The Decline and Fall of California Public Schools

This post is the second in a series examining the failure of the California public education system, the largest in the nation. After 18 years in public school classrooms, it is my conviction that the California K-12 public school system does more harm than good to our state, our communities, and our children. Unfortunately for all Americans, my conclusions can be extrapolated across school systems nationwide.

California had an educational system that used to be unrivaled in the world. It has steadily degraded to the point where the schools manipulate graduation rates to protect their school scores, most students rely on calculators for basic arithmetic (yes, ladies and gentlemen of means, even in your community where the school is rated a 10), and that a shameful number of kids leave functionally illiterate.

In 2019, only 29% of California 8th graders were proficient in math. Only 30% were proficient in reading. In science, we were at a pathetic 24% proficiency rate. Writing -- poorly measured by a multiple choice “writing” exam -- was an abysmal 28%.

But those scores don’t matter, right? Everyone knows kids don’t take the CAASPP test seriously. 

It would be nice to fall back on that excuse. Unfortunately, when kids are paying for their education in college, when the tests REALLY matter, our kids still fail. 

In 2016, 80% of California college students had to take remedial classes. In other words, they were not prepared for college. The metric was so scandalous the state changed the rules at state-run colleges so a student could use his high school grades to override his scores on the  placement exams. 

Bureaucrats tinkering around the edges of education rarely look more than a few feet down the road though.

Admitting students with zero academic chops into colleges has two enormous ramifications on the national economy. 

1. The dumbing down of college curricula, and 

2. the rise of majors with little to no academic rigor and little remunerative value.

The bankers make a ton of money off all those student loans though.

How did all this happen?

The same way we find ourselves in the crux of multiple crises all at once at this moment in history. We have an education crisis, an immigration crisis, a crisis in the Middle East, a crisis of confidence in our election system, a crisis of technological control, a monetary crisis, a housing crisis, and a pandemic.

Why the convergence?

Because there's no accountability for anyone, at any level, in any governmental system, which allows educators to commit malpractice on a daily basis.

Teachers can teach whatever they want in the classroom. Teachers can tell your child he's an irredeemable racist and/or tell my child the color of his skin means he'll never measure up, try as he might. 

We can force a steady diet of corrupt ideas on kids, loosely or not at all related to the actual curriculum we're supposed to teach. 

We can give your kid meaningless assignment after meaningless assignment that we never grade for actual learning. 

We can sit behind our desks all day, every day, and tell kids if they need help, they can ask Siri. 

We can teach a difficult class competently, then have "too many" kids failing it and be told by the bureaucrats in charge masquerading as "educators" that we need to get our numbers up. They don't care how we do it. I've seen offers of extra credit in exchange for school supplies (illegal), classroom labor (illegal), lowering the passing score so that an F magically becomes a D (unethical), or -- the most popular -- we can arbitrarily change a C to a B for whatever reasons we want (unethical). 

And even when we stick to our evaluation of a student as failing, school administration places the student in an online credit recovery program where every test answer is searchable online and you can repeat a test as many times as you need to pass it; kids sometimes finish entire year-long courses in two days.

All of this is fraud.

The Consequences of Educational Fraud

Educational malpractice sends false signals to parents and the larger community that the children are doing well. These signals may prevent you from recognizing your child's inability to read adequately or make simple calculations in her head, which prevents you from taking the action necessary to help your kid. 

This fraud may mean your child lacks the math skills to manage her money as an adult.

This fraud may lead you and your child to make an enormous financial mistake by taking on debt to put her in a college for which she is totally unprepared.

Because all the forms of fraud I related above still count as teachers "doing their job", the administration has cover. Principals are the one job in education that is "at-will" - they can be fired at any time. On the other hand, the union protections for teachers are so strong in California that it's difficult to pin any teacher with the "ineffective" label and begin the expensive and laborious process of firing her, then remediating the kids who spent a year languishing under her.

It's much simpler to just make sure that all the kids pass classes, since the most important metric for any school is graduation rate.

