LAUSD approaches pre-pandemic achievement levels, outpacing state

L.A. Unified Supt. Alberto Carvalho walks down a sidewalk.

By Howard BlumeStaff Writer

Nov. 22, 2024 3:21 PM PT

The Los Angeles Unified School District showed strong gains in newly released state metrics and reached a record graduation rate, but overall academic performance fell well short of state learning goals.

The latest release of state data indicated positive trends for the state’s largest school system, with improvement that outpaced the state as a whole.

In absolute terms, however, the performance of L.A. Unified is middling, even as depicted by a state accountability system that rarely shows school systems in a harsh light.

“LAUSD scores are on an upward trend, but the initial goal needs to be to attain results that meet or exceed LAUSD pre-pandemic levels,” said Michael W. Kirst, former state Board of Education president and a Stanford emeritus professor of education and business administration. “For example, there are some test-score results that meet this goal. I am less interested now in how they compare to the rest of the state on dashboard indicators. That will be more relevant in subsequent years.”

The district’s highest-rated metric was for its suspension rate, which scored the state’s best color rating of blue — indicating that the L.A. Unified has successfully slashed the number of students sent home from school for disciplinary reasons.

This figure — combined with rising test scores — is genuinely positive news because it suggests that even the more challenging students are improving and remaining in class to take the state tests, rather than being hidden during the testing window via suspensions.

The district also received a green or “good” rating for its graduation rate of 87% — a record for L.A. Unified.

This figure is more challenging to interpret because graduation rates have soared across the nation even as other indicators of academic achievement have not kept pace. In essence, school systems across the country have finally figured out how to get most students to graduation. And this is important: Graduates are eligible for higher education and have better job prospects.

However, experts have questioned whether academic standards have been sacrificed in the process. And many students enter college with learning gaps that make success there harder to achieve.

All the same, L.A. Unified’s graduation rate is rising faster than in the state as a whole — a consistent theme for L.A. Unified.

In the category of test scores for math and English language arts, L.A. Unified received a yellow rating, which is less than good, but better than the state’s worse overall rating of orange.

When it comes to the rate at which students miss school, both the state and L.A. Unified fell into the yellow ranking.

L.A. Unified Supt. Alberto Carvalho categorized the results as “historic,” while a district release called them “unprecedented.”

Carvalho announced the latest data at Jefferson High, where he alluded to a hit song from 1960 by former Jefferson student Etta James.

“Today, at last, as Etta James would say, the story actually gets better,” Carvalho said. “And at last, we can say that once again, Los Angeles Unified has overpowered, outperformed, other urban districts across the state” —including, he said, those with lower poverty rates and fewer students who are learning English.

Every school system tends to highlight the data in the best way possible.

San Diego Unified, for example, spotlighted overall achievement levels rather than rate of improvement in comparison to other school systems. Through this lens, San Diego Unified outranked L.A. Unified in every major category other than suspension rates.

Long Beach Unified could point to better overall scores in the most closely tracked categories of math and English, though it trailed L.A. Unified in other areas.

A sobering overall assessment of state progress came from the Oakland-based advocacy group EdTrust-West.

“While some of the new data [indicate] sustained progress, particularly steady reductions in chronic absenteeism, other improvements are gains in name only,” the group said in a statement. “We should not celebrate improvements of a single percentage point — or less — because they don’t tell the real story: that yet another year has gone by for Californian students of color and multilingual learners, and not enough has changed.”

For academic ratings, the state uses an obscure system called “distance from standard,” which averages all test scores and compares that number to a figure that represents “meeting the standard.”

Thus, in math, L.A. Unified is 60.4 points below standard, but is up by 6.9 points from the year before, which is considered a strong one-year improvement.

A more accessible measure, though also imperfect, is proficiency rate, which is the percentage of students who have met the state academic standard in a particular area. These figures, which were previously released, show that L.A. Unified has far to go.

43% of L.A. Unified students met grade-level standards in English, up 1.8 percentage points. Statewide, 47% of students are proficient in English.
In math, 32.8% of Los Angeles students met standards, up 2.3 percentage points from 2023 scores. Statewide, 35.5% of student are proficient.
L.A. Unified proficiency rates in science reached 24%, up 1.8 percentage from 2023. Statewide it’s 30.7%.

“LAUSD students are bouncing back from learning lost during the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley education Professor Bruce Fuller. “But their recovery is unfolding at a sluggish pace in reading and math.”

Fuller added, “The recovery does renew the steady progress made in the two decades prior to COVID-19. Still, L.A. students read a grade level below the average California pupil, as early as the fourth grade,” according to national tests.

Toward the end of the news conference, Carvalho acknowledged the less positive numbers.

“Do we have more work to do? Absolutely. Are we satisfied? Absolutely not,” Carvalho said. “Our static proficiency is still low, but our rate of improvement is phenomenal compared to everyone else’s.”

Carvalho and Deputy Supt. Karla Estrada pointed to several effective strategies. The superintendent said that summer school increased the graduation rate from 86% to 87% as seniors were able to complete required course work.

The location of the news conference at Jefferson High, south of downtown, was no accident. In the distance-from-standard measure, Jefferson had huge jumps — 20 points in math, 47 in English — even though overall scores remained low.

Jefferson is one of more than 120 “priority schools” in the district that receive extra resources and monthly evaluations and data analysis.

In an interview, Principal Kristine Puich described strategies that included aligning conference periods by grade level and topic so teachers could plan together and compare results.

The district provided a specialist in training teachers on strategies to help English learners, many of whom attend Jefferson. The school has about 100 newcomers to the United States.

The district also has assigned a special cadre of substitutes to Jefferson so they could become familiar with the students there. These substitutes work in regular classrooms as a second teacher when they are not needed as subs.

Teachers also have received special training in how to analyze data and adapt lessons in response.