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Search and compare data from the California School Dashboard, 2024

On Nov. 21, 2024, the California Department of Education updated the official California School Dashboard with the latest data for schools and districts. You can also view results for 2023, 2019, 2018, and 2017.* The dashboard shows achievement and progress, or lack of it, on multiple measures in color codes tied to performance metrics by the state. Enter a search term in the box to search by school, city, district or county. If a school or district does not appear, it means that no data is available. Detailed test scores are available on cells with an “i” (click to see more). For a full explanation, see the notes below the chart.

* Missing or incomplete years of data from the California School Dashboard are due to the disruptions caused by the pandemic.

School Name, City and County	Chronic Absenteeism Rate	Suspension Rates	English Lang. Arts Performance	Math Performance	High School Graduation Rate	English Learners	Link
School Name, City and County	Chronic Absenteeism Rate	Suspension Rates	English Lang. Arts Performance	Math Performance	High School Graduation Rate	English Learners	Link

Notes to Database

Color Codes and Ratings: The dashboard includes five color-coded performance levels, based on a combination of current performance level and change over the previous year. The color spectrum ranges from red to orange to yellow to green to blue, with red signifying the lowest performance level and blue the highest.

More information about how the performance levels were calculated is available at the California Department of Education’s website here.

Column Headings:

Chronic Absenteeism: Proportion of students who miss 10 percent or more expected days of attendance in a school year. (For a student enrolled for 180 days, this would be 18 or more days.) Note: This indicator is not reported for high schools.

Suspension Rates: Based on a combination of current suspension rates and changes in those rates over time.

English Language Arts Performance: Student performance in Grades 3-8 and 11 on the English Language Arts Smarter Balanced tests administered in the current year, combined with whether scores improved, declined or stayed the same compared to the previous year.

Math Performance: Student performance in Grades 3-8 and 11 on the math Smarter Balanced tests in the current year combined with whether scores improved, declined or stayed the same compared to the previous year.

High School Graduation Rate: Combined four-year and five-year graduation rates, including current graduation rate along with whether rates have changed over the previous year.

For more information about how the performance levels were calculated, go to the California Department of Education’s website here.

For the full dashboard for each school or district, go here.

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02/05/2025

California schools recovering from pandemic, dashboard shows

Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

California’s K-12 schools made progress in several areas last school year, including increasing graduation rates slightly, and reducing suspensions and the number of students who were chronically absent from school, according to the School Dashboard released Thursday.

The state also had an overall increase in scores on state standardized tests in both English language arts and math, prepared more students for college and careers, and had more students earn a seal of biliteracy.

The improvements, although incremental in some areas, are an indicator that California schools have made progress in reducing the learning loss and chronic absenteeism that resulted from school closures at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

“Today’s dashboard results show California continuing to make important strides in post-pandemic recovery,” said California State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond. “We’re getting students back to school, getting more of them prepared for college and careers, and graduating them in greater numbers.”

The dashboard, a key part of the state’s accountability system, uses an array of colors to show whether a school or district showed growth or decline in several areas, including chronic absenteeism, suspension and graduation rates; preparation for college and career; progress of English language learners; and on state standardized test scores in math and English language arts.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss 10 percent or more of instructional days during the school year.

Blue identifies schools and districts with the best performance, followed by green, yellow, orange and red. Schools and districts are scored based on their performance that school year, as well as on whether there were increases or decreases since the previous school year. Anything below a green rating indicates a need for improvement, according to state officials.

This year, the state added science scores from state standardized tests to the mix, but only as an informational item. Next year the scores will be an official indicator, used to help determine whether schools need support from the county or state.

Fewer school districts require support

Districts that have a red rating in one or more priority areas are required to receive assistance from their county office of education as part of the California Statewide System of Support. Poor-performing county offices, which also operate schools, receive support directly from the state.

Priority areas include school climate (suspension rates); pupil engagement (graduation rate and chronic absences) and pupil achievement (English learner progress and math, science and English language arts tests).

Because of the progress made by California schools last school year, the number of districts with performance low enough to require support from their county offices of education declined for the second year in a row. This year, 436 districts were qualified for help, compared with 466 last year.

In 2022, 617 school districts were referred for assistance, largely because of high chronic absenteeism rates, according to the California Department of Education. But over the last two school years, chronic absenteeism rates have declined 5.7 percentage points each year. In 2021-22, almost a third of students were chronically absent.

Chronic absenteeism continues to decline

Despite the decline in chronic absentee rates, the state still has to make improvements to reach the 12.1% rate it had in 2019, before the Covid pandemic. The current chronic absentee rate is 18.6%.

High school students were the most likely to be chronically absent last school year, missing on average 15.6 days of school. Transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students missed an average of 13.9 days, seventh and eighth graders 12.6 days, fourth through sixth graders 11 days, and first through third-grade students 11.5 days.

Eleven of the 15 school districts in El Dorado County were designated for differentiated assistance from the county because of high levels of chronic absenteeism in 2022. County Office of Education staff met with leaders from the 11 districts to review data and identify the root causes, said Ed Manansala, El Dorado County superintendent of schools. The county office provided data to districts every month in an effort to zero in on why student groups and individual students were absent and moving toward chronic absenteeism, he said.