In a middle school or high school setting, principals will effectively sacrifice 150-200 kids every year to every ineffective teacher or give 150-200 mostly intellectually defenseless minors to the ideologues on campus.

Tenure protections protect administrators too. When an administrator has a rogue teacher or an ineffective one, he can just put his hands up and say, "I understand how you feel. You're right. That shouldn't be happening in the classroom. But what happened doesn't violate any laws, so I can't guarantee much will change for your child."

The principal may or may not have a follow-up conversation with the teacher.

You'll likely never know.

But as long as graduation rates stay high, and there are no major school scandals, that principal will look effective and keep his job, if not be promoted.

As the elected board and higher ups in your local education system go, the same rules apply. If grad rates remain elevated, and parents aren't screaming about grades, the Board of education and superintendent don't receive many complaints. They are not in danger of losing their burgeoning political careers.

So everyone is safe. Teachers can't be fired. Principals aren't removed. Boards of Education remain in their seats for years and years until they move on to city council or another elected office.

There are no consequences for failure, because we have eliminated failure. Only the most determined and stubborn children fail. We label these kids "intentional non-learners". They are often the only ones who see that almost everything happening in the classroom is irrelevant and many of their teachers are liars. Nobody tries to save them, probably as punishment for calling bullshit on the system. Hell, maybe they're better off for it.

Meanwhile, graduation rates remain high, and if your kid is obedient, his grades will be in the B range. If he's REALLY obedient, he’ll get an A in most classes. Most parents urge compliance, saying it's good training for corporate America (which is true). If grades are good, parents don't complain.

School scores sustain high property values, so the community remains fat and happy.

Except in poor neighborhoods. But the cost of living in California is so high, people living in marginal neighborhoods barely have time to look up, let alone monitor the effectiveness of a system they entrust their babies to every day. 

And here's where the delusion would fall apart for everyone, if they'd only look.

The Ugly Truth About Your Kid's Performance

Despite the push for equity -- not equality -- from the union and its legislative minions, public schools disproportionately fail children of color, who consistently underperform their white and asian peers, but who graduate at rates not that far below them.

Above is the data from the 2019 8th grade NAEP exam, a criterion-referenced test that measures academic performance across all 50 states. Criterion-referenced tests actually count how many questions your kid got right, whereas norm-referenced tests compare your child's performance against that of other kids at her grade level.

Norm-referenced tests are useless as an indicator of how well your child is doing individually. If she is performing adequately and takes a norm-referenced test in a state that serves poor, minority, and/or English learners so terribly, she will look like a genius on a norm-referenced test, even if she's not scoring particularly well. When you compare someone who scores 50% on a test to someone who scores 15% on the test, the person who got the 50% looks advanced.

Many state proficiency exams are norm-referenced. 

California's CAASPP test, surprisingly, is not. However, when I tried to find score breakdowns I found another layer of deception. 

The scores range from a BOTTOM of 2000-3000. There’s only a 1000 point difference there.  Now that you know that, let’s look at the performance bands. 

Remove the thousands place -- get rid of that 2 -- and you should be absolutely horrified. 

To MEET the standard for English in 8th grade, it appears that you only need to get slightly more than half the possible points. 

I doubt in your world your boss would be excited to employ anyone at full pay who could only do the job half the time. 

Yet the state of California wants you to believe your kid is all right if she can only get half the questions right on a test of reading and writing in English.

The National test, NAEP, is a criterion-referenced beast. It highlights the failure of large, union-controlled education systems that have captured the legislatures with teacher's union lobbying money in states like New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and California.

Take a look at the numbers above for my state, California. By 8th grade, only 51% of whites are proficient or advanced. Asians score much higher at 71%.

But what about Americans of African descent, Hispanics and other children of color? Only 11% of blacks score proficient or advanced in reading, math, and science. Only 20% of Hispanics do, while less than half of mixed race students score well.

So basically, if you're a person of color in California who has trusted the schools to educate your child for 9 years of her precious life, you have a 1 in 10 shot that your kid will have competence in reading, simple calculations, and the application of science by the 8th grade.

