California mistakenly focuses on school costs rather than outcomes

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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Governor Gavin Newsom dedicated most of his final state of the state address last week to tout the accomplishments of the past seven years, and one praise was for California’s public school system, which educates nearly 6 million children in grades K-12.

Newsom said his new budget will increase system costs up to $27,418 per student, which includes federal money. He emphasized expansions in preschools, before- and after-school programs, and the blending of education with social and health programs in “community schools.”

“These years of investment in education are paying off,” Newsom told lawmakers. “This year alone, we’ve seen improved academic achievement in every subject area, in every grade level, in every student group, with greater gains in test scores for black and Hispanic children. These gains are especially pronounced in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district.”

It sounded great, but it needs to be put into a less than wonderful context.

Overall, California’s public school test scores are not only weak compared to other states, but they’ve lost ground in some key areas, according to recent results from National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed in September.

In fourth grade reading skills a vital area because reading comprehension is the gateway to mastery in all other subjects, California ranked a shameful 37th among states on the 2024 tests. Only 29 percent of its students achieved proficient levels, down two points from 2022. Black and Latino fourth-graders appear to be struggling the most.

California’s low reading scores should come as no surprise to anyone who has watched the state’s decade-long conflict over how it should be taught, called “reading wars”. For too long, educational leaders in California have insisted on experimenting with modern theories of reading instruction, such as “whole language,” while dismissing proponents of time-tested phonics as old-fashioned and even reactionary.

Other states acted while California played along after concluding that the way previous generations of students learned to read was still valid. One of them was Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the nation.

Like The New York Times reported recently in great detail, Mississippi was 49th in fourth-grade reading proficiency in 2013, but state leaders recognized the damage and decided to do something about it. Central to the state’s reform was the adoption of the “science of reading,” the current name for phonics, while targeting children in the early grades in an effort to prepare them for learning at all levels.

“The science of reading is really important; that was a key part of what we did,” Rachel Kanter, who heads the education reform group Mississippi First, told the Times. “But people are missing the forest for the trees if that’s all they’re looking at.”

Mississippi also set rigorous academic standards, and state political leaders made improvement a top priority — not just one of many. The latest national assessments found that Mississippi now has the ninth-highest fourth-grade reading score.

Strangely, while Newsom ticked off points of educational pride, he didn’t mention the most important one: California embraces phonics as core reading instruction last year. The new law enjoyed strong support from a governor who struggles with dyslexia.

Newsom’s boast about per-pupil spending exemplifies the Capitol’s focus on money in education debates, not results. Although a much smaller country, Mississippi spends just half than what California is doing, it still does a better job of teaching kids to read.

In the next few years, we will learn whether the California educational establishment finally embraces phonics and whether we can catch up to Mississippi.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.