On Thursday, California released its latest batch of student performance metrics. The data included quite a few bright spots for San Diego Unified — but also some worrying declines.
The district’s graduation rate showed a marked increase, likely helped along by officials’ creation of new graduation pathways. The percentage of graduates who qualified as “prepared” under the state’s career and college indicator metric also increased. In both metrics, San Diego Unified outperforms other large urban districts in the state.
Some negative metrics decreased, like the district’s suspension rate and the number of students who were chronically absent. Post-pandemic, chronic absenteeism reached crisis levels for districts across the country. Despite the declines, the district still hasn’t erased the pandemic-era increase.
And while student math performance continued to inch up, performance declined in two important areas – students’ scores on English standardized tests and the percentage of English language learners who were making progress toward proficiency. The decline in performance on English tests erased nearly all of the district’s progress toward erasing post-pandemic declines.
Superintendent Fabiola Bagula embraced the good news from today’s release. The district’s primary goal was to prepare students for whatever was next, and the latest data showed that “year-after-year more and more of our students are ready and capable to pursue a choice filled life after high school,” she wrote in a press release.
Still, she said the district must focus on continued improvement and had adopted a raft of measures aimed at improving student literacy. That included a renewed push of teaching methods aligned with science of reading approaches, which the district has struggled to implement at scale.
“We still have a lot of work in these areas,” Bagula wrote. “Our work is not done until all of our students are achieving in all areas.”