San Diego Students See Little Progress in Nationwide Tests  

The nation’s report card held few bright spots. The so-called report card is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to fourth and eighth-grade students.  

San Diego Unified students, however, performed better than the national and California average, according to scores released by the U.S. Department of Education. The district has consistently been one of the top-performing large urban districts. 

Unfortunately: It’s not that San Diego Unified students saw significant academic improvements, it’s that other kids did really bad. Students in California and nationwide saw a decline in three of four performance areas, with fourth-grade math being the only area with progress. 

Those declines compound what was already an extremely worrying drop between 2019 and 2022. National reading scores have dropped to their lowest point in over 30 years.

San Diego Unified students saw a much less precipitous decline in reading between 2019 and 2022 than other students. The latest results show that fourth graders are performing about where they were in 2019, while eighth graders’ scores have dropped ever so slightly over the last two tests. 

District students saw a much larger drop in math scores between 2019 and 2022. Like the rest of the country, San Diego Unified’s fourth graders saw big gains in performance, shooting up seven points on average to about where they were before the pandemic. The district’s eighth graders, however, are still testing eight points lower than pre-pandemic levels in math.  

“Our educators do incredible work every day for our students. Their unwavering dedication, expertise, and compassion form the foundation of our shared success,” Interim Superintendent Fabiola Bagula wrote in a statement. “For years we have been among the top urban school districts in the country academically, and all involved should be proud of their efforts to remain so.”