California officials are celebrating the latest state test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which bettered the district’s pre-pandemic scores for the first time.
“This is not just a rebound. This is a breakthrough. We didn’t just meet expectations–we exceeded them,” boasted LAUSD Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho.
If these test results are the definition of a breakthrough success, LAUSD’s bar for student achievement wasn’t particularly high.
Despite the recent gains, LAUSD’s latest scores show that less than 47% of students met or exceeded their grade-level standard in English Language Arts. Moreover, just 36 percent were at or above the grade-level standard in math, meaning nearly two in three students didn’t meet the basic standard.
It’s a positive that LAUSD’s test scores are about on par with California’s average statewide results from the previous school year (full 2024-25 results have not yet been released). However, statewide results have also not recovered from their post-pandemic slump, when the number of students who met or exceeded the standard for both English and math declined by four percent compared to the 2018-19 school year.
The state and school district have a long way to go to improve their academics, but producing higher test scores can be part of an effort to win back families who have left for alternatives such as charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Los Angeles Unified School District has lost more than 70,000 students.
In addition to the kids opting for other schools, LAUSD also has an absentee problem. As of the 2023-24 school year, nearly one in three LAUSD students were chronically absent, meaning that they missed 10% or more of the school year. This means that over 130,000 LAUSD students cumulatively missed at least 2.3 million days of school that school year. The problem was most prevalent among high school students, with about 37% of them categorized as chronically absent.
To the district’s credit, the latest absentee rate is an improvement from the 2021-22 school year, when more than 45% of students were chronically absent. However, the current rate of chronic absenteeism remains well above pre-pandemic levels, when only 18% of LAUSD students were categorized as such during the 2018-19 school year.
To encourage students to return to school, the district made home visits and provided wrap-around services, such as customized bussing, medical care, and even laundry services.
“For every one percent of daily attendance improvement, particularly for the most fragile students, we see a nine percent improvement in academic performance,” Superintendent Carvalho told The 74.
LAUSD needs to get students into classrooms and ensure they are learning once there. It’s a good sign that in recent years, LAUSD has adopted lesson plans based on the ‘science of reading,’ which examines how most kids learn and how to best teach them how to read. This aligns the district with decades of research on best practices associated with reading and could help many of its students, more than half of whom struggle to read.
Yet, the rollout and ensuring proper training for programs like this are essential to effective instruction. Scaling programs can be a challenge, especially for a district as large as LAUSD, which has a significant number of English learners and children from low-income families. A 2024 report by Families in Schools, an advocacy group, found that some LAUSD teachers in their survey were still unfamiliar with the term “science of reading,” admitting that they would need additional training on the concept and its associated lessons.
LAUSD has taken some crucial steps in the right direction, but much work remains to be done. Reducing chronic absenteeism and getting students to attend school regularly, along with training teachers on proven best practices that help kids learn math and reading, could be the start of a truly breakthrough success that’s more significant than this year’s slight improvement in test scores.
A version of this column first appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News