Educational gains are slow but steady locally, says the San Diego Unified School District.
The state released its updated 2024 California Schools Dashboard Thursday, enabling the public to check color-coded gauges and other visual cues to augment its annual data about districts and schools and how they perform.
The online database was originally launched during the 2016-2017 school year by the California Department of Education.
San Diego’s largest district — and the second largest school district in California after Los Angeles Unified — shows upward trends from its 2023 results, such as a slowing rate of chronic absenteeism, more students prepared for careers and higher education, and a steady rate of suspensions.
On the other hand, there has been a slight decrease in graduation rates, which the state says is due to tightening the use of graduation waivers since their requirements were first loosened in 2020-2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, not all school districts have tightened their requirements for using gradation waivers.
“We are committed to ensuring all of our students have the tools they need to sucessfully enter the workforce and secure a degree,” said Fabiola Bagula, interim superintendent for the San Diego Unified School District, in a statement.
“We hold ourselves as educators to high standards. Some of the indicators are very encouraging, others show we need to keep improving. We are not satisfied with maintaining the status quo or decline in any performance area.”
The dashboard’s design has also not changed much, which may disappoint some.
In September, the Center for Reinventing Public Education – based at Arizona State University – issued a state-by-state report on school system transparency in test scores in math, social studies, reading and science, as well as absenteeism, graduation rates and English learner progress.
California’s dashboard received a “D.”
“I have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,” Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor who worked on the report, told CalMatters at the time. “How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”
To learn more about the 2024 California Schools Dashboard, click here.
