While schools in the Bay Area and across the state are seeing more students graduate and attend class, academic performance among students remains stagnant nearly five years after the pandemic.
That’s according to new data from the California Department of Education, which released its 2023-2024 school dashboard — the best snapshot of California schools’ graduation and suspension rates, academic performance, attendance data and student progress.
While state leaders celebrated a drop in chronic student absences, stable growth in graduation rates and small gains in academic performance among higher-needs groups like foster, homeless and lower-income students, experts said the “incremental” progress needs context — and triggers alarm bells for California students’ post-pandemic recovery.
Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships at the education research nonprofit Policy Analysis for California Education, said the data suggests California students are not recovering from the pandemic as well as those in other states, despite extensive funding from the state and federal government.
“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 Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research group, recently examined students’ academic progress post-pandemic across the United States. Researchers found that while most states, including California, were nowhere near full recovery and making minimal progress in English and math, some states — like Illinois, Wisconsin and Alaska — were improving, while others like Iowa, New Mexico and New York had fully recovered.
Statewide, the percentage of all K-8 students who were absent for at least 10% or more of the school year dropped from 24.3% in 2023 to 18.6% in 2024. Targeted student groups like English language learners, foster youth, homeless students, lower-income students and students with disabilities also saw a drop in chronic absenteeism.
But the data also revealed that Black, Native American and Pacific Islander students were more than twice as likely as White students to be chronically absent.
The graduation rate for all students remained mostly unchanged, with 86.7% of students receiving a high school diploma within four or five years in 2024, compared to 86.4% in 2023. And the percentage of students who were considered prepared for college or a career saw little progress at 45.3% in 2024 compared to 43.9% in 2023.
Lance Christensen, who ran unsuccessfully for state superintendent and serves as the current vice president for education policy at the conservative California Policy Center, said one of the most concerning findings is the discrepancy between improved graduation rates and stagnant test scores.
“A lot of these kids get to college and they can’t hack it,” he said. “I can’t imagine that we’re sending kids off more prepared when all the other scores seem to be down in English language arts and math.”
Students’ test scores continue to trail pre-pandemic scores. Statewide, students remain 13.2 points below the English language arts standard, and 47.6 points below the math standard to be considered on track for college and career readiness at their grade level.
“I think we are well past the time to be concerned,” Gallagher said.
In the Bay Area, schools also saw minimal changes.
While still lower than the state average, Oakland Unified was one of the few districts with a significant jump in graduation rates (5.6%) to 80.6%. In the South Bay, San Jose Unified saw a slight increase at 2.5%. Palo Alto Unified, a high-performing district on the Peninsula, saw a slight 1.5% drop.
San Ramon Valley Unified, an East Bay district with top-ranked middle and elementary schools, continues to exceed state and county averages for test scores.
“We are pleased with our progress in many of the dashboard measures, especially as compared to many of our counterparts throughout the region,” the district said.
San Jose Unified and Palo Alto Unified did not respond to this news organization’s request for comment.
Chronic absenteeism also declined across the Bay Area, with a huge decline at Oakland Unified, dropping more than 29% from last year. Still, students at San Jose Unified and Oakland Unified had higher rates of chronic absenteeism, with 23.2% of students at San Jose Unified considered chronically absent and 31.2% of students at Oakland Unified, compared to the state average of 18.6%.
The percentage of students who were considered prepared for college or a career didn’t change at San Jose Unified — which is only slightly higher than the state’s average at 47.3%. Oakland Unified jumped 5.4% to 43.4% — still under the state’s average of 45.3%.
Test scores remained largely unchanged for the four districts. Although vastly higher than the state’s average in English and math, San Ramon Valley saw little improvement in both subjects, while Palo Alto remained the same in math but declined slightly in English.
Students at San Jose Unified performed better than the state average but were still 6.5 points below the standard in English and more than 30 points below the standard in math. Students at Oakland Unified made gains, but students remain nearly 55 points below the standard in English and 85 points below the standard in math.
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“It is clear that our students are improving, with our increasing graduation rates and college preparedness and the decrease in chronic absenteeism,” Oakland Unified said in a statement. “Our test scores have improved, yet we know the numbers are still falling short of where our students need and deserve to be.”
Christensen said the dashboard presents an alarming sign that state leaders are “fundamentally doing something wrong.”
“I’m concerned that we have not done enough … to actually help these kids succeed in real life,” Christensen said. “There’s nothing in our state reporting right now in education that should satisfy a single person in this state.”