Last year, the county had three school districts on the state list because of chronic absenteeism. This year there were none, Manansala said.

“To me, it’s a validation that the statewide system of support is working,” he said.

Long-term English learners added

While many districts improved their chronic absentee numbers and other indicators last year, avoiding the need for support, 215 districts are on the list, in part, because of the performance of their long-term English learners — a student group that was added this year.

The performance of long-term English learners on academic tests, graduation rates and other indicators was the leading reason schools and districts were flagged for improvement this year.

The dashboard defines long-term English learners as students who speak a language other than English at home and have been enrolled in U.S. schools for seven years or more but have not yet achieved proficiency in English. In the past, the dashboard only included data for English learners as a whole.

The inclusion of long-term English learners in the dashboard is the result of legislation that advocacy organizations pushed for several years.

“It’s a monumental step forward,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, a statewide organization that advocates for English learners. “Long-term English learners’ needs will no longer be hidden, and they’ll be spotlighted for statewide accountability.”

Hernandez said it is paramount that school districts use the new data about long-term English learners to develop programs and train teachers on how to help these students in particular. Long-term English learners have needs that differ from recently arrived immigrant students. For example, long-term English learners often have a good command of informal spoken English, but have not mastered reading and writing in the language.

In addition, Hernandez said districts should also focus on helping students achieve fluency in English faster, so they do not become long-term English learners in the first place.

“English learners come to school bright and ready to learn, and the system really fails them. (If) they become long-term English learners, it’s not an indication of the students, but really the system’s failure to meet their needs,” Hernandez said.

In El Dorado County, there are six districts in need of assistance from the county office of education. Like many districts in California this year, El Dorado Union High School District made the list because of the addition of long-term English language learners to the state metric. Manansala and Mike Kuhlman, superintendent of the high school district, have begun discussions on how to improve the achievement of long-term English learners.

“We have 12 TK-8 districts that feed into that high school district, so it’s going to become a systemwide discussion,” Manansala said. “Again, we’re going to look at that more closely over these next few years.”

More earn State Seal of Biliteracy

The number of students who received the State Seal of Biliteracy on their high school diplomas also increased — up from 52,773 in 2022-23 to 64,261 in 2023-24. This may be due to a law that went into effect in 2024 that offers students more ways to prove their proficiency in English, in addition to a second language.

In the past, advocates and administrators said many students, particularly English learners, didn’t receive the State Seal of Biliteracy, even though they were bilingual, because there weren’t enough options to prove proficiency in English.

Graduation rates up slightly

High school graduation rates in California increased 0.2 percentage points to 86.4% this year. But that was enough to give the state the largest cohort of students to graduate from high school since 2017, with 438,065 students, according to state officials. Of those 227,463 met the requirements to attend the University of California or California State University.

Graduation rates have stayed fairly stable over the last decade, primarily because many districts allowed juniors and seniors to graduate upon meeting the state’s minimum requirement of 130 units during pandemic closures, instead of the higher number of units most districts required.

Suspension rates decline

Suspension rates declined slightly last school year, from 3.5% in 2022-23 to 3.2%.

The decline in suspension rates was for all student groups, according to the California Department of Education, although there continues to be a focus on disparities in suspensions for African American students, foster youth, homeless students, students with disabilities and long-term English learners.

Equity report

Assistance to districts is also based on poor performance by student groups. So, even if a district overall has satisfactory performance, with yellow or even green, it will receive county guidance if the ratings of one or more student groups are red as measured on multiple measures of performance.

An equity report on the dashboard gives users a look at the progress of the 14 student groups that attend California schools, including African American, American Indian, Asian, English learners, Filipino, foster youth, Hispanic, homeless, two or more races, Pacific Islander, socioeconomically disadvantaged, long-term English learners, students with disabilities, and white students.

This year, school districts will get assistance to improve outcomes for long-term English learners in 215 districts, students with disabilities in 195 districts, homeless students in 125 districts, foster youth in 104 districts, English learners in 84 districts, economically disadvantaged students in 68 districts, white students in 30 districts, American Indian and Alaska Native in 27 districts, students of two or more races in 19 districts, Pacific Islander students in eight districts, and Asian students in one district, according to an EdSource analysis.

The number of districts needing help to improve outcomes for African American and Latino students declined this year. Districts will get assistance to help African American students in 51 districts, down from 66 in 2018. Thirty-nine districts will get assistance to help Latino students, down from 44 compared with 2018.

“Across California, we’re seeing that when we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities, all students reap the rewards,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in a statement. “Our migrant students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students show marked improvements in consistent school attendance and graduation rates, reflecting the dedication of our educators and students alike.”

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02/05/2025
Federal cuts throw a curveball into my young Dodger fan’s tutoring journey

Credit: Mary Taylor / Pexels

“Bye, Jose, I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend. Go Dodgers.”

That’s my standard weekly sign-off to Jose Hernandez, the third grader I tutor at Jackson Elementary in Altadena, a Title I school near where I live.

