In recent decades, many universities have sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student body and faculty. In addition to grades and test scores, they looked at many other factors, such as talents, life experiences, meeting challenges. This process meant that more students of color were admitted, while some students with higher test scores were rejected.
The Trump administration adamantly opposes this process, known as affirmative action. Its view is that scores on the SAT and ACT and grades should be the most important, if not the only criteria for admission. Those scores, to Trump officials, are synonymous with merit. Any deviation from their view will be grounds for investigating violations of civil rights laws.
As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.
That aspect of the agreements with Columbia andBrown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.
The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.
But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.
The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.
The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.
“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisionwas wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”
A student sounds out the word ‘both’ during a 2022 summer school class at Nystrom Elementary in the West Contra Costa Unfified School District.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Turning the tide on years of lagging elementary school reading scores at West Contra Costa Unified has become Superintendent Chris Hurst’s “No.1 priority.”
Hurst, in his third year as the district’s superintendent, says he is committed to improving elementary reading test scores by 5% each year, having reached the same goal during the 2022-23 school year. That goal is one of several in the strategic plan Hurst and his Cabinet have been developing to improve outcomes at the school.
“The research is very clear that once a student is behind, they typically will stay behind unless something significant happens in their K-12 experience that changes the trajectory of learning,” Hurst told EdSource. “So for me, literacy is a gatekeeper.”
In February, the district’s iReady assessment showed that only 42% of West Contra Costa Unified kindergartners, 26% of first graders and 39% of second graders were reading at or above grade level. Those scores were up from the previous year, according to a presentation Hurst made to the school board in April.
A history of low scores
Hurst said literacy scores at West Contra Costa Unified have been “stagnant for over a decade.” In the 2021-22 Smarter Balanced reading tests, 24% of third grade students scored below grade level; 56% tested near standard; only about 10% tested above standard. In the same year, the district’s scores from the Smarter Balanced tests for English language arts in reading and writing for grades three-11 were lower than 75% of other California districts.
Smarter Balanced results show that third grade reading test scores at West Contra Costa Unified have nearly steady since 2014, with no more than 17% of students reading above grade level. Similarly, only 18% of students in California scored above standard on reading; 57% statewide scored near standard, and 25% statewide scored below standard in 2021-22, the most recent year available.
Preliminary Smarter Balanced results for the 2022-23 school year show a slight uptick in English language arts scores: 33% of students in grades three-11 met or exceeded grade level, up 1 percentage point from the previous year, according to a district presentation at Wednesday’s school board meeting. Twelve of the district’s schools showed increases in the percentage of students who scored at or above grade level in English language arts.
West Contra Costa Unified serves mostly low-income students living in the cities of Richmond, El Cerrito and San Pablo. Before California adopted a universal free meal policy, 70% of the students qualified for free and reduced-price meals. Also, about a third of students in the district are English learners.
Some data points on the iReady assessments last year are “hard to swallow” Hurst said. For instance, only 2% of fourth grade English learners were reading at grade level.
The superintendent said he was aware of the district’s low scores before taking the leadership position but was unaware of “how little and few resources we actually have here in West Contra Costa.”
Like other districts in the state with similar demographics, West Contra Costa Unified has grappled with high-cost programs straining its budget, despite receiving $4.2 million in state grants to improve literacy scores at sevenof its elementary schools, as well as supplemental funds from the state for serving a high number of disadvantaged students.
“I really believe that my life has been about giving myself to a community, to work with the community to change outcomes for kids,” Hurst said. “And we need bold, passionate leaders to position ourselves to do that.”
The district will be using iReady and STAR assessments, to track its 5% growth goal; assessments will be done at various times throughout the year. At the Sept. 6 school board meeting, board President Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy said those assessments provide a better picture of students’ reading abilities than the Smarter Balanced tests.
Meeting the goals
Meeting the superintendent’s goals would require the district to focus more on phonics instruction and increase its teacher training, Hurst said. The district will hold weekly meetings with staff, as well as informational sessions with the school board and the public, to develop a comprehensive literacy plan over the next year for implementation in the 2024-25 school year.
The WCCUSD board is demanding that the district pursue its goals with an equity focus and concentrate its efforts on four primary groups: African-American students (13% of the district’s enrollment); Hispanic students, (57%) English learners and students in special education, whose reading scores have been historically low and troubling, Hurst said.
Hurst said the district is stressing phonics and phonological awareness — the theory (supported by developing research) that learning to read is not a natural process and that a heavy emphasis on phonics is the most effective way to teach students how to read.
That research falls under the umbrella of the “science of reading,” which approaches how reading is taught differently from the balanced literacy approach, which also calls for explicit phonics instruction, but coupled with plenty of time for students to develop their love of reading.
West Contra Costa Unified is, at the moment, primarily using a balanced literacy approach, and the superintendent did not indicate if and when the district would switch to the “science of reading” approach.
In 2021, Nystrom Elementary in West Contra Costa Unified district ditched balanced literacy and adopted the “science of reading” approach, thanks to grant funding. Nystrom continues to see modest improvements in reading scores.
The district introduced a program called Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics and Sight Words, or SIPPS, in all its elementary schools last year. SIPPS is supplemental to the core reading curriculum and focuses on foundational reading skills in order to support struggling readers. Nystrom Elementary used SIPPS to include more explicit phonics instruction in its lessons and attributes much of its progress to this curriculum.
The district also brought in experts on teaching phonics over the last year to train teachers and school leaders, Hurst said.
“We’re really trying to focus on becoming an evidence-based culture, so focusing on phonological awareness is one research-based best practice,” Hurst said. “What we’re really trying to do is to have research and study teams where we come together and look at other research.”
The district will also reevaluate the elementary curriculum it has used since 2019 – Units of Study for Teaching Reading English/Language Arts, also known as readers/writers’ workshop — which has been criticized in recent years for not focusing enough on phonics. Some experts say students who struggle to grasp phonics often get left behind.
While Units of Study’s publisher, Heinemann, has responded to the criticism by changing the curriculum for the 2022-23 year, including adding structured phonics lessons for early grades and information for teachers on the research behind the importance of explicit phonics instruction, critics insist that what is needed is a correction, not a revision. Critics say that’s because the Units of Study curriculum is based on debunked research.
By continuing to use the Units of Study curriculum, West Contra Costa Unified is thrust into the middle of the argument on the best way to teach reading.
Despite the criticism, some school board members expressed hesitation to get rid of Units of Study, arguing that the program is still relatively new and that several teachers and administrators in the district still support it.
Hurst said while the district is not about to drop Units of Study just yet, it is now “starting that conversation” about the possibility of doing so. He wants to gather more information and hear more voices before making a recommendation to the school board.
“I am looking at everything with a critical eye,” Hurst said. “And I’m trying to get everyone else to look at everything with a critical eye as well, and to really have those powerful conversations about what’s really best for our students.”
This story was updated on Oct. 18 to include comments from districts and on Oct. 25 to describe kindergarten absentee data as including students enrolled in transitional kindergarten.
In the second year fully back in school after remote learning, California school districts made negligible progress overall in reversing the steep declines in test scores that have lingered since Covid struck in 2020.
