Despite a sharp boost in funding in recent years, the overall record of public education in the Golden State is disappointing. Recent test scores show more than half of CA students surveyed did not meet English standards and more than 60 percent did not meet math standards. And a massive study of state schools that was overseen by Stanford University researchers and released in September found that California lagged other states in closing the reading achievement gap between white and Latino eighth-graders.
These results would be troubling in any context. But given that the state overhauled its school finance system in 2013 specifically to get billions of dollars in extra resources to schools with the most English-language learners, they are unfortunate and unacceptable.
