Recent results on state and national standardized tests show encouraging signs of recovery from dramatic pandemic-era declines in student performance. However, California students are still behind where they were in 2019: scores for all students remain lower than pre-pandemic scores on the state Smarter Balanced assessments (often called SBAC), as do scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). And comparisons across subject areas and grade levels point to other important challenges.
The good news is that the shares of California students meeting state standards have continued to rise: SBAC scores inched up from 47.0% to 48.8% in English language arts and from 35.5% to 37.3% in math. However, on the 2024 NAEP, reading and math scores among California students showed substantially lower achievement levels. For twelfth-graders (whose scores were reported for the first time since the pandemic in September), proficiency rates were 33% and 21% in reading and math, respectively, compared to 36% and 24% in 2019. Scores were also lower for students in grades 4 and 8, whose 2024 scores came out in January 2025.
Comparing proficiency rates—in math, especially—across grades and subjects points to additional concerns. The new NAEP data show that the share of twelfth-graders with satisfactory scores was lower than the share for eighth-graders, which in turn was lower than the share in grade 4. We have seen the same pattern in SBAC data over several years. About 42% of fourth-graders scored above the math benchmark on the SBAC (and 39% scored above the NAEP benchmark), compared to 34% of eighth-graders (27% on NAEP). Math proficiency rates were 31% among eleventh-graders on SBAC and 21% among twelfth-graders on NAEP. By contrast, we see proficiency gains across grades in reading.
Why do math proficiency rates fall across grades while English proficiency rates rise? Perhaps for the same reason that learning loss over the summer is typically more extreme in math than in English: reading skills are more easily developed and reinforced outside of school, while math relies more heavily on in-school instruction. This makes school attendance—which typically declines between grades 3 and 11—especially important for math.
Further, the dependencies across math levels are more explicit: understanding calculus requires substantial comfort with algebra, and mastering algebra requires students to have a strong handle on arithmetic. Research shows that knowledge of fractions and division in elementary school strongly predicts overall math achievement in high school. With proficiency standards rising across grades, the cost of not fully grasping one year of coursework can be compounded in the next.
These dynamics have important implications for post-pandemic learning recovery. As schools and districts look to help students catch up, the challenge of mastering rising math standards is heightened by the need to make up for the foundational work that was lost during school closures and distance learning. Perhaps most sobering, the drop in scores among twelfth-graders suggests that K–12 districts have run out of time to deliver support that could have helped these students.
There is some hope, however, for other students to catch up. For example, the significant impact of “high dosage” tutoring has been a promising bright spot among learning recovery strategies. But with the last threads of COVID response funding running out, finding sustainable resources to support these additional efforts will be an ongoing concern.
