Ryan J. Smith, Executive Director of The EdTrust-West, issued the following statement in response to the release of California’s statewide Smarter Balanced assessment scores:

“California’s current direction in education is not moving us forward”

says Ryan J. Smith, Executive Director of The EdTrust-West

“Today, California’s Department of Education released new state test results, providing a snapshot of how schools and districts are doing. This marked the third year of the Smarter Balanced assessments and the seventh year since the state adopted the Common Core standards. Across the board, improvement has slowed – in some places to a trickle. Fewer than half of all students met standards in English language arts – and in fifth grade English language arts, scores even declined. Math scores show minimal improvement over last year, but progress has slowed and achievement gaps across ethnic groups persist. Three-fourths of Latino students are not meeting standards in math, and more than two-thirds of African American students are not meeting standards in ELA or math. Even more troublingly, gaps for English learners appear to be widening in both math and English language arts.

California’s current direction in education is not moving us forward. We have made little progress in raising student achievement, and we have coupled this with a murky accountability plan with few assurances for safeguarding students of color and low-income students and a dashboard that takes a degree in analytics to decipher. For a state that often claims the mantle of innovation, we are currently far from it in education.
California started down the right path when it adopted the Common Core standards and moved to the Local Control Funding Formula – these were the right policy decisions. The Smarter Balanced assessments are more rigorous because they measure the types of high-level skills students need to be ready for college or a rewarding career. But in passing these policies, our state made a promise to students and families that we have not yet realized. We set high standards and offered local communities more freedom and flexibility. Unfortunately, we’ve made the wrong turn by not providing the deep, ongoing supports that are needed to shift practices at the ground level.

Indeed, there are some schools where educators are swiftly improving outcomes for historically underserved students. Nine out of ten students are Latino and/or low income at Eisenhower Elementary School in Garden Grove Unified, and the school has nearly doubled the percentage of these students who are meeting standards in math and ELA since 2014. At Vang Pao Elementary in Fresno Unified, where nearly all students are from low-income families, progress in both math and ELA continues to significantly outpace the state average. Too often we hear from our state leaders about the barriers that prohibit closing gaps. These schools dispel those myths and instead tell us that the barriers to closing gaps are more about choices than circumstances.

We should respond to these results with a sense of urgency. California also needs to recommit to equity not only in policy but in practice. EdTrust-West stands ready to work with state and local leaders to do everything necessary to close these gaps once and for all.”