To say he’s a huge Dodgers fan doesn’t quite capture it, and, like most of the world, he loves Shohei Ohtani. In fact, he made it to the recent Jackie Robinson Day at Dodger stadium and was pretty excited to show up to school the next day with his new Dodgers cap with Ohtani’s name emblazoned across it.

He’s not always the chattiest, but I’ve learned if I happen to say the right thing, all kinds of information comes pouring out. So I learned he’d been to the game because we happened to be reading a book about Robinson in one of our sessions. It was part of the 10 minutes of read-aloud I do at the beginning of our 45 minutes together.

“Ohhhhh,” I said, “that’s why your usual Dodger cap suddenly upgraded to this special Ohtani one.”

“Yeah,” he explained, “it was Jackie Robinson Day, and he was playing. And that was cool.”

I’ve been doing two reading sessions with Jose a week — Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons — since October, before I started this job as CEO of EdSource. The synchronicity wasn’t deliberate, but it has turned out to be a really helpful window into what’s happening on the ground in California’s public schools. And what it takes to help a kid who’s at least a grade level behind make a dent in the gap.

It took me a while to get the hang of tutoring. My kids are now 16 and 20, and teaching them to read is but a distant memory. I’m not sure where I’d even start, but luckily I haven’t had to figure it out myself. I’ve been volunteering through Reading Partners. They use an evidence-based curriculum, based on the science of how children learn to read.

It’s very structured — I write an agenda on a small white board, we start with 10 minutes of me reading while he follows along, then it’s his turn. We work our way lesson by lesson, Jose reading and filling out the worksheets that reinforce his comprehension.

Sometimes we work on breaking unfamiliar words into identifiable parts, which quite frankly often makes me think about how illogical English is.

“Well, so this time -ch sounds like sh, but yeah, you’re right, in that other word it was ch”.

Other times we advance through comprehension skills, like how to pull out the author’s main point or how to identify main characters. Some come more easily than others to Jose, but he hangs in there, and I’m often surprised at how much he understands from a story he seems to be struggling through.

Six months in, I felt like we were both getting in a groove and couldn’t believe the school year was coming to an end. Then came the email, a surprise this past Sunday at 8:30 pm.

No warning.

I suppose we should have seen it coming — in mid-April, the Trump administration targeted some 400 million dollars worth of federal AmeriCorps grants for elimination, but it wasn’t clear how that might affect Reading Partners, one of their programs. When we talked about it at tutoring that week, my amazing coordinator, Kaiya, seemed to think we were OK for the present. Now, a dozen states have filed lawsuits to block the overall AmeriCorps cuts, but confusion reigns.

The writing, as they say, is on the wall.

Reading Partners targets kids up to fourth grade who are reading anywhere from six months to 2.5 years behind their grade level. The research shows what a difference one-on-one help with reading can make in closing the gap. So what of Jose and the 54 other kids getting help with their reading at Jackson Elementary? Or of the nearly 800 kids across Los Angeles?

These kids from Jackson have already had more than their share of challenges this year. Jackson was one of the schools closed for several weeks after the Eaton fire in Altadena — the structure was fine, but had to be cleaned top to bottom to get rid of smoke damage. Jose’s family was displaced for even longer, so he was arriving at school late for several weeks, presumably while his parents navigated a new morning commute from the hotel in which they were staying. But the fire also meant most of the kids at Jackson also lost the midyear assessment that Reading Partners does to track whether the tutoring has been making a difference. End-of-year assessments were supposed to start this week, so with the hit to AmeriCorps, that all gets a lot more complicated.

As of this writing, it looks like some of the Reading Partners coordinators will be coming back, but not as AmeriCorps, and we will get a few more tutoring sessions after all. Whiplash. I can’t help but wonder how much the kids know about all of this.

I hope Jose improved in the months we worked together. I don’t think I was the greatest tutor, but I tried my best. I’d like to think it made a difference.

The books we were reading got harder. He kept advancing in the lessons. He got better and better at sounding out unfamiliar words with less prompting from me.

But I know reading was a struggle for him, and I can’t say I imparted a love of reading in him. He seemed to enjoy our time together, and once, when I picked him up at the after-school program at the school, a couple of his buddies asked how they could get tutors. I’ll take that as a sign of something.

Meantime, he and I were a few chapters into “James and the Giant Peach” at our last session. We may never get to the happy ending at the book’s conclusion, but now, with the reprieve, perhaps we can get far enough to at least see the hideous aunts perish.

•••

Deborah Clark is CEO of EdSource.

EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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02/05/2025
Trump nominee for education secretary would come backed with detailed policy agenda

Linda McMahon, former administrator of Small Business Administration, speaking during the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee.

Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of a close ally and the co-chair of his transition team indicates that education could be a major priority of his administration, even though it did not feature prominently in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is a leading financial backer Trump has been close to for decades. She is also chair of the board of the little known America First Policy Institute, sometimes referred to as a “shadow transition operation” or “White House in waiting.”

The institute has issued a detailed education policy agenda that is likely to serve as a guide for McMahon, and the Trump administration in general, should she be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

For those reading the political tea leaves, it was notable that in nominating McMahon, Trump did not explicitly charge her with shutting down the U.S. Department of Education, and that the agenda of the America First Policy Institute does not call for it either. Instead, Trump called on her “to spearhead efforts to send education back to the states” an expansive and undefined charge, especially because by law education is already mostly a state and local function.

