Compton USD’s decade on the rise

Superintendent Darin Brawley implemented systems and strategies to raise achievement

The Compton Unified School District (CUSD) in Los Angeles County has made historic gains in student scores over the last few years on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, including a five-point increase in English language arts (ELA) in 2024–25. As CSBA launches its SOS for Student Achievement: Close the State Accountability Gap campaign (csba.org/studentachievement) for the state to create an operations and support plan that aids local educational agencies in closing achievement gaps, the association will highlight LEAs that are seeing success in their approaches to raising student achievement.

CSBA interviewed Compton USD Superintendent Darin Brawley to uncover what the district is doing to improve student achievement.

Can you identify the most important strategies and interventions you think have been driving growth?

As far as strategy is concerned, there’s a lot that’s involved. We employ Malcolm Baldridge Performance Excellence Standards, and our approach consists of us benchmarking our performance against our surrounding districts in language arts and math, seeing where we are, and identifying those that we want to be better than. Then we create SMART [Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound] goals and action plans to become better in those areas. We also have a continuous improvement cycle where we’re measuring our growth related to the SMART goals and the action plans that we put into place.

Principals participate in data dives every six weeks with myself. Groups bring their action plans and their data related to the Dashboard indicators and sharing how they’re doing. They receive feedback at the end of their presentation in terms of what the positive things are and what those areas are that could be improved upon.

We also have what I call “quick checks” in the areas of math and ELA every week. There are five-question mini assessments, given Monday through Thursday. Students receive problems of the day where the teacher works those problems out with the kids collaboratively. And then on Friday the kids are turned loose to solve those on their own through the quick check process. We intervene with those students that have not achieved 80 percent mastery so that we address the misconceptions they have about the problems that they were solving.

We have Project Reach and Project Rise for ELA and math, which provide college tutors that go into the classroom to work collaboratively with the teachers. This year we moved away from tutor partners to bring in our own tutoring force, and we feel confident that we’ll be able to accomplish the same things with them.

CUSD hired reading specialists in 18 schools, added ELA administrators for high schools, and adopted phonics-based intervention materials. Was professional development for teachers provided?

Professional development takes a long time to sink in and has to be ongoing, and you have to constantly come back to it. It doesn’t have the impact that I think most legislators think it’s going to have. The bigger impact is always happening with the interventions. The intervening of the specialists, whether they’re language arts specialists or they’re mathematics specialists, and their ability to work alongside the teachers and bring those teachers along through a coaching process, as well as their ability to pull small groups of students and work with them on the things that the students are deficient in, is the bigger factor.

Is Compton seeing achievement gaps narrow between student groups?

That’s a tricky question. Here’s the reality: Compton is better than the state average in all student groups. While our achievement gap is narrowing with our Latino and African American student groups, we have a big gap in terms of our special needs group, our long-term English learners, our English learners in general, our foster youth and our homeless group. Even though we’re doing better every year, that gap really is not closing. So, the work that we have to continue to focus on and make a concerted effort to get better in is in closing the achievement gap of those five groups.

Are there any parent or community partnerships that have been particularly helpful in any of the improvement initiatives?

We have a few partnerships that I believe have been very beneficial. Our partnership with Compton College and the focus that we have on dual enrollment is significant. In Compton, we focus on Advanced Placement courses and we focus on college courses instead of just one approach so that we’re providing multiple opportunities for our kids to become college ready. We’re at 71 percent this year on the Dashboard’s College and Career Indicator, and that’s very significant.

Our partnership with Verizon has been immensely beneficial to the school district, which have provided the means for students to explore their interests in technology. Also, we have a partnership with Raytheon where we have math academies at all three high schools, and the goal of that is preparing kids to leave high school ready to enter into careers. We also have a partnership with Junior Achievement 3DE. For this program, Fortune 500 companies with genuine problems to solve will turn those problems over to the students. Students work in teams and compete against each other and the executives assess the projects and select winners.

Is there anything else you’d like to highlight that shows student progress?

When I arrived in Compton USD 14 years ago, our graduation rate was at 58 percent. Our A-G completion rate was at 12 percent. Our ELA and math scores were very low at that time. Fast forward to today and our graduation rate is at 94 percent, A-G completion rate is at 76 percent. Our math scores have continued to rise as well as our ELA scores. You heard me talk about how we benchmark against neighboring districts. Back then, they were all above us and now none of them are above us overall.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.