There was a slight improvement in math while English language arts declined a smidgeon, and the wide proficiency gap between Black and Latino students and whites and Asians showed little change.
Only 34.6% of students met or exceeded standards on the Smarter Balanced math test in 2023, which is 1.2 percentage points higher than a year ago. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, 39.8% of all students were at grade level. Only 16.9% of Black students, 22.7% of Latino students, and 9.9% of English learners were at grade level in 2023.
Year-over-year scores in English language arts dropped less than 1 percentage point to 46.7% for students meeting or exceeding standards in 2023; in 2019, it was 51.7%. The large proficiency gaps between Black and Hispanic students compared with Asian and white students showed little change. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, about 4 in 10 students in the state and 3 out of 4 Asian students, the highest-scoring student group, were at grade level in English language arts.
Among the state’s nearly 1,000 districts, small districts tended to show more gains, results show.
Smarter Balanced tests are given to students in grades three to eight and grade 11.
English language arts scores dropped slightly in every grade except 11th and third grades, which showed slight growth. The 0.8% percentage point increase in third grade may reflect that students had two years of face-to-face instruction, which is critical for learning how to read. It could also reflect concerted efforts to focus on and change reading instruction to phonics-focused curriculums in districts like Long Beach, up 4.1 points over 2022 for all third graders, and Palo Alto, where reading scores for low-income Latino students increased 47 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
Fewer English learners met or exceeded standards in English language arts this year. In 2023, 10.9% of English learners met or exceeded the standard for English language arts, down from 12.5% in 2022. Among students who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 35.7% met or exceeded the standard in English language arts, down from 36.5% in 2022.
In math, English learners were about the same as last year, with 9.9% meeting or exceeding the standard. Among those who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 24.2% met or exceeded the standard, up from 23.4% in 2021-22.
A slightly larger share of English learners achieved a proficient score this year on the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC): 16.5%. Students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the ELPAC every year until they are proficient in English.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser to Californians Together, an organization that advocates for English learners, said the fact that a higher percentage of English learners are not achieving proficiency each year shows that California needs to invest more in training teachers in how to help students improve their English language skills, especially within other classes.
“That’s when we see a big bump in students’ language proficiency — when they’re using language to learn about something, when their language development is taught while they’re learning science, while they’re learning social studies, while they’re doing art,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “There’s been no major funding and no major effort to do this kind of work. It’s time now.”
Shifting demographics
In its news release, the California Department of Education stressed that over the past year, the proportion of low-income students statewide rose from 60% to 63% of all students and the increase in homeless students who took the test by 2,000 to 94,000, the equivalent of the third-largest district in California.
Given “the relationship between student advantage and achievement, California’s statewide scores are particularly promising as the proportion of high-need students has also increased in California schools,” the department said.
Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust–West, an advocacy organization, viewed the results differently.“Seeing only slight improvements in already alarmingly low levels of student achievement is cause for concern, not celebration. In recent years, as in this year’s results, the state’s progress on student outcomes in English and math has been marginal at best. In fact, at no point in the past 9 years have we seen more than 1 out of 5 Black students at grade level in math.
“This trend is an indictment not of the efforts of California’s K-12 students but of the efforts and choices of the state’s adult decision-makers,” he said in a statement.
The latest test results, he said, “are as unsurprising as they are disappointing. What they mean is that California’s most disadvantaged students are falling further and further behind their more affluent counterparts, in large part because the state failed to assure the delivery of remote instruction to their communities during the pandemic and compounded that failure by failing to assure meaningful remediation once schools reopened.”
The latest test statewide results will disappoint others who had hoped to appreciably reclaim some of the lost academic ground. That has not happened in California or in neighboring states that also give the Smarter Balanced assessment. In Oregon, English language arts scores also fell less than 1 percentage point to 43% proficient, and math scores increased less than point to 31.6%. In Washington, it was the same story: English language arts scores were flat at 48.8% while math scores rose 1.8 percentage points to 40.8%.
A handful of states reached pre-pandemic levels on their state tests. They include Iowa and Mississippi in both reading and math, and Tennessee, which created a statewide tutoring program in reading, according to the COVID-19 School Data Hub, an effort led by Brown University economics professor Emily Oster.
Before Covid struck, changes in California’s test scores occurred slowly, a percentage point or two annually, said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE, a Stanford-based education research organization. “It took years of dedicated effort, with investments in education and the workforce, with steady increases in achievement over time, and then we had this huge drop. We can’t afford another 10- to 20-year period of slow incremental change, especially when what we know we’re facing is huge inequities in student achievement,” she said. “We have to keep that intensity that we have not fixed this problem, despite investments and despite good intentions.”
Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district with 429,000 students, is representative of where most districts are. It has seen widespread improvement in math scores across most grade levels, with 30.5% of students meeting or exceeding state standards. Its English language arts scores have been a “mixed bag,” said district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at Tuesday’s board meeting. Forty-one percent of students in the district met or exceeded standards in English language arts – a drop of less than point from the past year.
Carvalho said he was pleased to see third- and fourth-grade English language arts scores moving in the “right direction” — but stressed the need for improvement among upper elementary grades and middle schools. The district has found small-group instruction and “high dosage tutoring” to be critical, and hopeschanges to the district’s Primary Promise program will help, he said.
Infusion of funding
California school districts received record levels of one-time and ongoing funding since the start of Covid and had wide discretion on how to use it. This includes the last $12.5 billion in federal pandemic relief, which districts must spend by next September. At least 20% must be spent on learning recovery.
Some districts, mainly small ones, saw double-digit gains in 2023. Escondido Union High School District in San Diego County, with 7,000 students, saw its English language arts proficiency rise from 43.5% to 53.7%. The 800-student Wheatland Union High School District in Yuba County raised its proficiency level in English language arts by 21.5 percentage points, to 60%; its math scores rose 13.3 percentage points to nearly the state average for meeting state standards. Math scores in Healdsburg Unified in Sonoma County, with 1,200 students, rose 11.9 percentage points to 39.3% at grade level.
But in most districts, record student absences and staff shortages — not only among STEM and special education teachers but also vacant positions for aides and counselors and unfilled jobs for substitute teachers — undermine strategies for recovery. And the problems linger.
Stubbornly high chronic absences
Along with test scores, the state released chronic absenteeism data on Wednesday showing nearly a quarter of all students chronically absent in 2023, double the 12.1% rate in 2019.
While the 2023 chronic absenteeism rate is high, it’s a drop from 2022, which saw an unprecedented high rate of nearly a third. Students are counted as chronically absent for missing 10% or more of school days. The rates of the state’s minority groups and most vulnerable students remain disproportionately high: 34.6% for students with disabilities, 40.6% for homeless youths and 28.1% for English learners.
“The staffing has been a huge struggle for us, but so has absenteeism,” said Rick Miller, chief executive officer of the CORE districts, a school improvement organization that works with eight urban districts, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno and Sacramento City. “There was the notion that kids go to school every day. The pandemic changed that. And there’s a mindset we’re working through that you don’t need to be in school every day. You be there when you can.”