Regardless of the fate of the department, the contrast between President Joe Biden’s and Trump’s education agendas — and between McMahon and current Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona — could not be wider.

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Cardona is a lifelong educator, becoming secretary after a career as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and state commissioner of education. McMahon spent most of her career building the WWE, founded with her husband, Vince McMahon.

Cardona’s net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be $1 million, most of it tied up in his principal residence, retirement savings, and a 529 college savings account for his children. By contrast, Forbes places McMahon and her husband’s net worth at $2.5 billion.

The only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both from Connecticut.

But even though McMahon has a slim resume regarding education, she is not entirely an education neophyte. She studied to become a French teacher in college. She has been a trustee of Sacred Heart College, a Catholic college in Fairfield, Connecticut, for years. She was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, although she left after a year to run for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and again in 2012 — both times unsuccessfully.

McMahon is more of a traditional conservative Republican than several of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees. In some ways, she is more similar to Betsy DeVos, another billionaire, who was Trump’s first secretary of education. But unlike DeVos, she has had experience in government, as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.

In 2019, she left that post, not under a cloud or fleeing vitriol from Trump like many others in his administration, to head the America First PAC, which raised funds for Trump’s re-election bid in 2020.

On the explosive issue of “school choice,” publicly, at least, she has mostly called for expanding charter schools, rather than taxpayer-funded vouchers. “I am an advocate for choice through charter schools,” she declared in her 2010 campaign for Senate.

She also has some bipartisan instincts, even getting support from the Democratic senators she had previously run against, when they had to approve her nomination to head the Small Business Administration. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called her “a person of serious accomplishment and ability,” and Sen. Chris Murphy described her as a “talented and experienced businessperson.”

As SBA administrator, she drew high praise from some Democrats for increasing loans to women-owned businesses, and for making the agency more efficient, including from then-Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking member of the Small Business and Entrepreneur Committee.

Another sign of her bipartisan inclinations came in a September commentary in The Hill newspaper, when she argued for a radical revision of the Pell Grant, the main form of federal student financial aid.

While most Pell grants go to full-time students, McMahon argued that the grant should also be available to students enrolled in “high-quality, shorter-term, industry-aligned education programs that could lead to immediate employment in well-paying jobs.”

To that end, she endorsed a bill known as the Workforce Pell Act, sponsored by lawmakers usually on far opposite sides of the political aisle — Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., Bobby Scott, D-Va.

Arguably one of her key qualifications is that she and Trump have a positive relationship. Unlike many who served in his first administration and left reviled by their former boss, when she stepped down as SBA administrator, Trump praised her as a “superstar.” “Just so smooth,” he said. “She’s been one of our all-time favorites.”

But her most important credential may well be her role as chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, which she helped start.

Its 150-person staff includes well-known Trump staffers like Kellyanne Conway and its executive director, Chad Wolf, the former secretary of homeland security. Pam Bondi, the head of the institute’s legal arm, was just nominated by Trump to be attorney general in place of Matt Gaetz, who withdrew his nomination.

Like Project 2025, the conservative blueprint issued by the Heritage Foundation, which Trump has disavowed and says he had no role in crafting, the America First Policy Institute has also drawn up a similar detailed policy framework, including one on education. Yet the institute has not done much to publicize its proposals, which Trump has reportedly appreciated.

The institute draws a sharp contrast between its “America First” polices and what it calls “America Last” policies championed by Democrats.

“America Last” policies, it argues, “prioritize radical ideologies and failing public schools.” These include promoting “transgenderism” and “radical ideologies over core subjects,” while fighting “school choice expansion,” and parent notification policies regarding curriculum and gender identification.

The institute calls for reinstating Trump’s 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic civic education” and removing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from what it alleges are requirements for federal grants.

And instead of supporting “leftist teachers unions” and teacher tenure, it advocates for “reduced union influence, and increasing flexibility in hiring and firing.”

For these and other reasons, it is to be expected that key education groups would oppose McMahon’s nomination.

“Rather than working to strengthen public schools, expand learning opportunities for students, and support educators, McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools,” said President Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the U.S.

But for conservatives like Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, McMahon is an unknown quantity when it comes to education, and he made a pitch for approaching her nomination with an open mind. “I’m looking forward to learning more about her views and approach to the role in the weeks to come,” he said. “I’d avoid gross assumptions based on biography. Those seeking reflexive celebration or condemnation should look elsewhere. “

Controversy has already surfaced about her nomination. Media reports point to an October lawsuit in Maryland alleging McMahon and her husband failed to stop a prominent WWE ringside announcer in the 1980s and 1990s from sexually abusing 12- and 13-year-olds known as “ring boys” who were hired to do errands in preparation for wrestling matches.

What is still an open question is whether Trump will move to eliminate the Department of Education, or how aggressively he will do so. His administration may decide that it is more important to keep the department intact for any number of reasons, including transforming its influential Office of Civil Rights into a weapon to impose his education agenda onto states or schools.