The white kids, the ones who supposedly have all the power in the system, are only getting it done 51% of the time. So 49% of the "oppressors", in whose favor education is supposedly skewed, aren't getting a useful education.

Asians do significantly better, but even they still have a 29% fail rate.

The raw numbers should horrify us all.

There are 373,000 American children of African descent in California public schools. Only 41,030 are able to read and do math at grade level.

There are 3,360,562 Hispanic children in California public schools. Only 672,112 of them are able to read and do math at grade level.

There are 1,383,137 white children in California public schools. Only 705,400 are able to read and calculate at grade level.

There are 574,000 Asian children in California public schools. Only 407,540 of them are able to read and calculate at grade level.

There are 243,372 mixed-race (non-Hispanic) children in California public schools. Only 119,252 are able to read and calculate at grade level.

Those four groups together make up 92% of the K-12 population in California. They number 5,911,374 children. Of those nearly six million, only 1,945,334 of them score proficient. That means if your kid is in one of those four groups, she has a 1 in 3 chance of being at grade level in learning.

She has a 66% chance of being behind.

That's an intolerable fail rate in any other field.

And yet, year after year, nothing changes for the better, academically.

Why is that?

Partially because you think your kid is doing just fine. You spent a lot of money to live in a neighborhood the realtor and GreatSchools.com told you had a highly-rated school. You don't see what happens in the classroom and, if you're the typical parent, you're too busy to pay too much attention and don't feel the need to as long as your kid's grades stay high and you're not getting emails/calls home about behavior issues.

Even when a teacher abuses her authority and parents actually find out about it, college acceptances are on the line. Most parents advise their kids to keep their heads down and mouths shut.

CAASPP (the state-administered reading and math test) results look solid for many middle class kids.

But let's go back to NAEP. You never see NAEP results for your child. NAEP is a national test. The data are not disaggregated by child, only by state and a few of the largest school districts. They are a snapshot of all the children's performances as a whole.

But remember: the CAASPP test has a tragically low bar for competence. As NAEP so ably demonstrates, 66% of kids in the major demographic groups in this state lack proficiency in reading, math, and science.

So, when you see your child's CAASPP scores, she looks like a high performer, but it's only because the state competence levels are so low and a disturbingly high number of the children she's being compared against are performing abysmally.

California used to have a high school exit exam, the CAHSEE, which students had to pass to receive a diploma. The state wanted to ensure California children had the basic skills necessary to perform well in America.

The more accomplished students at the low-performing high school where I worked at the time related that the CAHSEE was ridiculously easy. Keep in mind, "accomplished" at that high school was still below grade level.

Students got their first opportunity to take the test in the tenth grade. This begs the question: How could they test for graduation competence that early? Because the test only covered skills and knowledge through the 8th grade level. 

Sure calls into question the value of those final four years of school, doesn't it? 

Worse, the bureaucrats in Sacramento must have also known there was a good chance a significant portion of students wouldn't pass. How do I know? They funded six opportunities to take the exam: one in the tenth grade, two in the eleventh grade and three in a student's senior year.

Seems that the bureaucrats understood how deeply California schools were failing.

On the first try on this 8th grade test, fully one-quarter of California students did not pass. And, as you should expect by now, the results were worse for Black and Hispanic children. Black kids had a 40% fail rate, while Hispanics had a 31% fail rate. Whites and Asians did better, with only 15% and 11% failing respectively, while mixed race (non-Hispanic) students had a higher fail rate of 22%.

The last time the test was given was in the 2014-2015 school year. After that, it became part of the Local Control Funding plan for schools. Once they had the option to fund the test or not, public school districts universally chose not to administer any exit exam; the results exposed to everyone just how bad they were.

Now, we're supposedly on a path to see if we can achieve equity in schools, but in California at least, we're doing that by taking away academic courses in favor of ethnic studies courses, limiting discipline for students who are disruptive if they also happen to be children of color (equity, not equality), and allowing students to make up whole years of instruction in a couple of days online with the help of everyone's best study buddy, Google.

Graduation rates are up, but NAEP scores are down, especially among children of color.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the very definition of systemic racism.