That appears to be the case in kindergarten, where the chronic absenteeism rate was 40.4% in 2021-22 and 36.3% in 2022-23, compared with 15.6% in 2018-19. Unlike many states, California includes excused absences in its chronic absentee rate calculations. The kindergarten data includes students enrolled in transitional kindergarten, a program for 4-year-olds whose 5th birthday will fall between Sept. 2 and April 2.
Other factors are working against student learning, PACE’s Hough said. At the same time, teachers need to accelerate learning, they are backfilling the needs of absent students. Some students come to school with mental health issues or lack socialization. Political disputes at school board meetings are diverting attention from districts’ learning priorities.
“The basic work of educating kids and running school districts has gotten a lot more complicated,” she said.
Amy Slavensky, interim deputy superintendent of San Juan Unified, agreed. “When you’re in schools every day, or nearly every day like we are, we can see the direct impact of that on our students,” she said. “It’s just not the same as it was before. So it’s going to take time.”
San Juan Unified, in Sacramento County, has sharply increased training for teachers, added intervention teachers and improved attendance at its schools, but its students’ test scores still have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
Nearly 42% of the 49,000 students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts in 2023, down about 1 percentage point from 2022. Math scores were stagnant with 29.6% meeting or exceeding state standards, down 7.5 percentage points from 2019.
The district has used multiple tactics to increase achievement, including hiring intervention teachers and expanding training for teachers in reading and math. The district is training grade-level cohorts of teachers using some of the latest research to strengthen their strategies around reading instruction, Slavensky said. The district is seeing gains in kindergarten and first grade at Dyer-Kelly Elementary School, which has been focusing intensely on early literacy, she said.
“Anytime you implement a new change initiative, it takes four or five years to really see the impact of that, and especially on a summative assessment like CAASPP,” Slavensky said.
To increase math scores, the district is also adding math sections in middle and high school master schedules to reduce class sizes so teachers can offer deeper instruction and differentiated instruction, Slavensky said.
But pulling dozens of teachers out of their classrooms for training isn’t always possible during a teacher shortage, said Superintendent Melissa Bassanelli. Training schedules often fall apart when there aren’t enough teachers to fill the classrooms.
Garden Grove Unified in Orange County, with 79% low-income students and 94% students of color, has scored well above state averages on Smarter Balanced tests and ranks highest among the CORE districts, but saw its math scores fall 7.5 percentage points from pre-pandemic 2019. In 2023, it clawed back half of the difference, though it wasn’t easy, Superintendent Gabriela Mafi said. Many families still struggled financially; resurgent Covid kept students at home; and a lack of subs strained schools.
But Garden Grove, a highly centralized district, stayed true to its system of deploying teacher coaches to schools and encouraging conversations around math concepts in elementary grades. It is using extended learning time at Boys and Girls Clubs and summer programs for academic interventions and supports, Mafi said. “We haven’t quite rebounded to our pre-Covid, but we’re getting close,” she said.
Perhaps no district high-achieving in math took a bigger hit to its Smarter Balanced scores than Rocketship Public Schools, a network with 13 K-5 Title I charter schools in the Bay Area. In 2018-19, 60% of students were at or above standard. By 2021-22, the proficiency rate, while still above the state average, had fallen to 40%. In 2023, overall scores increased by 2 percentage points with variations among schools.
Recovery will entail a multipronged, multiyear strategy, said Danny Echeverry, Rocketship’s Bay Area director of schools. It started with using its community schools funding to hire a Care Corps worker, akin to a social worker, at each site to help families who experienced housing and food insecurity during Covid. “We’ve seen ourselves as a hub of connecting at-risk families with social services in the community,” he said. Chronic absenteeism fell 10 percentage points, and attendance increased 7 percentage points in 2022-23.
Students in kindergarten, first grade or second grade during the pandemic had foundational skill gaps that had to be filled before students could handle grade-level content and move to proficiency on state tests, Etcheverry said. The Rocketship model builds in flex time so that teachers can provide one-on-one interventions.
Scores increased 2 percentage points overall on the 2023 math test, with variations among schools from a decline of 7.4 percentage points to a gain of 15.8 percentage points. Rocketship Los Sueños in San Jose, which piloted the Eureka Math curriculum, gained 5.4 percentage points in 2023, leading to a decision to adopt it in all Bay Area schools.
“We’re building traction, and we have no reason to believe that we’re not going to continue that momentum and see greater gains this year,” Etcheverry said.
Twin Rivers Unified, in Sacramento, made incremental gains this year but still has a long way to go before catching up to 2019 scores. More than 80% of the students are from low-income families.
“Our scores might be below the state average, but our growth is ahead in both English and math,” said Lori Grace, associate superintendent of school leadership.
In 2023, 31.9% of its students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts, up 0.5 points from 2022. In math, 22.7% of the district’s students met or exceeded state standards, an increase of 2.7 points. In 2019, 37% of students were proficient in English language arts and 29% in math.
To combat pandemic-related learning loss, the district added a multitiered system of support at schools, a framework that gives targeted support to struggling students, Grace said. To improve literacy skills, the district began a reading intervention program focusing on the science of reading for kindergarten throughthird grade. The district also tapped its best teachers to offer coaching on the subject to fourth through sixth grade teachers.
Central Valley strategies
Most students in Fresno Unified, the state’s third-largest school district with over 70,000 students, are not meeting standards. Last year, 33.2% of Fresno Unified students met or exceeded English language arts standards, a 1 percentage point gain from a year ago. In math, 23.3% met or exceeded state standards, a 2.5 point increase.
“We are definitely not satisfied with our results,” said Zerina Hargrove, the Fresno Unified assistant superintendent of research, evaluation and assessment. “While we had many students grow in their achievement, we had just as many who slid backward, contributing to very little change overall.”
Fresno Unified plans to focus on ensuring that every child shows growth, specifically targeting the needs of historically underserved student groups, Hargrove said.
One way to do that is by evaluating the “shining stars,” the schools that made significant progress. For example, at Jefferson Elementary, 6.9% more students met or exceeded standards in English, and 15.6% more students met or exceeded math standards. At Bullard High School, 17.6% more students met or exceeded English standards; at Patiño School of Entrepreneurship, 27.5% more students met or exceeded math standards.
“We desire to learn from the schools that have made significant gains and dig deeper into the why of those who didn’t,” she said.
Fresno Unified’s neighbor, Clovis Unified, has some of the highest student achievement scores in the area.
With more than 40,000 students, 72.7% were at or above state standards for English language arts in 2019. By 2022, that percentage dropped to 66.2% and remained flat in 2023. In 2019, 58.7% of Clovis Unified’s students met or exceeded math standards, and in 2022, 49.3% did so. The nearly 2 percentage-point growth in math in 2023 puts the proficiency level at more than 51%.
Still, the numbers haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic proficiency levels.
“Some of our schools saw student achievement grow by anywhere from 15 to 22% at certain grade levels. We must now work together to replicate that level of achievement across every grade level and school in our district,” said Superintendent Corrine Folmer.