And it is possible that McMahon will continue to voice her praise for teachers, and for public schools, including charter schools. “We have a very good system of public and private schools,” she said in an interview a decade ago. “I’ve watched some masterful teachers who are innovative and who are reaching kids who are below grade level in many of the subjects.  To see how they get turned around is heartwarming and astounding.”

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02/05/2025
West Contra Costa Unified denies charter renewal application

Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource

For the first time in five years, the West Contra Costa school district board of trustees has denied a renewal petition of one of its charter schools.

By a unanimous vote on Wednesday, the board rejected the renewal application of the Richmond Charter Academy, which serves just under 300 students.

It is part of Amethod Public Schools, or AMPS, a charter management organization that also operates two other charter schools in Richmond and three in Oakland.

The vote followed impassioned appeals by staff and students wearing yellow T-shirts, trying to persuade the board to allow the school to continue operating.

A similar hearing about the school’s fate was held at a board meeting last month. There are 13 charter schools in the district, serving close to 4,000 students of the district’s nearly 30,000 students.

The charter schools are among more than 1,300 in California, by far the largest number in any state.

Renewal petitions are rarely denied in California. The Legislature approved a law (Assembly Bill 1505) in 2019 governing charter school applications and renewals, but its full implementation was delayed until after the pandemic. As a result, many charters are just now coming up for renewal under the 2019 law.

The board’s decision was not entirely unexpected. It was based on a strong recommendation by district staff, outlined in a detailed 79-page report that the district deny the school’s charter based on concerns about its finances and its ability to guarantee that it could offer the educational programs it was promising.

The staff reviewers said they “found fiscal concerns that could not be remedied and the school would not likely implement the program as described in the petition.”

The denial came despite students showing academic results somewhat higher than the district average.

Beyond fiscal worries, several board members also expressed concern about the small number of Black students in the school.

The school has a 91% enrollment of Latino students, while Black students only make up 4%. That’s in a district with an 11.5% Black enrollment.

School administrators said the school admitted students based on a lottery, and thus, the racial or ethnic makeup of the school was determined by who applied.

The school now has a chance to appeal the denial to the county school board, and if the renewal is denied there, the school could then appeal to the State Board of Education.

Among the issues identified in the staff report was the very low number of teachers with a “clear” teaching credential.

Another concern was the considerable turnover in leadership. Some board members had high praise for the current interim CEO, Adrienne Barnes. But in light of leadership turnover in the past few years, they said they weren’t confident that the current leadership would stay much longer.

“Ms. Barnes, you have made a Herculean leap forward, and I appreciate your efforts,” board President Leslie Reckler told her at the meeting. “But I have deep concerns over whether you’re going to be here in a year, or even less than that.”

In 2020, the board voted not to renew the application of the Manzanita Elementary charter school, despite a staff recommendation that the application be approved. The school then appealed to the Alameda County Board of Education, which overruled the district board. Manzanita is still operating today.

None of the current district board members were on the board in 2020. Reckler and Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy, the two most senior current members, pointed out that this was the first time they had voted against a charter renewal, and that it was a difficult vote to cast.

“As the people in charge of renewing the charter, I simply cannot do that,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “I am sorry for that because I know how painful this is. And as the first charter that I have to deny, I feel the pain.”

“The staff’s findings raise serious questions that we cannot ignore, and it would be irresponsible to move forward without addressing them fully,” added board member Guadalupe Enllana in explaining her vote. “My decision is not made lightly, but it’s made with students at the center because that is who we are here to serve.”

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02/05/2025
Graduation rates up at most Cal State campuses, but some worsen

Cal State Fullerton commencement 2024.

Credit: Cal State Fullerton/Flickr

While 14 Cal State universities notched six-year graduation rate increases over the previous year, nine schools in the system saw their rates decline.

San Jose (+ 4.6 percentage points), East Bay (+ 2.4 percentage points) and Fresno (+ 2.1 percentage points) were among the campuses with the greatest increases in six-year graduation rate. Those figures represent the difference in completion among first-time, full-time freshman students who started in 2018 and those who began in 2017.

But several campuses’ graduation rates slipped year-over-year, with the deepest dips at three of Cal State’s smallest campuses. Cal Maritime posted the biggest downswing, falling 7 percentage points. Stanislaus (- 4.6 percentage points) and Monterey Bay (- 4.1 percentage points) recorded the next-largest decreases. Two of Cal State’s largest campuses — San Diego (- 1.8 percentage points) and Long Beach (- 1 percentage point) — also saw six-year freshman rates go down slightly.

That’s according to campus-level statistics the system unveiled this week, coinciding with Cal State’s November board of trustees meeting. The university system is nearing the end of a decadelong campaign to graduate more students, which will conclude in spring 2025. It has made marked improvement toward hitting top-line goals across the system, but is falling short on some targets. Cal State officials have said that the pandemic set back progress on some graduation metrics. They also cite a need to focus on retaining students entering their second and third years of school, particularly students of color.

Cal State knows “that we have a leak, that in that second to third year we’re losing a significantly high number of our students of color and probably male students of color, quite honestly,” said Dilcie D. Perez, Cal State’s chief student affairs officer. “We’re bringing them in. But if the mechanism doesn’t change, we’re going to lose students.”

