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California’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores revealed troubling trends in student achievement. Despite significant financial investments, student performance continues to struggle to reach full academic recovery. Worse, achievement gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students widened even further.

The timing of these results couldn’t be worse. With California districts spending the last of their $23 billion in federal relief funds last year, schools are now facing a critical juncture. With declining enrollment reducing their budgets and only modest new state investments coming this year, it will be tough for districts to dramatically scale up promising initiatives like high-dosage tutoring or extensive summer programming.

So, what levers do state and local policymakers have at their disposal? By looking at the data and learning from other successful low-cost interventions, the state has an opportunity to reverse its slide and drive student gains.

First, kids have to be in school to learn. In California, chronic absenteeism rates have come down significantly from their pandemic levels, but they’re still nearly twice as high as they were five years ago. Black students, English learners, students with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are missing too much school. 

Fortunately, there are low-cost, high-impact strategies that schools can adopt to ensure students are present and engaged. For example, a research study looking at a large California district found that missing a part of the school day — for referrals for in-school discipline or participation in extracurricular activities — predicted short- and long-run outcomes for students. Many school districts are already tracking these measures; the next step is using them to inform and implement interventions such as parent notifications or individualized support.

Second, once kids are back in school, the next step is ensuring that classroom time is used well. This is especially critical in California, given that it ranks in the bottom 10 states in terms of total instructional hours per school year. Last year’s law to ban or limit the use of cell phones during school hours should help reduce digital distractions, but the research on attention is clear that humans are not good at multitasking and can take a long time to refocus when our thinking is interrupted.

For schools, that means that every little interruption counts. Students being pulled out of class for special interventions or testing, outdoor noise and intercom announcements are all important in their own way, but they also add up. One study found that a typical classroom might be interrupted 2,000 times per year and that these disruptions can result in the loss of 10 to 20 days of instructional time. School district leaders could conduct attention audits to maximize and better understand how schools are using time and all of their technological tools.

Last but not least is the question of what students are (and are not) learning. California’s test results suggest that reading is a particular problem area. Since 2019, California’s reading scores on NAEP are down 4 points in fourth grade and 5 points in eighth grade. But those are averages. Last year, just 7% of California’s Black students met the “Proficient” benchmark and 72% fell below “Basic” in fourth grade reading.

When students lack foundational reading skills, the impact compounds across subjects. All students need and deserve evidence-based literacy instruction, with sustained focus on the relationships between sound and print, exposure to rich text, thought-provoking content, and both general and domain-specific vocabulary that builds knowledge of the world.

Improving reading scores is hard work, and other states are dealing with similar challenges. But California — unlike many other states — has not yet passed a comprehensive reading bill.

This is where California could stand to learn from some of the higher-performing states on NAEP, sometimes called “the nation’s report card.” Specifically, it might surprise some readers to learn that Mississippi made the largest reading gains over the last 10 years. Last year, Mississippi ranked seventh overall but third for Black students and first for low-income students. California, in contrast, came in 37th, 33rd and 28th, respectively.

How did Mississippi make this turnaround? It took a long-term, systematic approach to its literacy efforts. It invested in teacher development and coaching, identified and supported struggling readers as early as possible and equipped teachers with high-quality instructional materials.

This combination of high-quality instructional materials with diagnostic data and student supports has the potential to improve outcomes for California’s most vulnerable students, and to create a more equitable education system for all. By leveraging data it already tracks and focusing on the delivery of core instruction, California can build a stronger foundation for student success.

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Lindsay Dworkin is senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA, a K-12 assessment and research organization.

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