For students who start in California schools and are not yet fluent in English, becoming English proficient is a critical step in the learning trajectory. Students who are reclassified from English Learner (EL) to Fluent English Proficient demonstrate sufficient language proficiency to follow the academic curriculum without support. Today, the statewide reclassification rate has bounced back after pandemic declines, but the share of reclassified English Learners still lags for students in early grades.

In California, the state’s annual reclassification rate hovered around 13–14% in the years leading up to the pandemic; it fell to roughly 7% in 2020. In the years since, statewide reclassification rates have been unavailable, making it difficult to understand any post-COVID trends.

To fill this data gap, we estimate our own reclassification rates for recent years using the California Department of Education’s public counts of students. To calculate the overall rate, we take all newly reclassified students across all grades in a given year and divide them by all English learners reported from the prior year.

Our overall estimates closely match the rates reported by the California Department of Education from 2016 until 2020. Overall reclassification remained low in 2021 (6%). Rates fell in all grades, but declines were largest for younger students: rates fell below 7% for grade 6 and under—a drop of about 14 percentage points. For 1st grade, the rate was even lower at 0.7%.

When students were receiving remote instruction, districts faced challenges with administering the key assessments required for reclassification. Some tests were newly available to be administered to students remotely, but some were not given at all. Districts were likely prioritizing instruction over testing for those two years, so the reclassification dip is not a surprise.

Overall reclassification began to rise again in 2022 and recovered to pre-pandemic levels (13%) in 2023. However, the effects of the pandemic lingered for a majority of EL students in 2nd through 6th grade in 2023–24. Nearly all early grades, aside from 1st grade, have much lower shares of reclassified students than prior to the pandemic. The impact is especially pronounced among 3rd and 4th grade students in the 2023–24 school year.

One bright spot: a higher share of current 1st graders are reclassified than in the past. In the most recent year of data, 6% of kindergarten English Learners were reclassified before they even started 1st grade in 2023-24—the highest initial share of all cohorts.

How can policymakers, administrators, teachers, and others support students who missed early opportunities for reclassification? Now that the state is monitoring long-term EL students (those in EL status for over six years) in the California School Dashboard, we can more easily track progress among these students. This information will assist districts in prioritizing efforts to keep students out of long term EL status, which can stunt academic growth, have negative socioemotional consequences, and even put students at higher risk of missing high school graduation requirements. When the state and districts can again provide official data for tracking reclassification rates for all students, this information will support efforts to evaluate trends moving forward.