “Are we having the kids interact with the material on the level the state expects?”

The tests are no longer tied to funding, and many districts have stopped using the scores to decide if students can take honors classes.

Students are assessed with grades and other standardized tests, said Silvy Un Lafayette, director of assessment for St. Louis Park, but the MCA helps assess teachers and the district as a whole.

When students opt out, the data school districts receive from the state Department of Education count their scores as if they got every question wrong. Overall scores, including all those opt-outs, factor heavily into online school-rating systems, including those used by real estate listing sites, and can make schools look worse to outsiders than neighboring districts.