ome of the state’s most vulnerable student groups — foster youth, students experiencing homelessness, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, English learners and students with disabilities — continue to experience large achievement gaps with peers in English language arts and math. Results of the 2024–25 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress released Oct. 9 show modest gains and a slight narrowing of some achievement gaps.

However, the results also revealed massive performance differences between student groups, demonstrating that student performance has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and showing that millions of California students are failing to reach proficiency. CSBA is calling on the State of California to adopt a coherent, state-focused plan for how it will better support the work of LEAs to close achievement gaps and to hold their agencies and policymaking bodies accountable for their aggregate policymaking decisions, operations and levels of support to LEAs.

California’s System of Support represents a shift in how the state approaches accountability. Rather than a top-down, centralized approach, LEAs are provided three levels of increasingly targeted support. The second tier — differentiated assistance (DA) — is individually designed support available to LEAs that meet the eligibility requirements set by the State Board of Education (SBE).

Some of the most common ways districts can become eligible for DA, which they receive from their county office of education (COE), include the same student group not meeting the criteria in two of the 10 different State Priority Areas (e.g. Pupil Achievement, Pupil Engagement, School Climate); or if the LEA fails to submit California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System information on time, per Education Code.

It isn’t uncommon for LEAs to qualify for DA, particularly due to impacts linked to the pandemic on academic achievement, chronic absenteeism and more. In January 2025, for example, Policy Analysis for California Education found the percentage of schools with high (20-29 percent of students) and extreme (30 percent or more of students) levels of chronic absence more than tripled during the pandemic. Many administrators are finding it challenging to change student and parental mindsets around attendance.

“As a result of the state’s mandates to keep kids home, even with the slightest symptoms for a pretty long running period of time, some families got conditioned to stay at home,” said David Roth, superintendent of Buckeye Union School District, whose district qualified for DA two years ago, in part due to having high rates of chronic absenteeism.

“Getting students to come back to school and families to understand that attendance needed to be more regular was incredibly challenging, but not surprising. So, the fact that we had to participate in DA because of this issue occurring in the 2022–23 school year, I considered DA to be a distraction and unnecessary,” he continued. “Of course, getting the kids back here on a regular basis was a high priority for our district. I didn’t need the state to tell us that in order to recognize the urgency.”

While Roth said the situation was “highly frustrating,” he recalled that the El Dorado County Office of Education “approached us in a very reasonable way. They could see that we were addressing the issue in good faith, and they allowed us to go through the process with as little interference as possible.”

Not every LEA views DA the same. For especially small districts like Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District (Big Oak Flat), which serves up to 300 students across three schools, having that extra support is welcome.

Jeff McFarland is more than a superintendent/principal — he’s also regularly serves as a classroom substitute teacher, is currently the after-school program director, coordinates the development of the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), is the district’s special education coordinator and more.

“There is that uniqueness of having that personal touch, being able to know every single student’s name in my school district, being able to know most of the parents’ names, knowing when a kid’s having a bad day, what’s going on in their personal life, or them feeling comfortable enough to come and sit in my office and have a conversation,” McFarland said while extolling the virtues of serving in small LEAs.

As a result of these close connections, McFarland and the rest of Big Oak Flat-Groveland’s small staff knew why students were skipping school — some were simply bored while others didn’t have access to clean clothes or school supplies — but couldn’t address the underlying causes on their own.

“The heart was there to do whatever we could, but not really having a process that helped us understand what’s missing, what’s going to make that change — I feel like the differentiated assistance was that kick in the butt,” he said.

Diana Harford, deputy superintendent of Educational Services at Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools — the COE that provided DA to Big Oak Flat — said that LEAs are usually already aware of the situation and are working to address it.

“They had already put in place some strategies, so we were able to support them, help them work through how they were going to measure those strategies, maybe give some additional resources for how to complement some things that they were already working on,” she said.

In fact, for COEs like Tuolumne that serve districts with enrollments ranging from 150 students to approximately 1,000, the additional funding to provide one district with DA can often help support students across the county.

“When districts in our county become eligible for DA, it really benefits all of our districts because we can put in Tier One or Tier Two interventions and strategies and maybe professional development that’s targeted towards our DA districts, but it’s really going to benefit all of our districts,” Harford said. “For example, we used some of our county DA funds to create a director of continuous improvement position, and he’s available to support districts with data analysis and improving student outcomes.”

SBE Board President Linda Darling-Hammond noted at the board’s July 9 meeting that budget trailer bill language “charges the State Board to take a more comprehensive look at the performance criteria for differentiated assistance for local educational agencies, taking into consideration the recommendations from a 2022 state-funded WestEd evaluation of differentiated assistance and the need to appropriately focus our resources and supports where the demonstrated needs are the greatest.”

That report, she said, found that, as a result of the pandemic, a substantial majority of districts would likely be identified for DA, and that this number would overwhelm the system in terms of staff capacity to provide support.

“And indeed, shortly after this report, we saw the spiking of the Chronic Absenteeism Indicator as a function of illness and climate events, as well as disengagement from school, which led to 60 percent of the state’s districts being identified for DA. And in some counties, this has included every single district,” Darling-Hammond continued. “So, this dilutes the state’s and the county’s ability to focus intently on the places that have the greatest needs.”