The pandemic’s impact persists, district spokesperson Kelly Avants said, citing continuing challenges to learning. They include, she said, “restoring classroom behavior expectations; re-developing the interpersonal relationships between students and between students and their teachers that equates to success in the classroom and facing the impact of decreases in attendance rates has on learning.”
EdSource reporters also contributed to this report: Diana Lambert, Lasherica Thornton, Mallika Seshadri and Zaidee Stavely.
Research by Stanford University found that 75 of the lowest-performing California elementary schools that received funding from an out-of-court settlement made significant progress on third-grade state Smarter Balanced tests this year.
The results indicate that the $50 million the schools received for effective reading instruction in the primary grades carried over to third grade after two years of funding.
“The fact that we were able to budge third grade comprehension assessments with a grant that was focused on TK, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, with a light touch on third grade, is amazing,” said Margaret Goldberg, literacy coach at Nystrom Elementary in West Contra Costa Unified, one of the schools that received the Early Literacy Support Block Grants, or ELSBs.
The 75 schools had the lowest scores in the state in 2019 on the third-grade Smarter Balanced test. They received the money, averaging $1,144 per year for the 15,541 K-three students, under the settlement in the lawsuit, Ella T. v. the State of California, brought by the public interest law firm Public Counsel. It argued that the state violated the students’ constitutional right to an education by failing to teach them how to read adequately.
Eligible schools were chosen from various districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco Unified, West Contra Costa Unified and others. The funding promoted the literacy instruction known as the “science of reading,” which includes explicit phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade, along with the development of vocabulary, oral language, comprehension and writing.
Schools had the flexibility to choose to fund literacy coaches and bilingual reading specialists, new curriculum and instructional materials, expanded access to libraries and literacy training for parents. Schools were encouraged to participate in professional development in the science of reading and seek guidance on their literacy plans from the Sacramento County Office of Education, which oversaw the grants.
Released Monday, the study concluded that the block grants “generated significant (and cost-effective) improvements in English language arts achievement in its first two years of implementation as well as smaller, spillover improvements in math achievement,” wroteresearchers Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah Novicoff, a Stanford doctoral candidate in educational policy.
Students in the funded schools were scoring at the bottom of the scale in 2019, and, despite significant progress, few had achieved reading at grade level in 2023. Dee and Novicoff credited the early education grant for increasing third graders’ achievement by 0.14 standard deviation, the equivalent of a 25% increase in a year of learning, compared with demographically similar students who did not receive the funding. Researchers also found a similar gain by comparing the scores of third graders in the schools with the grants with third-grade scores of fifth graders from the same schools who had not benefited from the funding.
The Smarter Balanced reports results in four performance bands: standard not met, standard nearly met, standard met and standard exceeded. The schools with the grants succeeded in raising scores by 6 percentage points from the lowest category to standard nearly met, significantly reducing the number of students requiring intensive help. Still, after two years of funding, only 13.5% of students are proficient in reading, having met or exceeded standard. That’s 3 percentage points higher than in 2018, and 1 percentage point above pre-pandemic 2019. Schools with similar students not receiving the grants remain below where they were before Covid, according to the research.
Dee and Novicoff were unable to analyze why some schools performed better than others, which could be useful in shaping the state’s policy on early literacy. Unlike some states with comprehensive literacy plans, California does not collect any assessment data that school districts collect from TK to second grade. And, under the rules that the state negotiated in the settlement, participating schools were not required to submit their assessment data to the California Department of Education; most voluntarily did in the second year, but many did not in the first year. It’s also unclear how many schools adhered to their literacy plans or focused on less effective or ineffective strategies for improvement.
Researchers used the only complete set of state-level data to which they had access — third-grade reading comprehension assessments. Those scores may have understated the progress in reading that many schools made on district assessments in the first and second grades.
Public Counsel filed the Ella T. v. the State of California lawsuit in 2017, and the settlement went into effect during the height of the pandemic.Dee said the early success of the program during Covid, amid teacher shortages and extremely high chronic absences, made the results even more striking.
The third graders who took the Smarter Balanced test in 2023 “were the hardest hit by the pandemic. They were in kindergarten when it was interrupted by Covid,” Goldberg said. “They attended first grade remotely. In second grade, in schools like mine, which chose to adopt new curriculum, their teachers had never taught the curriculum before.”
Dee noted the academic gains from the grant were relatively large compared with the cost, making the program quite cost-effective — an effect size that is 13 times higher than general, untargeted spending.
Goldberg said the grant was efficient “because early intervention is cheaper and it’s more effective than waiting until third grade or later grades to provide reading support.”
The grant funding ends in June 2024. Dee said whether schools can sustain improved scores without specific funding support is an open question. Novicoff mentioned that the grant schools may be able to continue receiving support for literacy coaches and reading specialists if they receive funding from the new Literacy Coach and Reading Specialist Grant program.
Instead of being based on performance, the literacy coach grants are awarded to schools with high unduplicated pupil percentages, or the number of students who are eligible for free or reduced meals, are English language learners or are foster youth. Schools eligible for an early literacy grant may also qualify for a literacy coach grant.
Dee said design and implementation are key if the state hopes to continue or scale this success. This means paying close attention to school-based literacy action plans, oversight and resources with some flexibility. “This is a story about how schools that get money tend to do better — money does matter in schools, and this is another piece of evidence into that bucket,” Novicoff said, “but it also shows that what we can do with the money and how you structure that funding really does matter.”
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, right, with students at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park.
Credit: Twitter / LAUSDSup
The Los Angeles Unified School District is showing signs of recovery from the learning losses it incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Tuesday at a press conference, following his Opening of Schools Address at The Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The preliminary scores for the California Smarter Balanced Assessments show that English proficiency increased from roughly 41% to 43% among LAUSD students. Meanwhile, district students’ math scores went up by more than 2 percentage points — reaching a 32.8% proficiency rate across the district, a spokesperson for LAUSD confirmed. The scores were first reported Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.
Carvalho said the increase in math scores was particularly impressive given the subject had always been LAUSD’s “achilles heel.”
“For every grade level tester — those are Grades 3 to 11 — both in English Language Arts as well as mathematics, our students beat the odds,” he said Tuesday. “They rose to the expectation we had with them.”
Since 2015, when the state began its current testing system, there has only been one other year when scores have gone up at every grade level.
According to a district announcement on X Tuesday evening, students “are achieving success” in both English Language Arts and math, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or gender.
Specifically, students who are English learners — and make up a significant portion of LAUSD’s student population — made the most significant progress of any sub-group, Carvalho also said Tuesday. He added that foster youth was the only sub-group that did not make the same strides.
The district has not yet released its science scores; last year, it was LAUSD’s weakest link, with only 22% of students meeting or exceeding state standards.
At this point, the California Department of Education has not released scores for the state as a whole, so it is impossible to know how Los Angeles Unified performed in comparison to other districts.
In fall 2022, Carvalho vowed to curb the district’s pandemic learning losses. Last year, halfway to that benchmark, math scores went up by small margins, while scores in English Language Arts declined slightly.
Experts at the time called the district’s goal of returning to 2018-19 levels in another year ambitious but possible if they specifically target students who are struggling.
