Walters: California can fix its school crisis. Two projects point the way

When the state Department of Education released academic test scores of California’s public school students in October, it cast them in positive terms.

“Overall,” the department said, “the percentages of California students meeting or exceeding standards (demonstrating proficient or advanced grade-level knowledge and skills) in (English language arts), mathematics, and science increased, from 46.7% to 47% percent in (English language arts), from 34.6% to 35.5% in math, and from 30.2% to 30.7% in science.”

What the department didn’t say is that those minuscule increases from the previous year meant that California remains one of the states where academic achievements are still below what they were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As CalMatters’ account of the test scores notes, “both English language arts and math scores are 4 percentage points below their 2018-19 levels, which were among the highest scores for California students since the state began administering the Smarter Balanced test in 2014-15.”

Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships at the education research nonprofit Policy Analysis for California Education, told the San Jose Mercury News that the slow recovery from the pandemic indicates that the massive federal and state funds given schools to cope with the pandemic failed to prevent declines. “What we would want to see is that with those additional funds, we had a really strong recovery. Instead what we saw were really modest gains,” Gallagher said.

The department’s obfuscation continued a month later when it released its “dashboard” of public education markers that trumpeted nonacademic factors, such as increases in attendance and decreases in student suspensions, but ignored California’s subpar academic outcomes, which should be the most important.

That’s not surprising, given that the state’s education bureaucrats consciously developed the multipoint dashboard to conceal the chronic lack of academic achievement.

A state-by-state report on school system transparency of academic test results issued by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, based at Arizona State University, gives California a “D” for its lack of clarity.

“I have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,” Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor who worked on the report, told CalMatters. “How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”

Are California’s stubborn failings in teaching basic subjects such as math and reading, which the educational establishment hopes no one will notice, fixable?

Two recent projects to improve academic skills indicate that learning can be improved with sustained effort that uses proven techniques and shuns trendy short-term fixes that school systems often adopt in their desperate efforts to raise test scores.

Policy Analysis for Public Education, a think tank jointly operated by several major universities that studies California schools, cites the math project in Lake Tahoe Unified School District’s Sierra House Elementary School and a reading program in Grass Valley School District as successful examples.

In both, California Education Partners, a school reform organization staffed by academic experts, provided three years of hands-on help to improve instruction, and PACE evaluators found significantly positive results. “The Sierra House model serves as a blueprint for building adult capacity and fostering instructional coherence,” they said, while Grass Valley’s phonics-based reading program was adopted district-wide and “improved student outcomes.”

California’s educational crisis is palpable. Not only do California schools fare very poorly vis-a-vis other states in federal academic testing — seventh from the bottom — but there’s a yawning “achievement gap” between low income and English learner students and their more privileged classmates that widened during the pandemic.

Rather than hide the problem with gimmicks such as the school dashboard, California should own up to it and embrace successful examples such as those in Tahoe and Grass Valley.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.