The state of California is delaying the release of test scores to the public, potentially pushing the release until after Election Day. Coincidentally, those test scores may not reflect well on Democratic leaders across the state.
According to EdSource, the California Department of Education is withholding the scores from its Smarter Balanced tests so that they can be released at the same time as other data on the California School Dashboard. There is no good reason for this, and in fact, it is a break in precedent. EdSource notes that since the department began releasing those results in 2015, it has been consistently released before other dashboard data, ranging from releases in the last week of August to the first week of October.
The only time the department has not released the scores in that time frame was for the 2020-21 school year, when those results were published in January 2022. That was because some school districts were given the option not to use the Smarter Balanced tests that year. Also, the test scores are “not embargoed,” according to the department, meaning there is no reason they shouldn’t be made public now.
It isn’t hard to see why Democrats would want to stall the release of test scores until after Election Day. The school closures and restrictions handed down by Democrats at the state and local levels dramatically set students back, and all the data show this. The 2020-21 test results found that scores “declined significantly” after “five straight years of gradual improvement,” according to EdSource. The achievement gap between white and Asian students on the one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other also widened thanks to closures, which affected students in poorer communities the most.
This matches nationwide data, but you don’t need to look outside of California to know that the results will look poor. The Los Angeles Unified School District did already release its Smarter Balanced results, showing a decline in English scores in every grade level except for 8th grade compared to the 2018-19 scores. The percentage of students meeting English standards in the district dropped from 43.93% to 41.67%, and the percentage of students meeting math standards dropped from 33.5% to 28.47%.
It is likely you will see drops across the state as well, once California gets around to releasing the results.
The falling test scores and the learning loss that caused them are direct results of the Democratic Party’s anti-science embrace of school closures and restrictions for children, who were never at serious risk from COVID-19. Unfortunately, they were always at serious risk of being barred from in-person learning by the state’s all-powerful teachers unions. California Democrats want to hide those results ahead of state and local elections because it is yet another example of them failing California students.
