California Student Test Scores Plunge — but Some Achievement Gaps Narrow. How Does Your School Compare?

For math, rates for economically disadvantaged students actually dropped slightly less than the average drop for all students, falling 6 percentage points but still resulting in an abysmal 21% meeting standards. English learners went from 13% to 10%. Students with disabilities went from 13% to 11%.

The achievement gap for Black students closed slightly, from a 33 percentage-point difference from their white peers in 2019 to 31 percentage points in 2022. Native American, Asian and Latino students also saw drops that were largely proportional to that of their white peers. Latino students saw their achievement gap grow in math scores by one percentage point.

When separated by grade level, third-grade students saw the largest drops in both subjects. In 2019, 48.5% of third graders met English language arts standards. Compare that to 42.2% in 2022, a 6.4 percentage-point decline. For math, the rate for third graders meeting standards dropped by 6.7 percentage points.

Megan Bacigalupi is the executive director of CA Parent Power, a parent advocacy group that rallied parents to fight for school reopenings earlier in the pandemic. She said these scores aren’t just the reckoning for prolonged school closures but a wake-up call for parents. California’s test scores were always abysmal, and they couldn’t afford to sink any lower, she said.

“We’re not a state that’s performing well, so for kids to backslide … We were never in a good place,” Bacigalupi said. “What I hope is eye-opening to parents is that, guess what, prior to all this, our kids weren’t doing that well.”

Check out how your school compares:

Despite the alarm caused by these signs of pandemic-era learning loss, experts in California want the state to remain on the path it was on before the public health crisis.

Julien Lafortune is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who specializes in K-12 education finance. He said there was some evidence that the state’s formula for funding public schools was working to close achievement gaps before the pandemic.

The Local Control Funding Formula gives additional money to school districts and charter schools for their English learners, foster children and students from lower-income households. Districts with high percentages of students who fall into at least one of these student groups get an additional pot of money called a “concentration grant.”

Lafortune said there was some “strong evidence” showing districts receiving concentration grants were performing better on standardized tests prior to the pandemic. That said, helping those same districts with additional funding might be a faster route to recovery for those districts.

“Maybe that’s how we want to do it, by targeting the concentration grants,” he said.

But Lafortune said there’s no evidence that the state needs to overhaul its formula. It might just take time to get student test scores back to where they were before the pandemic.

“I don’t know if there’s something that needs to be changed imminently,” he said. “The formula does a good job of allocating more funding for high-needs students.”

The state’s funding model also gives districts more control over how they spend their money. Lance Christensen, who’s running against incumbent State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, said the state needs to play an even smaller role.

“The state has done enough to destroy our kids’ education,” he said. “I think the state needs fewer education programs and more getting out of the way.”

Richard Barrera, a school board member at San Diego Unified, said the Smarter Balanced results were “really not surprising.” But on top of that, the data isn’t very useful for educators, he said.

While many experts might jump to compare data from 2019 and 2022, Barrera said 2022 doesn’t provide the best baseline because school was still being shaped by the spread of COVID-19. Student and employee absences soared due to high case numbers. He said teachers struggled with disruptive behavior from students readjusting to in-person learning.

Barrera said the current school year will be a more useful point of comparison to pre-pandemic student achievement.

“Our students and educators have just gone through the two most difficult years of their entire experience,” Barrera said. “What was supposed to be the return-to-normal year in ’21-’22 was anything but a normal year.”

Barrera added that Smarter Balanced scores are just one data point that arrives too late to be useful for classroom teachers. He said mid-year assessments are better at helping teachers keep track of their students’ progress.

Barrera also said educators and education officials have always known what resources are needed to best support students. With the billions of dollars in federal grants going to districts to help them recover from the pandemic, he said educators can finally fund the programs they’ve always needed.

“Pre-pandemic, the money wasn’t there to support those state strategies,” he said. “If we know what the best practices are, we’ve got to make sure we’re providing the resources.”

But this surge of funding won’t last forever. And the recent increases to state education funding might not be enough to make up for the disappearance of the federal money.

Bacigalupi, the parent advocate, said there’s been little explanation to parents when it comes to how districts are spending this money. She said the lack of transparency has been an alarming trend throughout the pandemic, from the rationale behind prolonged school closures, to even the release of these test scores.

“It’s a pattern that parents are very aware of when it comes to public education,” Bacigalupi said.