Once again, public school students’ standardized test scores across San Diego County and California barely budged from last year and still haven’t regained the ground lost from pre-COVID days, new data released by the state Thursday show.
About 52% of San Diego County public school students who took state standardized tests last spring passed them in English, and about 41% did so in math — meaning they scored high enough to qualify as having met or exceeded state standards in those subjects. That’s an improvement of less than half a percentage point in math and virtually no change for English.
Statewide, 47% of students passed English and 36% did so in math. That’s an improvement of almost one percentage point in math and less than half a percentage point in English.
In San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, students did better than the state and county averages, with 54% of students passing English and 44% passing math. That’s an improvement of three-quarters a percentage point in math and half a percentage point in English from last year.
Every spring, California public school students in grades 3-8 and 11 take state standardized tests in at least English language arts and math under the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, commonly known as CAASPP. Private school students do not take the tests.
CAASPP scores are the only consistent indicator of student academic performance that can be compared across all California’s public schools and over time.
But some educators say there are limitations to using these test scores to judge or improve schools’ and students’ academic performance.
For one thing, test scores come out months after students took the tests and have moved on to the next grade, so the results come too late for teachers to use them to improve instruction for the students who took them.
Standardized test scores also tend to correlate heavily with students’ socioeconomic status. The highest-performing schools, as measured solely by test scores, tend to have high percentages of students who are not from low-income families, while lowest-performing schools often disproportionately enroll more low-income students.
That’s because students from higher-income families are more likely to have resources and benefits, such as parents who can help them with schoolwork, while students from low-income families are more likely to lack such resources and to have experienced traumas, such as hunger or homelessness.
In most of the 10 San Diego County school districts with the highest percentages of students passing English and math tests, more than four out of five students were from higher-income families.
Indeed, this year’s test scores continue to show that specific student groups are struggling and lagging far behind their peers overall. In San Diego County, only 21% of students with disabilities met state standards in English, and 16% did so in math; the same is true for homeless students. And 10% of students learning English as a second language met state standards in English and math.
Later this year the state education department is expected to release its California School Dashboard ratings, which are a more comprehensive but also more complex assessment of school performance in test scores and other areas such as student absenteeism and college and career preparedness.
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