San Diego Unified School District students’ performance in math and reading has stayed relatively steady on national tests this year, and their scores have nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels in fourth-grade math, new standardized test data shows.
Wednesday’s release of scores from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” is the second since the COVID-19 pandemic began, upending student learning.
San Diego Unified’s trends this year reflect a nationwide increase in fourth-grade math, but they depart from declines in other subjects seen elsewhere, said a statistician with the test’s administration center. However, achievement gaps persist on racial and economic lines.
“There is kind of a different pattern for San Diego,” said Ebony Walton, statistician with the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP.
The test is usually given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders. It’s administered across states, allowing direct comparisons between student performance nationwide; it also collects district-specific scores for some large urban districts, including San Diego Unified.
“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a media call Tuesday.
Nationwide, scores are still not recovering to pre-pandemic levels; in 2022, they fell from the 2019 scores in the steep declines. But fourth-graders in math are showing progress.
San Diego Unified in 2022 lost ground in math at both the basic and proficient level, compared with 2019, but the district stayed relatively steady in reading.
On last year’s assessment, the district’s eighth-graders in math scored one point above where eighth-graders had in 2022 but had not yet returned to the pre-pandemic 2019 score. The 2024 average score was 275; it was 283 in 2019.
Tested fourth-graders had an average math score of 239 — seven points higher than the 2022 score, but still one point below the pre-pandemic score.
“Some states didn’t make any change, any significant change — but in the case of San Diego for grade four math, it seems that these fourth-graders have improved to the degree that it would take for you all to get to your 2019 scores,” Walton said.
Bucking the national trend, San Diego did not experience declines in reading from 2019 to 2022, and the district’s performance has remained steady since.
“They’re continuing pretty much similar scores in the second period from ‘22 to ‘24, so there was no real movement there,” she said,
Eighth-graders had an average score of 263, one point below 2022 and only three points below 2019. Fourth-graders in reading showed no significant change, with an average score of 223, one point above 2022 and the same as in 2019.
However, in all of those subjects, students who were identified as economically disadvantaged — a composite measure that includes whether they qualified for free or reduced lunch — scored on average significantly below those who were not.
For instance, at the eighth-grade math level, economically disadvantaged students scored, on average, 42 points below their peers who weren’t economically disadvantaged.
On the whole, California students scored four points below their 2022 performance in eighth-grade reading. At 254, the average score was also four points below its 2019 average.
In fourth-grade reading, the average score was 212 — also four points below its pre-pandemic average score, and two points lower than in 2022.
California’s fourth-graders had an average score of 233 in math, three points higher than 2022 and two points below 2019.
The state’s eighth-graders averaged a score of 269 in math, one point lower than in 2022 but seven points lower than in 2019.
