California should emulate states posting gains on ‘nation’s report card’

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Jennie Herriot-Hatfield | Special to EdSource

Once again, California’s scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress — often called the ‘nation’s report card’ — were disappointing across the board.

Most news coverage, locally and nationally, focused on the stagnant post-Covid recovery nationwide. But this discouraging coverage overlooks a more positive development: Some states are continuing to see growth in student learning. And it’s happening because of focused, visionary state leadership — something California’s leaders would do well to learn from.

A recent analysis by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University identified states that successfully leveraged federal Covid recovery funds to fuel academic improvement. It’s no accident that states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky are on the list of places where students have made gains over the past two years. These are all states that set a clear vision for how to improve curriculum and instruction in schools, are giving schools the necessary tools and resources, and are tracking outcomes to fuel continuous improvement.

For example, in Louisiana, the state Department of Education first set a high bar for curriculum and instruction. Then it identified curricula that met that high bar; incentivized districts to adopt those curricula; identified effective curriculum implementation partners and provided funding for districts to hire them. While this may sound like a top-down reform effort, it was anything but: It included input from teacher leaders from the start, leading to changes like providing each district a single contact person for all state programs and working with teachers to develop Louisiana’s own literacy curriculum. Now, Louisiana is one of only two states where students’ scores have exceeded pre-pandemic results.

California, unfortunately, has set no such vision for curriculum and instruction. The state creates lots of frameworks, but it’s unclear how those massive documents affect what’s happening in classrooms. (In my five years of teaching, I never heard about or used any state framework documents.) The state spent billions of dollars in Covid recovery funds, but didn’t use the funds to pursue any particular instructional improvement strategy, and failed to systematically track outcomes from different spending strategies.

The states that have pursued instructional improvement with positive results seem to have two common characteristics: a visionary state education leader who makes this work a priority over the long term; and a willingness to learn from other states that have done this work. California hasn’t had either recently, but perhaps that could change, if parents, teachers, and other advocacy groups work together to influence current leadership or find new leaders willing to prioritize this work.

California is a leader in so many fields — but not in education. Hopefully, that will change soon, with statewide elections less than two years away. With more purposeful state leadership, future NAEP score releases could someday highlight better results for California’s students too.

Jennie Herriot-Hatfield is a K-12 education consultant, former elementary school teacher and public school parent in San Francisco. She wrote this for EdSource.

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