San Diego Unified students still haven’t made up the academic ground they lost after the pandemic, the district’s latest standardized test scores show. From the 2022-23 school year to the 2023-24 school year, district students’ scores on both the state’s English and math tests increased by less than a point.
The glacial recovery seems to indicate that learning loss students suffered during years of virtual education and the upheaval of the pandemic are likely to stick around.
The most recent standardized test scores show the percentage of district students meeting state standards in English increased just under half a point from 53.76 percent to 54.22 percent. The number of students meeting math standards increased slightly more, from 43.15 percent to 43.89 percent.
The percentage of students meeting state math and English standards remain about four percentage points lower than they were the year prior to the pandemic.
San Diego Unified is far from the only local district suffering from an arrested pandemic recovery. Countywide, the percentage of students meeting state standards stayed basically flat. The percentage of students meeting state English standards went from 52.19 percent in the 2022-23 school year to 52.16 percent last year. The percentage of students meeting math standards went from 40.22 percent to 40.51 percent.
The results come after three years of heavy district spending on programs aimed at recovery – but those days are likely done. San Diego Unified, like many districts throughout the state, has been hit hard by the expiration of federal pandemic recovery funds.
The loss of hundreds of millions of grant dollars coupled with rising costs, some of which were self-imposed, like the district’s granting of raises last year, have left the district in a dire financial situation. Last year, officials had to close a nearly $100 million budget deficit. The deficit is projected to continue to increase in the coming years. Officials will have to figure out how to plug a projected $176 million hole in next year’s budget and a projected $202 million hole the following year. Cuts of that magnitude could kneecap district recovery efforts.
Board member Richard Barrera has long been skeptical of standardized tests. They only show part of the picture in Barrera’s view and are less useful than more granular data like formative assessments that show how much a student has grown over the course of a semester or even grades. Based on those data points, he said students are seeing growth.
Still, he acknowledged this was a terrible time for the district to be facing a budget crisis. But schools have almost always been chronically underfunded, Barrera claimed. The boom years of the pandemic were, in his view, the first time in recent memory schools received enough money to do the job they’re tasked with, so returning to years of cutbacks is just the old normal.
Moving forward, “Will we have the resources that we need to meet the needs of students? No, not even close,” Barrera said. “But despite that, will educators … be able to help students make progress? I think they will.”
Board president Shana Hazan was similarly confident, at least in part because she believes district leadership has taken important steps in the right direction in recent months. Some of those steps include clearer and more streamlined goals, something Interim Superintendent Fabiola Bagula has also touted They also include what leaders describe as a more intentional focus on students who’ve long struggled academically, a group the district calls spotlight students.
“For the first time, we have goals around the growth we expect for those students and are developing plans around how we as a district are going to support our spotlight students,” Hazan said. “But we have significant work to do to ensure that every single child is meeting their potential.”