“I just want to appreciate and celebrate the amazing work of our schools in achieving the progress that has been discussed today,” said LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez at Tuesday’s press conference. “When you think about the struggles that our families are facing, they are significant.”
She applauded the principals, teachers and classified staff members who support Los Angeles Unified students on a daily basis — especially as students continue to struggle with mental health challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Everyday we’re showing up for our students, and it’s showing results,” Gonez said. “I believe that we’re at the tipping point of really achieving the ambitious goals that we have for our students in our school district. And I’m excited for the best school year yet.”
The Trump administration is determined to punish Harvard University for defiance of its efforts to take control of Harvard’s curriculum, admissions, and faculty hiring policies. Having already suspended $2.2 billion in research grants, the Trump administration expanded its attack on Harvard.
This level of petty vengefulness is unprecedented. Trump is turning his wrath upon Harvard and weaponizing the entire federal government to force the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher education to surrender.
In yet another escalation of its fight against higher education, the Trump administration has moved to terminate scores of research grants at Harvard University and its medical school, imperiling scores of research projects and potentially upending the futures of dozens of young scientists.
Harvard researchers who rely on federal grants to study cancer, infectious diseases and a range of other topics began receiving termination notices en masse on Thursday from a number of federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Energy, according to emails shared with the Globe.
The termination notices threaten tens of millions of dollars in research funding for Harvard and affect a broad swath of the university’s scientific community, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are dependent on federal funding for income.
While not unexpected, the wave of termination letters has roiled the Harvard campus in Cambridge and has left many young scientists anxious about their futures, while others are scrambling to find ways to replace the anticipated loss of federal funding.
As states across the nation release their annual data from tests administered to students in the 2023-24 school year, we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of how far along we are in our post-pandemic recovery. The release of California test data today shows our public schools are continuing to turn the corner on pandemic recovery, with gains on most assessments, while highlighting areas where we have more work to do.
Overall, the percentages of California students meeting or exceeding the proficiency standards for English language arts (ELA), mathematics, and science increased. This is encouraging given that the population of socioeconomically disadvantaged students tested increased again over the past year — as it has for each of the last three years — this time from 63% to 65% — an increase of more than 60,000 students. The number of students experiencing homelessness also rose once again. Despite the challenges they face, achievement levels for socioeconomically disadvantaged students increased more than the statewide average in all three subjects at every grade level.
Furthermore, Black and Latino students showed positive score trends in mathematics across all grades, and the stubborn achievement gaps long experienced by Black students began to close with gains larger than the statewide averages in math and ELA at several grade levels. The same was true for foster youth.
These gains for California’s most vulnerable students are likely due in large part to the investments made by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and efforts to target inequities in life circumstances and educational opportunities. These include programs like the California community schools initiative that provides wraparound whole child supports, the expanded learning opportunities program (ELO-P) that provides academic support and enrichment after school and over the summer, the literacy coaching initiative, and the equity multiplier — all targeted to high-poverty schools. Attracting and keeping better prepared teachers in these schools has also been enabled by the Golden State Teacher Grants for new teachers and incentives for accomplished veterans who are National Board certified.
It is encouraging that overall scores are up, but there is more work needed. And an accurate understanding of what’s being measured and what the scores mean is critically important for diagnosing and improving student learning.
Smarter Balanced assessments are administered in California and 11 other states and territories that helped develop the tests. California’s Smarter Balanced assessments are more rigorous than those in most other states as they focus on higher-order skills and critical thinking, and measure more standards.
For example, whereas most states’ English language arts assessments test only reading and use only multiple-choice questions, California’s tests include reading, writing, listening, and even research, as well as open-ended questions and performance tasks that require students to analyze multiple sources of evidence and explain their conclusions.
Each Smarter Balanced assessment measures grade-level content along a continuum. Higher test score performance represents a student’s ability to handle greater complexity as they use evidence, analyze and solve real-world problems, and communicate their thinking.
Smarter Balanced defines benchmarks at levels 2, 3 and 4 respectively as foundational, proficient, or advanced levels of grade-level skills, while a “1” shows “inconsistent” demonstrations of grade-level skills. In the case of English language arts, students as early as grade three who achieve levels 2 or above are reading, writing and demonstrating research skills.
As an example, a sixth-grade writing prompt asks students to research and explain the impact of the 1893 World’s Fair, and different levels of performance show different levels of sophistication, from communicating a few facts to elaborating on how the activities of the fair led to other human accomplishments with long-term impact:
To understand where improvements are most needed, educators can look at “claim scores” on the assessment — measures of what students have shown they know and can do on specific topics. These show, for example, that 25% of students statewide score below the standard in reading, but 31% score below the standard in writing — an area for greater focus. Since research shows that writing improves reading, ensuring that students are receiving regular writing instruction and practice will improve performance in both areas of literacy.
Similarly, in mathematics, California assessments are more sophisticated than those in many other states, as they measure math concepts and procedures (where many state tests begin and end), plus data analysis, problem-solving, and how well students communicate their reasoning through additional performance tasks in which students must solve a complex real-world problem and communicate their reasoning.
The states that created and use these assessments believe that when students are asked to learn and show higher-order skills, they are better prepared for later schooling and life than if they were only prepared to bubble in answers on a multiple-choice test.
A recent study from Washington state provided evidence for this belief. The study found that over half of students who scored a “Level 2 / Nearly Meets” on the Smarter Balanced high school mathematics test (and more than one-third of those who scored a 1) successfully enrolled in post-secondary learning without additional remedial courses, and the large majority succeeded. Among those who scored a 3 or 4, 70% and 82% respectively attended college, and nearly all were successful.
We hope that educators, parents and policymakers will not only understand and act on what they learn from these assessments, but also use the evidence productively for improving teaching and learning. Smarter Balanced assessments include lesson plans and interim assessments teachers can choose to examine student learning and adjust their teaching throughout the year. The score reports also provide information about the levels at which students are reading and computing, linked to resources parents can access directly to support their children — supplemented by what they know authentically about what their children are learning and doing at home and school.
Students’ engagement, parents’ observations, teachers’ reports and classroom-based assignments will always provide more detailed, timely and useful information about individual students’ interests, needs and progress. Hopefully, these assessments can provide a useful adjunct if we know what they mean and how to use them productively.
This story was updated at 4:25 pm with more details on the assessment results.
California students made some progress toward regaining their pre-Covid levels of achievement with incremental increases in English language arts, math and science scores last school year, according to state data released Wednesday.
English language arts test scores overall increased slightly, from 46.7% of the state’s students meeting or exceeding proficiency standards in 2023 to 47% in 2024. Math and science scores also edged up incrementally, with 30.7% of students in both subjects meeting or exceeding proficiency standards compared with 30.2% the year before.
Smarter Balanced tests are given to students in third through eighth grades and in 11th grade. They are part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), which also includes the English Language Proficiency Assessment.
Last school year was the third year students returned to school since the Covid pandemic pushed schools into distance learning and caused dramatic declines in test scores after years of progress. In 2019, more than half of California students, 51.7%, met or exceeded state standards in English language arts, and 37.1% met or exceeded state standards in math.
Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education and an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, said she found reason for encouragement in the scores. She said that the overall gains were consistent across grades and for Latino and Black students.
“California’s public schools are making encouraging gains in all of the key subject areas, and these gains are largest for our most vulnerable groups of students,” Darling-Hammond said in a statement. “Our governor and the Legislature have, in recent years, prioritized … accelerating learning and equity: community schools, expanded learning time, transitional kindergarten, and investments in literacy and math. Those efforts are paying dividends.”
Students from low-income households made larger gains in all three subjects on the tests than students overall — a change from initially after the pandemic. Low-income students’ scores in English language arts increased 1.5 percentage points over the previous year, with 36.8% meeting or exceeding proficiency standards in English. There was a similar increase in both math and science, with 20.7% meeting or exceeding standards — a 1.4 percentage point increase in each.
Darling-Hammond attributes the academic improvement to billions of dollars in federal and state assistance directed to students with the most needs. She acknowledged it’s not possible to tease out the impact of the state’s expanded after-school learning program relative to money spent on community schools or literacy coaches. But it’s apparent that the combined money is making a difference; for families experiencing evictions and illnesses in high-poverty neighborhoods, the pandemic isn’t over, she said.
“My heart goes out to those in the schools that deal daily with these issues,” Darling-Hammond said.
This narrowing of the performance gaps occurred even though the proportion of low-income students in California has grown significantly in the last seven years, from 58% to 65%, Darling-Hammond said. And the numbers of homeless and foster children are up too, she said.
After looking at the same state data, however, the nonprofit advocacy group Children Now expressed alarm. “California’s lack of progress in closing the education achievement gap over the past 10 years is completely unacceptable,” it said in a statement. “We have made almost no progress for our Black and Latino students, who make up more than 60% of California’s TK-12 student population, since the start of the Local Control Funding Formula and associated accountability system a decade ago.”
Additional protections are needed, Children Now stated, “to ensure the equity-focused funding that is the hallmark (of the funding formula) goes to the schools and students most in need to close our state’s unconscionable achievement gap.”
Racial/demographic breakdown of test scores from 2015 – 2024
English and math scores for students in all California schools and districts showing gaps in proficiency.
California school districts have received record levels of one-time and ongoing funding since the start of the Covid pandemic. But the last $12.5 billion in federal pandemic relief — 20% of which was required to be spent on learning recovery — had to be spent by last month.
California schools are getting creative to continue to fund positions and other support once funded by Covid dollars, said Alex Traverso, spokesperson for the California State Board of Education. Some schools in San Diego County, for example, are funding counselors and social worker positions, once paid for with federal Covid dollars, with the community schools dollars.
“So I think as much as we can, we are trying to find strategies and techniques that can keep these programs moving forward and keep student achievement on the rise,” Traverso said.
The gap in proficiency between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students remains daunting in 2023-24: 29.3 percentage points in English language arts and 30.2 percentage points in math — about 1 percentage point smaller than in 2022-23.
States’ scores flat after dropping
An analysis of third-grade reading by David Scarlett Wakelyn, a partner with Upswing Labs, a nonprofit that works with school districts to improve reading instruction, found that California’s scores were similar to 29 other states he has examined: flat after falling sharply after the pandemic.
Third grade is a benchmark year for achieving fluency. In 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic, 48.5% of California students were proficient or advanced; in 2023-24, 42.8% were, a drop of 5.7 percentage points. In the past three years, reading scores rose less than 1 percentage point.
Other states that take the Smarter Balanced assessments followed the same pattern, including Oregon, Nevada and Delaware, whose scores were below California before the pandemic and were again in 2023-24. Washington State, where 55% of students were proficient in 2018-19, fell to 47% and has stayed there the past three years.
None of the nation’s 10 largest states have bounced back to where they were before the pandemic, Wakelyn found. But in four “bright spot” states — Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana and South Carolina — reading scores increased by 3 to 5 percentage points each of the past three years and are now ahead of where they were before the pandemic. The state leadership in Louisiana, he said, has long focused on adopting high-quality instructional materials and giving teachers deep professional learning opportunities in the new curricula, he said.
Smarter Balanced test results divide student scores into four achievement levels, but this year the names of the levels have changed. Instead of “not meeting standards,” “standards nearly met,” “standards met” or “standards exceeded,” they are now “advanced,” “proficient,” “foundational” or “inconsistent.”
English learners have mixed results
Fewer English learners tested as proficient on the summative English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) than last year. The percentage of English learners who tested as proficient went down from 16.5% in 2023 to 14.6% in 2024, while the percentage of English learners who had the most basic level of English increased from 20.33% to 23.93%.
Students classified as English learners have to take the summative ELPAC every year until they achieve proficiency. There are four levels of proficiency — “beginning to develop,” “somewhat developed,” “moderately developed,” and “well developed.”
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser to the Californians Together, a nonprofit organization that advocates for English learners, said it is difficult to know what these numbers mean, because they could be due to a change in the demographics of English learners. For example, the increase in the percentage of students with the most basic level of English could be due to an increase in students who recently arrived in the U.S., she said. In addition, there is no information about how many students are reclassified as proficient in English.
However, she said, “it would suggest that districts take a look at their English language development program and see if there is a need for intentional work to enhance it.”
Los Angeles, Compton see gains
The number of students in Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) who met or exceeded state proficiency standards in both English language arts and math increased by about 2 points since 2023. Now, 43% of students meet or exceed standards in English language arts and 32.83% of students meet or exceed standards in math.
School board member Kelly Gonez said the district is committed to continuous improvement and equity.
“Every day, we’re showing up for our students, and it’s showing results,” Gonez said at a news conference in July, when the district announced preliminary scores. “I believe that we’re at the tipping point of really achieving the ambitious goals that we have for our students in our school district.”
Nearby Compton Unified also saw improved test scores last school year. Roughly 43% of students met or exceeded proficiency standards in English language arts this year, compared with about 40% the previous year. The number of students who met or exceeded math standards also rose, from just over 31% to nearly 35% this year.
“Compton Unified School District has shown steady and remarkable progress in both math and English language arts, with our CAASPP scores far exceeding the state average for school districts with an unduplicated pupil count exceeding 90%,” Compton Unified School District Superintendent Darin Brawley said in a statement to EdSource.
Benecia’s 8 point gain in math scores, to 53% proficiency, was led by two years of growth by Hispanic students. At 40.7% proficiency, they are the first student group in the district to exceed its pre-pandemic 2018-19 rate. Superintendent Damon Wright credited the funding of districtwide professional learning and instructional coaches as factors.
Fallbrook’s one-year 5.2 point gain in English language arts and 5.9 pont gain in math bring the district almost back to pre-pandemic levels. Superintendent Monika Hazel also credits additional district-level math teaching specialists, leadership coaches and school-level instructional coaches for contributing to the improvement. The state’s $6 billion Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant, which will continue after federal Covid relief runs dry this fall, paid for some of the positions.