Among the many recommendations outlined by researchers at WestEd in their 2022 report on DA, several were emphasized by those interviewed for this story as being particularly crucial to supporting LEAs as they attempt to close achievement gaps.

For instance, the report calls on state leaders to “develop and distribute guidance on best practices for providing DA” and to “incorporate opportunities for peer learning into the DA structure.”

Harford said it would be helpful to county DA teams and district leaders if the state compiled a document of best practices and efficient proven strategies that have improved student outcomes. CSBA Research and Education Policy Development Principal Research Manager Jeremy Anderson also said the state could do more to disseminate such information, especially to help support LEAs that are close to but have not yet qualified for DA.

“There are a lot of very valuable lessons that can come from an LEA undergoing differentiated assistance,” Anderson said. “However, that information needs to be more widely available to other LEAs who are experiencing similar challenges. At the same time, the statewide system is overwhelmed by the number of LEAs requiring assistance. The system itself can be challenging to navigate for LEAs who may be receiving a varied quality of DA depending on where they are located, so bringing more coherence, clarity and reliability to the system would be a good place to start.”

The WestEd team also recommended “a focus on understanding how opportunities for support might be targeted to districts serving student groups with n-sizes too small for eligibility and how the metrics used for identification may be privileging particular student groups and potentially reducing the opportunity for districts serving English learners and Black students to benefit from DA eligibility.”

State law requires that each indicator have at least 30 members in each student group — or 15 for students in the foster system or experiencing homelessness — in order for that student group’s performance to generate a color on the California School Dashboard. However, researchers noted that “only 2 percent of districts have a sufficient number of American Indian students to receive a score for graduation rate for that group” and “only 30 percent to 40 percent of districts have a sufficient number of African American students to be rated for eligibility for their performance,” making it impossible for many districts to become eligible for DA for certain student group–indicator combinations.

This requirement is meant to avoid allocating DA based on wild swings in performance among a small number of students, but that appears to be happening anyway in smaller LEAs like those served in Tuolumne County. “With small districts, one of the things that can be frustrating is you have so few students that are being calculated for your student outcomes that you may have one incident of alcohol use or one incident of a fight on campus where students are suspended, and that one incident is enough to change the color on your [Dashboard] indicator,” Harford said. “Just a few students in a student group can change the outcome.”

The report also called on the state to “reduce administrative burden to free up system leaders’ time to focus on improvement.”

McFarland detailed one instance at the height of the pandemic when he was receiving upwards of 500 emails per day. During school closures, McFarland said he received an email from the state with a new form for reporting attendance. He missed the form amid the avalanche of emails, submitted attendance information using the prior method and blames the mistake in part for landing the district in DA. “Even though we did a great job in every other capacity, that’s how we got we got on differentiated assistance, because of the way they wanted the attendance to be reported,” he said.

Roth noted that Buckeye Union operates two dependent charter schools, and as a result, the district must write three of every required state plan including three LCAPs — one for each charter school and one for the district. “That’s baloney. The state continuously burdens us with pointless clerical and administrative tasks that take the educators away from the core work of teaching,” he said, also citing increasing amounts of time spent by teachers and administrators on legal and compliance-related activities associated with the delivery of special education programs. “It’s that kind of stuff that’s just really frustrating and it takes valuable resources away from focusing on achievement gaps and all the other things we need to be focused on.”

Often, LEAs are called on to move mountains — to close achievement gaps among students that begin with factors largely out of a school’s control, such as student poverty or difficulties young people experience at home. But advocates and educators alike are beginning to call on state officials to hold themselves accountable when it comes to supporting young people and the schools they attend.

“LEAs have been held responsible for student outcomes for years, and they have accepted that responsibility. However, state education leaders have never held themselves to those same standards,” Anderson said. “Achievement gaps that have persisted for decades still exist, and the state has yet to create a clear, comprehensive and transparent plan to address them. These gaps are indicators that something is not working for our state’s most vulnerable student groups. While the CCEE is an example of a good first step, much more work remains to be done as evidenced by year after year of sluggish achievement data.”

Roth agreed. In addition to improving working conditions, strengthening accountability for educators and refining teacher training programs, he said the state must also put some skin in the game if the public education system in California is going to be able to meaningfully move the needle on student achievement.

“Folks in Sacramento hold all of the authority but they really don’t hold any responsibility at the end of the day,” Roth said. “And because of that, it’s easy for them to throw poorly constructed policy into place. If, in their estimation, it passes the smell test and satisfies whatever interest group has their ear in that moment, then they feel like they’ve done their job. At the end of the day, there’s no real responsibility for the impacts of their policies.

“I want to be clear, I believe very strongly there needs to be an accountability system,” he continued. “But the accountability system we have is not what’s going to drive change. Reform policies will continue to fail if they are not constructed in a way that’s facilitative of us remaining focused on what’s important. We have to have changes to public policy that address the underlying issues that contribute to us not realizing gains in student achievement.”