A majority of the state’s students can’t read at an adequate level, but to Gov. Gavin Newsom there’s a silver lining: At least California is not doing as bad as other states.
Last week, both national and statewide test scores revealed poor marks for California in math and reading. While it’s true that in the wake of COVID shutdowns students are struggling throughout the country, in California it’s been that way for quite some time.
“While California’s students experienced less learning loss than those in most other states during the pandemic, these results are not a celebration but a call to action,” Newsom said in a statement.
That undoubtedly provides little comfort to the parents who were hoping their kids would learn to read at school. To his credit, Newsom did say the bad national scores are not a cause to celebrate, but only after he celebrated California not being last.
It’s not that California performed better than other states, per se. It’s that the state’s decline was not as steep as other states in the national NAEP test. Still though, the state saw its scores in math and reading drop across the board, sometimes by significant margins, and was still below the national average, except in 8th grade reading, which was average.
But the state’s Smarter Balanced test scores showed that 53 percent of the state’s students can read at an adequate level and a whopping 67 percent are not up to standards in math.
Smarter Balanced, given to all California students in grades 3 through 8 and 11, is a more accurate indicator than the NAEP test, which is just a small sampling of a few thousand students, as noted by Lance Christensen, a candidate for California Superintendent of Public Instruction.
“(T)ests taken by 2.9 mil kids offer a more detailed & devastating report than the natl NAEP scores taken by 4k CA students,” Christensen tweeted.
Newsom has done some things recently that might help on the margins, like providing two meals a day for students. This might not sound like much, but hunger makes everything more difficult, especially concentrating and learning.
But the problems with education are bigger than hunger. Smarter Balanced revealed a troubling trend that likely kept the scores from being even worse: the number of students enrolled who did not satisfactorily complete the test increased approximately 70 percent since 2019, with around 120,000 students not taking the test and a few thousand more submitting incomplete tests that could not earn a score.
“It’s like polling bias— if you’re missing groups of people, the results wind up giving you a distorted picture,” said American Enterprise Institute’s Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies Frederick Hess.
Chronic absenteeism – missing at least 10 percent of school days per year – was already a problem pre-COVID, but the rate ticked up to 14.3 percent in 2020-21. If students aren’t in school regularly, they aren’t likely to perform well on tests, or even show up to the test at all.
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The Smarter Balanced scores would have usually been released weeks ago, but the state had decided to delay releasing the scores until after the election. But under strong pressure from the public, the state dumped the bad news on the same day the NAEP scores were released, giving it the chance to blunt the blow with the less bad national scores.
COVID shutdowns, which Newsom supported (even as he was sending his kids in person to private school), had a negative effect on education throughout the country.
But Californians should not accept that as the scapegoat. The possibility of learning to read at an adequate level has been a 50/50 proposition in California schools for years.
Students will continue to suffer until there are drastic changes in how the state educates.
Follow Matt on Twitter @FlemingWords