Bay Area schools’ results vary
In the Bay Area, some districts had big test score gains, while others stayed stagnant. Benicia Unified had a 4-point gain in its overall English test score, and an 8-point gain in math. San Francisco and Oakland test scores were mostly stagnant.
West Contra Costa Unified is laboring to bring its scores back to pre-pandemic levels. Since the 2021-22 school year, slightly more West Contra Costa students have tested proficient or higher in math — up 2 points to 23% this year. Students who meet or exceed state proficiency standards in English language arts have been flat since 2021 at 32%, compared with 34.9% pre-pandemic.
To help improve reading scores, the district created a 13-member literacy task force about a year ago to create a literacy plan and improve literacy instruction in the district. District officials did not respond to requests for an update on the task force’s progress.
Big gains for Central Valley migrant students
Tulare Joint Union High School District in the Central Valley region had data points worth celebrating and data pointing to areas that need improvement, said Kevin Covert, assistant superintendent for curriculum, technology and assessment of the test results.
Based on the 2024 tests, 53.5% of the 1,300 11th graders who took the exam met or exceeded English proficiency standards, a 2.2 point gain from the previous year. In math, 18.3% of students met or exceeded standards — an improvement of less than 1 point.
“Some people want to hang their hat on an overall test score,” Covert said. “We’re also looking at how our subgroups are doing.”
The percentage of Tulare Joint Union students with disabilities meeting or exceeding standards was 12.7% in English, a jump of more than 5 points, and 3.5% in math, an improvement of more than 2 points. Though scores have fluctuated for students with disabilities, the 5.5-point gain in English is the largest percentage growth the group has made within the last decade.
Though migrant students are a small population of the district’s students, 63.6% met or exceeded English standards, representing a double-digit gain. Only 18.2% met or exceeded math standards, although the increase of 1.5% was higher than the overall district increase.
“Our success on this test can only be as good, partly, as the instruction that’s going on in the classroom,” Covert said. But educators must also know where students are academically, which is harder to track in Tulare Joint Union.
Fresno Unified, the state’s third-largest district, is struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of achievement of 38% proficiency and above in English language arts and 29% proficiency and advanced in math. Superintendent Misty Her expressed confidence in the districtwide strategy known as “data chats.” At Data Chats, principals and staff evaluate data and set goals, including the need for intervention, for students to progress.
Clarity matters when explaining to parents how their children did on standardized tests. An imprecise characterization of a complicated score can mislead parents into assuming their kids performed better than they did.
That issue is at the heart of the opposition to draft revisions to descriptions of students’ scores on the Smarter Balanced assessments that are sent home to parents. While the degree of difficulty of the tests and their scoring wouldn’t change, the characterization of the results would, like replacing the term “standard not met” with “inconsistent” for the lowest scores.
Parent focus groups this week
The California Department of Education is scheduling three online focus groups to gather thoughts, questions and concerns on proposed changes to how scores on the Smarter Balanced statewide assessments will be reported publicly. The meetings are for parents, teachers and students.
Tuesday, Dec. 3, 6 to 7 p,m.: Session 1, in English
Wednesday, Dec. 4, 7 to 8 p.m. Session 2, in English for students only
Thursday, Dec. 5, 6 to 7 p.m. Session 3, in Spanish
The State Board of Education delayed its adoption at its November meeting because of criticism that the revised wording may compound, not solve, current unclear language.
Board members listened to children’s advocacy groups who chided state officials for not first consulting with teachers and parents before taking any action — which state officials acknowledged they hadn’t done.
In a letter to the state board about the proposed changes, particularly the labeling of low test scores, nine student advocacy groups — the Alliance for Students — argued that the revised language “will only serve to obfuscate the data and make it even more challenging for families and advocates to lift the needs of our most underserved students.” Signers of the letter include Teach Plus, Children Now, and Innovate Public Schools.
Getting the terms right is important for the assessment scores to be useful to parents and teachers, Sarah Lillis, executive director of Teach Plus California, told EdSource. “We want to make sure the signals sent by the descriptors foster dialogue” and encourage parents to ask the right questions.
“We echo the concerns of our colleagues,” testified Lindsay Tornatore, representing the California County Superintendents at the board’s Nov. 13 meeting. “Outreach to parents, families and the community should have been prioritized to engage in multiple opportunities prior to the changes being made.”
In response, the California Department of Education hastily scheduled online presentations this week for parents and teachers, with the expectation that they will consider any recommendations at their next meeting in January.
How scores are reported
A student’s scores on the Smarter Balanced tests in English language arts and math and on the California Science Test fall within one of four achievement levels that provide context on how the student performed. Level 4, with the highest attainable scores, is also labeled “Standard Exceeded.” Level 3 is labeled Standard Met; Level 2 is Standard Nearly Met, and Level 1 is Standard Not Met. Many of the dozen states and territories that give Smarter Balanced use the same definitions.
The target is to score at least Level 3, which indicates a student is working at grade level. In the 2023-24 results, fewer than half of students achieved Levels 3 or 4: 53% scored at levels 1 or 2 in English language arts, and 64.5% scored at Levels 1 or 2 in math. The tests are given to students in grades three through eight and grade 11.
Statewide scores were worse in science, which is given to students in grades five, eight, and once in high school, 69.3% failed to meet Level 3 — the grade-level standard — in 2023-24.
In response to criticism that the existing labels are vague, imprecise and confusing, Smarter Balanced representatives decided to create a new set of labels and brief descriptions, which states have the option to use. This is particularly so for Level 2 — the “Standard Nearly Met” label. Many parents don’t understand what nearly meeting grade-level standards in particular means.
Under the Smarter Balanced draft for the scoring bands, Level 4 would become “Advanced,” Level 3 would be “Proficient,” Level 2 would be “Foundational,” and Level 1 would be “Inconsistent.”
A draft description for Level 2 in language arts for third to fifth grade would read, “The student demonstrates foundational grade-level skills and shows a basic understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge and skills in English language arts/literacy needed for likely success in future coursework.”
In letters and in remarks at the board meeting, critics indicated they’re fine with “Advanced” and “Proficient” but are unhappy with the labels Foundational and Inconsistent for Levels 1 and 2.
“The language is confusing and not engaging for families with the first two levels,” said Joanna French, director of research and policy strategies for Innovate Public Schools. “If a student is not at grade level, be direct about that. You cannot address a problem you cannot see.”
Tonya Craft-Perry, a 15-year teacher who is active in the Black Parent Network of Innovate Public Schools, said that “’Foundational’ could lead parents to believe their children are doing better than they are. It makes the district and teachers look better, but if a low score requires intervention, a parent needs to know that,” she said.
Several board members indicated that one easy remedy would be to include language in the revision’s current descriptions. The wording makes clear that a student scoring in Level 2 “may require further development” to demonstrate the knowledge and skills to succeed in future grades or, for older students, in college courses after high school. Students scoring in Level 1 “needs substantial improvement” to succeed.
News media oversimplifies
In a two-page explanation, Smarter Balanced blamed the news media for much of the misunderstanding over the current wording of the labels.
