California Student Test Scores Fall Short but Education Officials Ignore Root Causes

The California Department of Education released its annual student test scores this week and the news is sobering.

The state’s California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) results for the 2023-24 school year show the percentage of students who have met or exceeded state standards for English language arts, math and science has increased only slightly year-over-year compared for 2022-23.

Overall, less than half of students — 47 percent — met or exceeded English language arts standards, while a mere 35.5 percent met or exceeded math standards for their respective grade levels. Just under 31 percent of students tested met or exceeded science standards.

Compared to the prior year, English, math and science proficiency increased by 0.38, 0.92 and 0.52 percentage points respectively. This is despite the billions of federal and state dollars spent on catching students up after the staggering learning loss caused by Governor Newsom’s extended school closures during the COVID pandemic.

“With all the resources directed toward schools since the pandemic, we should be seeing more substantial progress,” said Lance Christensen, Vice President of Education Policy and Government Affairs at California Policy Center.

Despite the dismal scores, the California Department of Education (CDE) is celebrating the marginal gains. State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond called the results “encouraging,” and attributed the less-than-one-percent uptick to “forward-thinking investments… with a focus on accelerating learning and equity: community schools, expanded learning time, transitional kindergarten, and investments in literacy and math.”

But a closer examination reveals a bleak truth: Despite some gains, today’s math and reading scores remain significantly lower than the last set of test scores before COVID shutdowns, when English language arts (ELA) proficiency was just over 51 percent and math proficiency was at 39.7 percent. Science proficiency has increased by about eight-tenths of a percentage point over the same time period.

The CDE says the new data indicates “accelerated progress [toward] closing equity gaps for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, Black/African American students, and Hispanic/Latino students…The percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students meeting or exceeding standards rose 1.5 percentage points in English language arts/literacy (ELA), 2.1 percentage points in mathematics, and 1.4 percentage points in science.”

But minority students are still showing the severe educational impact of school closures: ELA scores for black students are 2.85 percentage points lower and math scores for black students are 2.8 percentage points lower compared to pre-COVID scores.

For Latino students, ELA proficiency is 4 percentage points lower and math proficiency is 4.3 percentage points lower than before COVID. However, science scores for both groups have increased slightly in the same time frame: 1.37 percentage points for black students and 0.78 percentage points for Latino students.

White students experienced similar declines in academic achievement since COVID, with ELA scores 5.4 percent lower, math scores 4.66 percent lower, and science scores 0.47 percent lower compared to before the school shutdowns.

Meanwhile, one figure that hasn’t declined is education spending. California’s budgeted education spending for last school year was $129.2 billion, a 25 percent increase since 2019-20 when the K-12 education budget was $103.4 billion.

Christensen points out that California public schools have lost 420,000 students over the last few years. But because of the legislature’s “hold harmless” funding practice, which protects districts from funding decreases despite a marked decline in enrollment, schools are still receiving and spending the same amount of money to educate fewer and fewer students.

And yet the public school system has yet to effectively mitigate the COVID learning losses.

“The bottom line is that California’s education system, with all its vast resources, is still failing students,” said Christensen. “The reasons are clear. We have to jettison the experimental teaching methods pushed by teachers’ unions and teacher credentialing programs. We also need to address the union-driven system that bases teacher pay not on merit but on how long you’ve been in the union.”

“Until we confront these entrenched issues driven by teachers’ unions, students will continue to bear the brunt of this failed system.”