Test Scores Show California Students Struggling With Reading and Math
“The state needs much more urgency to improve outcomes for California kids.”
This is despite massive spending on education.
The New York Post reports:
Most California kids can’t read well or do basic math, damning new test scores show
A majority of California students still can’t read or do math at grade level, with new standardized test scores showing little to no gains despite years of efforts to recover from pandemic-era learning losses.
Just 49.3% of students met or exceeded state English language arts standards in 2025-26, while only 38.4% reached proficiency in math, according to California’s latest test results released Thursday.
The scores are from tests administered in Spring 2026.
The figures mark a 0.5 percentage-point increase in English scores and a 1.1-point gain in math from the previous school year, when 48.8% of students met English standards and 37.3% were proficient in math.
But California remains below its pre-pandemic performance, when 50.9% of students met English language arts standards and 39.7% achieved proficiency in math in 2018-19.
The state spent about $134 billion on K-12 schools from all sources in 2025-26, or roughly $26,450 per student, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. This year’s budget raises that to about $28,250 per student.
Yet California lags on national exams.
“The state needs much more urgency to improve outcomes for California kids. Recent reforms, like the state’s new science of reading law, should help—but the state has to get serious about implementation and accountability if it wants to drive better student learning statewide,” Morgan Polikoff, professor at the USC Rossier School of Education, told the Post.
“The number of children reading and doing math on grade level in California continues to slowly tick up, but the pace of improvement is very slow,” he added.
Students from low-income households also continued to struggle to meet academic standards, with the latest results showing a persistent divide between socioeconomically disadvantaged students and their peers.
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They are just future democratic voters who won’t see a problem with owing more in taxes than they earn, cause to them, the numbers add up.
I can’t be out of money! I still have unused checks!
The photo at the top of this article shows part of the problem: tables with multiple children instead of individual desks.
How is this an issue? I am asking this because I want to know; I am not being a wiseacre.
I attended Cheremoya* Avenue School, a Los Angeles elementary school. We sat two to a two-student desk, often lined up in rows, or set four desks to a “block”, so, eight students in a cluster. This at a time when the Los Angeles City School District, as it was called back then, achieved among the highest scores in a state that at that time was always in the top five for public education.
* their spelling
California will just end testing
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