he same pattern can be found in achievement gaps between students from low- and higher-income backgrounds, with lower-income students performing notably worse. These results are true nationwide and are affecting the college, career and life-fulfilling potential for generations of students.
These gaps have existed nationwide for decades, and California has perennially had issues providing historically disadvantaged students with the resources necessary to help them make up the difference. This issue has persisted in the scores from the state’s assessments for at least the past decade. On the bright side, 2024 CAASPP results did show minimal increases for African American students in both English language arts (ELA) (0.49 percentage points) and in mathematics (0.86 percentage points). While that represents positive progress, it still means that about 119,000 of the 144,203 African American students tested in math did not meet the standard. When looking at the state’s largest student population, Hispanic or Latino students, 37 percent met or exceeded standards in ELA and 24 percent in math. That means that about 1.2 million Hispanic students in math and about 1 million in ELA, out of the state’s 1.6 million Hispanic or Latino students tested, also did not meet the standard the state has set for student performance.
By and large, gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students have barely closed by 1 percentage point since 2022. Since 2019, the gap between African American and white students has stayed around 30 percent in both ELA and math. The gap between African American and Asian American students in 2024 for ELA was 43 percent in 2023–24. In math, the gap was 52 percent. The gap between Hispanic and white students in math was 24 percent and the gap between Hispanic and Asian American students in ELA is 37 percent and in math is 46 percent.
Many factors can contribute to these dismal statistics, including California’s high levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation and decades of resource deprivation that have exacerbated the difficulties around addressing achievement gaps, according to Tyrone Howard, Pritzker Family Endowed Chair and professor in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I think you can’t look at today’s achievement gaps or disparities in education without understanding the historical role that structural racism has played — the fact that for decades, we denied access to education for Black and Brown groups,” Howard said. “And when they did get access to education, they didn’t always get the best quality of education. We’re facing a historical and structural disadvantage that we’re still trying to recover from. You have to connect the past to the present to start the conversation. And even within the current context, we still have to understand things such as the social determinants of health, meaning for example, that we know that Black and Brown folks and folks in poor communities are more likely to live in areas where they have poor air quality, which leads to issues of respiratory health and asthma, which leads to chronic absenteeism.”
“Each year, the state proposes new programs, redirecting money, adding more unfunded mandates, tinkering with the accountability system and administering more directives,” said CSBA CEO & Executive Director Vernon M. Billy. “This does not show a true investment in developing and articulating a coherent strategy that includes annual benchmarks to guide a successful implementation and furthers local efforts to eliminate the achievement gap. To be clear, a state master plan for closing the achievement gap should focus on what the state is going to do differently, rather than trying to tell local educators at the district and county level how to close the achievement gap in their local schools.”
Disaggregating data by student group and beyond helps LEAs know which students are struggling and enables better targeting of interventions. This work is foundational to the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE), an organization established by the State Legislature and Governor to advise and assist LEAs in achieving the goals and objectives in their Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs).
Experts at CCEE and Howard emphasized that a data-driven approach requires buy-in at all levels, including from the school board. Sujie Shin, CCEE deputy executive director in charge of the organization’s data academies, said focusing on data at each and every board meeting helps hold everyone involved accountable. She reviewed a series of questions LEAs should be asking themselves regarding their data collection.
“Are you looking at the right data? Are you collecting at the right time?” Shin said. “Are you cleaning it and using it systematically? Are you sharing and communicating it with your community partners and stakeholders in the right way? Are you engaging the right folks, from your parents all the way to your school board members in this conversation in the appropriate way?”
Stephanie Gregson, CCEE deputy executive director, shared that a lot of the work she focuses on with LEAs is creating a data-driven culture through direct technical assistance.
“School boards need to be educated on your local data, your statewide data, and make that a regular part of the conversation when you are making decisions — that is absolutely critical,” said Gregson. “In addition to that is not only holding the school board accountable for looking at data, but holding the district leadership accountable for using data in a very thoughtful and intentional way, especially when making decisions around what initiatives to engage in. A lot of the districts that we’re working with have too many initiatives — they are doing things a mile wide and an inch deep and it is detracting them from the teaching and learning focus for students. If they were putting data at the center of their decision-making process, that would help decrease the initiatives and ensure that there’s focus for district leadership.”
This approach is leading to gains at Taft City School District, a K-8 district in Kern County where 80 percent of the students are from low-income families and 65 percent are Latino. The district has been working with CCEE for the past three years to address the problem they identified through data dives — too many students in third through eighth grade could not read at grade level. They followed up this data collection with a districtwide teacher survey to see if they had identified the correct problem of practice, and the survey results matched.
