Most California kids can’t read well or do basic math, damning new test scores show

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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 of 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.

About 61.1% of socioeconomically disadvantaged students failed to meet English language arts standards, while 72.6% fell short in math. The achievement gap between disadvantaged students and other students remained at roughly 30 percentage points in both subjects.

The results also highlighted the challenges facing students learning English. More than 133,000 English learners — representing 15.4% of the group tested — demonstrated English proficiency in 2025-26 under the state’s English Language Proficiency Assessments for California.

Under a new state law, those students are now eligible to be automatically reclassified as fluent and proficient in English.

Former English learners performed better on standardized tests than students who had never been classified as English learners. About 60.9% of former English learners met English language arts standards, compared with 53.5% of native English speakers.

Sonja Shaw, the Republican candidate for state superintendent, blasted the state for its overspending and lack of results.

“California spends roughly $150 billion a year on education, yet the majority of our children still cannot demonstrate proficiency in English language arts and math. This has to be the inflection point where we stop making excuses and hold the people running this system accountable,” she told the Post.

“Our children are paying the price for failed leadership, misplaced priorities, and a system that has lost sight of its most basic responsibility: teaching kids to read, write, and do math. California families deserve answers, not another victory lap over marginal gains,” she added.

Polikoff offered some insight into why students are performing at such low levels.

He pointed to longer-term trends that researchers believe may be at play, “things like technology, you know, cell phones as a distraction and now with the rise of AI, kids may be cognitively offloading their work,” he told The Post.

“It’s not really been a priority for the state. State leaders haven’t really emphasized education reform. There hasn’t been much accountability for improved student outcomes.” he added. “You would kind of hope that we were back to where we were pre-COVID by now.”

California runs the nation’s largest public school system, with roughly 5.4 million students in daily attendance.

In a recent Tennessee SCORE report cited by Polikoff, which combined math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California failed to crack the top 20 states.

“California’s not in the top 20. We’re about middle of the pack among the Western states, so we’re right in between Hawaii and Nevada,” polikodds added.

“We might sort of raise our noses at some of these Southern states, but in fact, states like Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, these are states that outperform California on national exams,” he said. “We’re the nation’s economic powerhouse, and we should be able to have some of the best schools in the country, but we don’t seem to.”

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