Systemwide data presented last month shows that Cal State’s freshman four-year graduation rate across all campuses increased slightly during the 2023-24 school year over the previous year, but that its six-year freshman rate plateaued and four-year transfer rate fell.

Cal Maritime, the university system’s smallest campus, was an outlier in terms of how much graduation rates fell from spring 2023 to spring 2024. The school, which specializes in shipping and oceanography programs, experienced the system’s greatest decrease in four-year graduation rates among students transferring from the California Community Colleges over the past two school years. Flagging enrollment has plunged the school into financial difficulty, which culminated this week in a vote to merge the maritime academy with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in order to keep it afloat.

Eight other campuses including Bakersfield (- 3 percentage points) showed declines in four-year transfer graduation rates. Humboldt (+ 5.8 percentage points) and Monterey Bay (+ 4.1 percentage points) gained the most, comparing four-year transfer graduation rates for the 2018 cohort to their peers a year earlier.

Systemwide, Cal State is aiming to have 40% of first-year students graduate in four years and 70% of first-year students graduate in six years by spring 2025. Individual campuses also have their own graduation rate targets, which can be more or less ambitious than those that apply to the system as a whole.

None of the system’s universities met their individual campuses’ graduation rate targets for first-time, six-year graduation rates among students who started in 2018. There has been more success on four-year rates. San Diego, Long Beach, San Jose, Sacramento and Northridge met their four-year target for first-time students who started in 2020.

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02/05/2025
West Contra Costa Unified loses big chunk of federal grant to support students’ mental health
West Contra Costa Unified School District administration building.

Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource
TOP TAKEAWAYS

West Contra Costa Unified anticipates it will receive only about $600,000 of $4.2 million it was awarded last year.

The cut is part of a big push by the Trump administration to roll back or eliminate funding to support student mental health in schools across the nation.

The district was one of only three school districts in California to be awarded grants from the Mental Health Professional Services program.
The West Contra Costa Unified School District is the latest school district in California to feel the direct impact of the Trump Administration’s elimination of a range of grant programs approved by the U.S. Department of Education during the Biden administration.

At its meeting on Wednesday night, Interim Superintendent Kim Moses told board members, who were caught unawares by the news, that she had received a letter the previous day from the department of education indicating that the five-year, $4.2 million grant awarded last fall will be cut to one year.

The letter stated that the grant was no longer “aligned with the current goals of the administration,” she said.

As a result of the cut, the district anticipates it will only receive about $600,000 of the funds it was expecting, all of which must be spent between August and December of this year.

Board president Leslie Reckler summarized her reaction in two words: “Total bummer.”

The district was one of three in California to receive a five-year grant last fall. They were among 46 grants awarded last year under the Mental Health Services Professional Grant program begun by the Biden Administration.

The grant was supposed to enable the San Francisco Bay Area district to address the mental health needs of its students by placing graduate student counseling interns in its schools, in collaboration with San Jose State University and St. Mary’s College in Oakland.

The goal of the program, as described in the Federal Register, is “to support and demonstrate innovative partnerships to train school-based mental health services providers.”

Interim Superintendent of West Contra Costa Unified, Kim Moses
Caption: Courtesy West Contra Costa Unified

Moses said she was taken aback by the news of the drastic reduction. “Of all the things that I am worrying about being reduced or taken away, I didn’t have this grant in mind,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “The grant is to build our workforce (of mental health workers). How could building our workforce and supporting students with their mental health needs be against what the administration stands for?”

School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy described the funding cut as “atrocious.” “This is just another way they (the Trump administration) are going to start hurting our kids, our staff, our school district, because of what we stand for, because of what we look like.”

The drastic grant cutback comes as a blow to the district, which has made significant progress over the past year in cutting major budget deficits and averting the prospect of a state takeover. Especially since the pandemic, educators have realized that addressing the mental health needs of students is essential to their ultimate academic success. A particular challenge has been to boost the number of school mental health professionals, especially those reflecting the backgrounds of students.

The reduction appears to be part of an aggressive drive by the administration to eliminate mental health programs serving schools. On the same day West Contra Costa heard about its grant reduction, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Education is moving to terminate $1 billion in mental health grants to schools, signed into law by President Biden after the school shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.

The district applied for the funds in the spring of 2024 and was awarded them in the fall. It had been working on signing a Memorandum of Understanding to begin implementing the program this fall.

The funds were designated to be spent in “high-need” school districts like West Contra Costa Unified, where nearly two-thirds of its almost 30,000 students qualify for free and reduced-price meals.

Program probably targeted because of emphasis on diversity

What almost certainly caught the Trump administration’s eye was the emphasis on diversity in the grant application guidelines, a term the current government is using as a rationale to cut federal funds to education institutions at all levels.

One of the goals of the program, according to the guidelines, is to “increase the number and diversity of high-quality, trained providers available to address the shortages of mental health services professionals in schools served by high-need districts.”

The mental health professionals serving students in those districts, according to the guidelines, “should reflect the communities, identities, races, ethnicities, abilities, and cultures of the students in the high-need districts, including underserved students.”