By working with teachers directly, who expressed they did not know how to teach reading to these older students, district administration created the buy-in necessary to implement a new, structured science of reading program, according to Superintendent Lori Slaven and Board President Stacey Falgout. CCEE provided the training, and the district worked with the Kern County Office of Education to implement Multi-Tiered System of Supports training to identify the levels of support for different student groups. Having everyone from the county office to schools on the same page has helped move the needle on student reading.
“It’s important to collaborate at all levels,” Falgout said. “It’s important for our teachers to know what they’re teaching and how to teach it. And then having the district and superintendent and principals support that — I think that we’ve done that under Lori’s leadership and now we’re seeing progress. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s happening. And that’s what we want to see as a board. We want to see progress.”
Professional learning networks
Lynwood Unified School District has been working with CCEE since the learning network’s inception in 2017, when the district identified an overrepresentation of African American male students who were receiving Ds and Fs in core classes. Located in South Los Angeles County, the district serves about 11,000 students, of which 95 percent are Latino and 5 percent are African American.
The district looked at its baseline data and found that 62 of the 134 African American males in grades 9-12, or 46 percent, had received a D or F in three or more classes. Lynwood began with foundational changes when the board adopted policies solidifying the district’s belief in equity, access and justice, including an equitable grading resolution that focused on giving students what they need to obtain skill mastery.
“While not the majority, we want our African American students to feel recognized and supported,” said Board President Julian Del Real-Calleros. “We’re allocating and we’re being very intentional about supporting these program services and staff.”
The district implemented something extraordinary in its core strategy to bolster these struggling students — personal learning plans for each struggling individual. Part of the strategy was sharing the data they had, and how it could be improved, with each student and their parents/caregivers. The district also implemented a survey to understand how school climate was affecting these students and incorporated common themes into the personal learning plans.
“The first question in these plans is: What are your dreams? What do you want to become?” explained Patricia Brent-Sanco, Lynwood USD director of Equity, Access and Instructional Services. “Then we tailored each plan to what the student needs.”
In addition to CCEE, Lynwood partnered with the National College Resources Foundation’s Movement program that embeds mentors and tutors on school grounds. “At our middle schools and high schools, we have a comprehensive team that’s on the campus every day. Many of them are college students or recent graduates and so the kids are able to identify with them and can get that individualized support they need,” Brent-Saco said.
Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite said teachers and other school staff are also involved every step of the way. “We have a comprehensive system that brings together teachers on a regular basis to look at common assessment data and formative assessments, and separately, we have another system where our school counselors were coming together with school principals to look at course access as well as D and F rates. We are looking at grades, personalized learning plans, attendance records, completion records and just making sure we have a comprehensive view of how outcomes are going to be measured and collected — it’s something that’s ingrained in our culture.”
The initiative is starting to see success, with less Ds and Fs and a higher graduation rate for African American students than the state average.
Jason Willis, senior policy advisor for strategic resource allocation and systems planning at education research organization WestEd, said these competing programs are part of the problem.
“Our system is intended to basically put a label on something and push money out to school systems in its attempts to respond to this precipitous problem, this achievement gap,” he said “And in many ways, I actually think it’s just further contributing to the problem, especially when we have clear evidence about what really matters in helping and supporting kids — quality instruction in the classroom and connecting to children in a way that allows them to be really vested and interested in learning. So, focusing entirely on a single factor and driving towards a clear priority for the system versus an unmaneuverable number of factors, is part of the answer here.”
Willis, like CSBA, advocates for putting most funding into the Local Control Funding Formula base. “We seem to have lost the intention behind creating the space for local communities to own for themselves what was the most important, and then to drive resources towards those strategies that would allow them to address the persistent issues that they are having,” he said. “We’ve been weighed down by the enormity of the accountability system, the LCAP and all the reporting requirements that have come at us. This isn’t to say that there is a single entity that is at fault here, but it is to say that we do know things that are extraordinarily helpful to systems in helping them to identify their priority, garner the will and the buy-in of adults and other community members to drive that system toward a set of outcomes and utilizing their resources in ways that are flexible enough for them to authentically invest in that strategy or priority, especially in a system that we already know is limited by its set of resources.”
CSBA’s Billy said it’s time for more than lip service. “Our state talks a lot about closing the achievement gap, but the state has never developed a coherent master plan for its operations to close the achievement gap that is focused specifically on the students who comprise the gap,” he said. “That’s tragic, because most of California’s challenges will need to be solved by Californians educated in our state, which requires a focus on eliminating the achievement gap and providing all students with a high-quality education.”
Kimberly Sellery is editorial director for California Schools.