“The media often incorrectly reports that students who aren’t proficient ‘can’t do math’ or ‘can’t read.’ This is not true. The Smarter Balanced assessments are aligned to grade-level content, and students who achieve Levels 2, 3, and 4 do, in fact, demonstrate a continuum of grade-level knowledge and skills,” it said.
Students at all three of those levels are showing that they “understand core content,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education, at the board meeting.
But as scores progress from one level to the next, students convey increasing accuracy and complexity in their knowledge and skills. Smarter Balanced said students demonstrate this in how they respond to more complex reading passages, concepts and advanced vocabulary, or in math, the number of elements in equations and difficult word problems.
Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser to the advocacy group Children Now, said that the new labels would feed the “reality gap in the perceptions of parents that their kids are doing better than they are” in school. In an often-cited 2023 parent survey in communities nationwide, survey firm Gallup and the nonprofit parent advocacy organization Learning Heroes found that, based on their kids’ report cards, parents’ perceptions were out of whack with how their children did on assessments. In Sacramento County, where 28% of students were proficient in math tests, 85% of parents believed their children were proficient.
“Now we are suggesting that students scoring below standard are foundational. Many parents will conclude, ‘My kid is doing fine,’” Manwaring said.
Like most of the nation, California students were stuck in low gear again in 2024. On the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), they performed significantly below their pre-pandemic scores in math and reading.
The gaps between the lowest-performing students, between low-income and well-off students, and among some racial and ethnic groups continued to widen overall, an ominous sign that many students are unprepared for high school and beyond.
“Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, noting that nationwide, the percentage of eighth graders reading Below Basic, the lowest achievers, was 33% and the highest in the assessment’s history. The 40% of fourth graders scoring Below Basic was the highest in 20 years.
On the fourth grade reading assessment for NAEP, scores in five states, in light blue, declined compared with 2022, no states’ scores improved, and 47 states, including California, saw no statistically significant change.Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress
Also known as The Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is the only assessment that a representative number of students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades in every state and Washington, D.C., take every two years—and thus, the most reliable measure of performance among states. The results for fourth and eighth graders were released today.
On NAEP’s 500-point scale, where one or 2-point gains are common, and movement of 3 or more points are notable, California’s scores have consistently trailed the nation in both reading and math, although the gap in reading has narrowed. That had been especially so for eighth graders, whose score equaled the nation’s in 2022.
But that result was the exception in a year in which scores fell sharply nationally and to a lesser extent in California in the aftermath of the pandemic and slow recovery. Nationally, math scores in 2022 dropped 8 points in eighth grade and 5 points in fourth, the largest drop in NAEP’s 25-year history.
The latest scores show mostly no progress. Scores in fourth and eighth grade reading fell again, leaving California 9 points and the nation 8 points below 2017. Math was mixed — up in fourth grade, but not enough to catch 2019, with eighth grade taking another dip.
The average scores, however, mask widening disparities between the highest and lowest-performing students. On fourth grade reading, student scores at the 90th achievement percentile fell 1 point between 2019 and 2024, and scores at the 75th percentile fell 3 points. However, scores for students in the 10th percentile fell 10 points, and for students in the 25th percentile, they fell 8 points.
The pattern looks about the same throughout the nation, with a serious long-term impact, said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who also was provided an early peek at the scores. “The top scorers are coming back, and the bottom is doing worse, which will affect income distribution over a lifetime,” he said.
On fourth grade reading, California scored higher than three states (West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska), statistically about the same as 35 other states and behind 13 states. Only two states, Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math, scored above pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
NAEP scores fall within four bands of achievement: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and Below Basic. The differences by race and ethnicity remained stark on all the tests. For example, on the fourth grade reading test, 7% of Black students and 19% of Latino students scored Proficient and Advanced, while 50% of Asian and 44% of white students scored that high.
For all students, only 31% of California’s fourth graders scored Proficient or Advanced, compared with 32% nationally.
NAEP defines students performing at the Basic level as having partially mastered knowledge and skills required to perform at a Proficient level. Proficient students have demonstrated a grasp of challenging material and can apply the knowledge to real-world situations and analytical skills. Advanced students showed superior performance.
Scoring Below Basic doesn’t mean students in fourth grade can’t read. “We’re saying that they’re unlikely to be able to determine the meaning of a familiar word using context from the text. That’s a critical skill that students will really need for entering middle school,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that Congress created to set policy for NAEP.
Once education experts and advocates have had a chance to review the results and findings of surveys that the National Center for Educational Statistics conducted of students and teachers, there will be theories for the low scores and calls for efforts to address them.
In The 74 earlier this week, columnist Chad Aldeman evaluated a half-dozen explanations for declining scores nationwide. They include less reading and more TikTok; the abandonment of federal accountability for school performance, starting in the latter years of the Obama administration; the adoption of Common Core state standards a decade ago; and soaring student absenteeism rates post-Covid. While they have come down, the rates remain disproportionately high for the lowest-performing students, contributing to widening gaps in achievement.
Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and one of a few education experts who got an early look at the NAEP results, would add another cause to the mix: emerging evidence of grade inflation, connected to the pandemic, and perceptions parents have of their own children’s learning.
“So the most immediate information that parents get is not state or NAEP tests. It’s (high) grades that are not showing parents where their kids stand in real time, to allow them to provide feedback to their kids and encourage them.”
Goldhaber said there is evidence that teacher quality is largely what moves students; he’d focus on the inequitable distribution of schools with less qualified and credentialed teachers.
Not comparable to Smarter Balanced
Students also take annual state tests in math and English language arts, but NAEP officials warn not to make comparisons since each state’s measurements and standards are different. California aligns its tests to the Common Core standards, while NAEP’s tests are based on what experts say students in each grade should know. It’s harder to score Proficient or above on NAEP than on most state tests. In 2024, 44% of all California fourth graders students scored at or above Proficient on the Smarter Balanced test.
About 11,000 students in California took NAEP, and only portions of it. That’s too few for individual students, schools, and districts to receive scores, with one exception. Annually, a representative number of students in 25 large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, take the Trial Urban District Assessment or TUDA. They provided one of the few bright spots in 2024.
Los Angeles was one of three districts whose fourth grade math scores didn’t drop during the pandemic; it rose slightly from 2019 to 2024, and San Diego’s fell less than 2 points, a statistically insignificant amount. In eighth grade, Los Angeles dropped less than a point, and San Diego’s 8-point drop was lower than the national average for the districts. Los Angeles’ reading scores in fourth and eighth grade didn’t decline at all post-pandemic; San Diego’s increased a statistically insignificant amount in fourth grade, and its decline of 3 points was about the average for the TUDA districts.
California’s low percentage of students scoring Proficient or better on fourth grade reading and math (34% Proficient in fourth grade, 29% in eighth grade) will likely lead to calls for funding for teacher training on the new standards and evidence-based practices in kindergarten through second grade.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed allocating $500 million in the 2025-26 budget for teacher training and to encourage districts to use discretionary funding on summer programs and tutoring to make up for lost Covid learning. Some states whose scores exceeded California’s on fourth-grade reading, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Colorado, adopted comprehensive reading plans grounded in the science of reading.