“We considered appealing, but the reality is that they just erased this whole grant, and everybody is in the same boat,” interim Supt. Moses said. “This isn’t a case of ‘we picked on you because you’re doing something wrong, we picked on you because the grant is going away.’”

Looking forward, board member Gonzalez-Hoy said, “We must just continue to reassure our students that even if we have less resources, we are here to support and protect them, and we will give them what we can with what we have.”

Other districts that received grants under the program are Trinity Alps Unified and the Wheatland Union High School District, both in Northern California. Also receiving grants are the Marin County Office of Education, Cal State East Bay and the University of Redlands, as well as two charter schools, Entrepreneur High School in San Bernardino and Academia Avance in Los Angeles.
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02/05/2025
For a true meritocracy, education must not be one-size-fits-all

A student in Oakland’s Skyline High School Education and Community Health Pathway sculpts a clay model of the endocrine system.

Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

It’s time to balance out our lopsided education system. Millions of parents and students have long struggled with our one-size-fits-all model, which primarily teaches to, tests for and celebrates students as theorists, not practitioners.

Our current system acts as a gatekeeper to the middle class by doling out opportunity based on grades and test scores in a traditional classroom setting, but rarely recognizes competencies and interests beyond standardized exams and essays.

Fifty years ago, students could opt into publicly funded trade schools and apprenticeships or enroll in practice-based classes like home economics and shop in traditional academic schools, which taught skills that led to well-paying jobs in carpentry, culinary arts and other trades. But over time, public funding for such programs dried up. The share of federal spending on vocational instruction as part of elementary and secondary education dropped from roughly 30% in 1970 to just 7.5% in 2022. Even as elementary and secondary education spending ballooned from $5.8 billion a year to $96 billion during this period, the vocational component grew only from $1.8 billion to $7.2 billion.

Most publicly funded instruction now happens at desks, with grading based on written exams, essays and problem sets rather than demonstrations and hands-on learning. Some students are more prepared than others to succeed in such a system, exacerbating existing inequalities.

Research by the Economic Policy Institute found that social class, as defined by parental income, education and job, is the leading predictor for a student’s school readiness: Kindergartners from the highest social class possess more theory-based skills and perform an entire standard deviation higher on math and reading tests than kindergartners from the lowest social class. The gaps are particularly high for Black and Hispanic students, who are more likely than white children to live in poverty. When some students inevitably falter, the system tells them they are failures and offers trade schools and technical colleges as second-tier alternatives they often must pay for themselves.

It didn’t have to be this way. The United States originally based its system on a German/Prussian model, which prioritized efficiency by tracking students into “academic” or “vocational” tracks at age 10. In that model, still in place in Germany today, students are expected to know what they want to do by adolescence, and many simply end up in the same track as their parents.

The United States, hoping to advance a true meritocracy, did not want a system that limited intergenerational mobility in this way, and over the 20th century we adopted a liberal arts approach that was supposed to prioritize economic and social mobility. But in a myopic attempt to get rid of tracking, we inadvertently eliminated vocational education and simply tracked all our students into the academic model. The result? The worst of both worlds for less traditional students who struggle in a sink-or-swim academic system.

Student outcomes now depend a lot on parents’ backgrounds, just like in Germany.

There is another possibility. Consider Finland, which in the 1970s switched from the German model to one that teaches a combination of academic and technical subjects until age 16, when students choose a track. The vocational path for students interested in highly -skilled trades includes carpentry and culinary arts, but it also offers applied sciences, health care, and social services, which in the United States would require attending traditional academic universities.

Finland’s vocational path is highly competitive and includes matriculation at rigorous polytechnic universities with high-level training in subjects like business, engineering and nursing and quality instructors with connections to actual companies — not an alternative education. With a system that celebrates the value of highly skilled thinkers and workers, Finland recently ranked first out of 143 countries on the World Happiness Report for the seventh consecutive year, and as of 2021, its income inequality is eighth lowest among 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the United States ranks 23 on the World Happiness Report, and its income inequality is down at 33, beating only Turkey, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica).

Of course, the United States is not Finland, and we cannot simply adopt its system. (Though before you discount Finland because of its smaller or more homogeneous population, consider that its size and composition are comparable to many U.S. states, and much of U.S. education policy is decided at the state level.) What we can do is stop deciding who is educated, intelligent and successful based on only one type of student. Instead, we should recognize the value of all students, and offer more mainstream career and technical opportunities across K-12 education.

States and the federal government should fund more career and technical education, including apprenticeships, hands-on learning courses and training and recruitment for vocational teachers. They should work with employers, schools, training organizations and other groups to tie education to the workforce needs of their region.

Everyone should be given the opportunity to pursue a traditional academic education, but they should also be able to pursue an equally rigorous vocational one, equipped with public resources and support. Only then will the middle class truly be open to all.

•••

Eric Chung is a lawyer, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. His work focuses on law and policy related to economic mobility and educational opportunity.

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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02/05/2025
How are college students using AI tools like ChatGPT?

“I find it most helpful for summarizing readings and just making really menial and time-consuming tasks a lot easier,” Miglani said. A premium ChatGPT subscriber, he said he regularly checks his math problems with the chatbot, though it often can’t handle the complex equations and concepts used in some of his classes.

Miglani said the preliminary models of ChatGPT were “pretty rudimentary,” struggling to produce quality written answers and useful for mainly short-answer assignments and creating outlines for his essays. Now, ChatGPT and other AI tools, including Microsoft Edge and Gemini, are Miglani’s near-constant companions for homework tasks.

For the first few semesters after ChatGPT’s debut, Miglani said students used it fairly freely without much concern about getting caught, as AI detection software didn’t yet exist. Now that commonly used submission programs like Turnitin allow professors to scan assignments for evidence of AI use, Miglani said he’s been more conscientious about writing essays that won’t be flagged.

“I have not gotten caught using AI yet,” he said. “In fact, now, as I take higher level courses, professors understand that people are going to use AI, and so I have started asking them, ‘Do you approve of AI use in and in what capacity?’”

Some of Miglani’s professors have allowed AI use for research and basic summarization, but many draw the line at using chatbots to generate citations or write essays.

By Christina Chkarboul

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01/05/2025
Why isn’t Los Angeles Unified settling this lawsuit on arts funding?
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

My time on the high school football field was spent with a snare drum strapped around my chest. As a student who was easily distracted in the academic classroom and struggled to apply myself, band class was a welcome reprieve during the day.

Playing the drums was my niche, it was how I stood out. I carried my drumsticks around the way football players wore their varsity jackets.

During my school years, I was fortunate that the district I attended recognized the importance of arts education. In elementary school, there were classrooms devoted to art and music staffed by full-time teachers. There was also an orchestra teacher. My middle school had two full-time band teachers, and an art class was included in the curriculum. High school offered a full range of band and choir classes in addition to the chance to participate in the jazz band and marching band in after-school programs.

Even back then, it was clear that future students would not have these same opportunities. The program that allowed interested sixth-grade students to participate in a stage production disappeared while I was in school, a victim of budget cuts as the baby boom turned into a bust. During my time in high school, there were constant rumors of plans to reduce the number of band teachers.

This reduction in the availability of arts education was part of a nationwide trend that accelerated as the second Bush administration and then Obama’s placed an increasing focus on test scores. Ignoring evidence that music and art help increase academic performance, teachers were forced to spend more time teaching to standardized tests. Arts funding was seen as extravagant in a system that values data over a full educational experience.

When I visited my old elementary school in 2015, the band room did not even exist anymore. I grieved for the school’s students who no longer had the opportunity to find the joy of mastering an instrument.

California voters understood the magnitude of this loss when 64.4% of voters opted to approve Proposition 28 in 2022. This measure provided an additional source of funding for arts and music education for K-12 public schools with rules to ensure that districts used this money to supplement, not supplant, existing funding.

This included a requirement that schools with 500 or more students use 80% of the funding for employing teachers and 20% for training and materials.

Complaints grew as parents in Los Angeles noticed that their children were not seeing improved access to art and music funding as the Proposition 28 money started to flow into the district. As the author of the proposition, Austin Beuttner was well acquainted with the rules it set in place and agreed that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) was not following the spirit or the letter of the law.

After months of trying to get the district to do the right thing, Beuttner joined parents, students,and teachers in filing a lawsuit against the district and current Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho.

The suit could have served as a wake-up call to LAUSD’s leadership that their actions were being watched, but they did not use it as an opportunity to ensure the Proposition 28 money was being spent properly. Carvalho saw the suit as a public relations problem, and instead of fixing the compliance issues, he tried to spin the narrative. As noted by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jeff Chemerinsky, he “has already decided to double down on explanations not grounded in fact.”

To resolve this issue, the plaintiffs are demanding that LAUSD:
- Publicly acknowledge that it misspent the Proposition 28 funds in the 2023–24 and 2024–25 school years.
- Fully restore the misspent and misallocated funding to schools.
- Be fully transparent about how the funding is used in future years.
In a letter to the LAUSD’s general counsel, Chemerinsky reminds the district that, if it is found that the funds were not used properly, it will have to return the money to the state. Combined with possible penalties for “violating the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino students,” LAUSD could be facing a hit to its budget of over $100 million.

This is not a slip-and-fall lawsuit designed to squeeze scarce education funding from our children’s classrooms. Rather, it is intended to improve the educational experience of our students.

The suit would not have been brought if Carvahlo and the district had engaged with the community instead of ignoring their concerns. As Chermerinsky notes, “families, labor partners and concerned citizens spent months seeking answers. Regrettably, LAUSD refused to meaningfully respond.”

The lawsuit has also attracted the attention of California Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, who has asked the state auditor to look into how the funds were spent.

If the audit proceeds, Bryan says, “The district is going to have to produce the necessary documents to show that they are in compliance.” Based on statements from Carvalho saying the author of the proposition has a “misunderstanding of the law,” LAUSD should be concerned that its creative budgeting will not pass muster when held up to scrutiny.

The LAUSD board must make it clear to Carvahlo that the concerns of their constituents can no longer be ignored by an increasingly detached bureaucracy. A good place to start would be by settling this lawsuit.

•••

Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, and serves as the education chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. Read more opinion pieces by Petersen.

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
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01/05/2025