Overview of Student Issues

The achievement gap in California
National and California achievement data
Home-based factors that contribute to the gap
Policies and programs that address home-based factors
Schools' role in narrowing the gap
Special student issues

With 35 million people, California is far and away the most populous state in the union, and more than six million students attend the state’s K–12 public schools. (Another 600,000 are enrolled in private schools.) In fact, California’s public school enrollment is larger than the entire populations of many states.

California’s student population is not only enormous; it is enormously diverse. In its schools the state has a majority of minorities. Hispanics make up the largest student group and account for a significant portion of the growth in enrollment. More than one in five children in California live in poverty, and nearly 50% of all K–12 students participate in the federal free and reduced-price meal programs offered in schools to students from low-income families. In addition, one-quarter of California’s K–12 students are English learners.

For more demographic data, see our Related Data page.

Achievement gap is a big issue in California
The academic success of students—and of public education in general—is often measured by how well students perform on standardized tests. Results from a wide variety of state and national tests administered over the last half-century have been fairly consistent in one respect. Certain groups of children—English learners, students of color, and those living in poverty—repeatedly score far below children in other groups.

These results are important because they predict later success, including students’ pursuit and completion of post-secondary education and higher earnings. The same groups of students who, on the whole, perform poorly on standardized tests are disproportionately represented among those who later drop out of high school and have difficulty as adults securing jobs that pay them living wages.

This achievement gap between poor and non-poor, between various ethnic groups, and between non-English speakers and their English speaking peers has over several decades been the catalyst for countless laws, initiatives, and education experiments.

How the data look, nationally and in California
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and California’s own standards tests (CSTs), poor students, African Americans and Hispanics, and English learners are over-represented among students scoring at the lowest levels and under-represented among those scoring at the highest levels. Other measures of achievement—including dropout and graduation rates and a-g course completion for UC/CSU admissions eligibility—reveal similar achievement patterns between these groups of students and their peers.

To see student achievement data, go to our Related Data page.

Home-based factors that contribute to the achievement gap
The achievement gap stems from both home- and school-based factors. It exists before students ever cross the school threshold as kindergartners, and this disadvantage can greatly affect their later educational progress and success.

Poverty
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted a national longitudinal study of children entering kindergarten in 1998. It found that students whose mothers had not graduated from high school, whose families received public assistance, or were headed by single parents, and/or whose parents’ primary language was not English were disproportionately represented among low-performers. All of these factors correlate highly with poverty.

While poverty does not cause low achievement, it does set the conditions for it. Students living in poverty are more likely to be exposed to factors known to affect achievement: lack of access to proper nutrition, health care, and decent housing; exposure to substance abuse; and living in high-crime communities. Risk factors have a synergistic effect on school performance—children with one risk factor typically do not fare as well as those with none. Children with two or more of these factors lag far behind those with only one.

Not to be overlooked are social factors and processes that play an enormous role in determining a child’s later learning and future academic success. High family stress levels, maternal depression, little interaction with the child, and family illiteracy all have a negative impact on a child’s developing capacity to learn.

Because African Americans and Hispanics represent disproportionate numbers of children living in poverty and are thus exposed to the above risk factors, they also reflect a similarly disproportionate number of children who begin school at a disadvantage.

Culture
Cultural background can also play a role in student achievement. First, it is well documented that some educators have lower expectations for the academic achievement of students of color. This has been a topic of much discussion over the past decades, and changing teachers’ attitudes and practices is at the heart of the standards-based reform movement.

Beyond this complex and pervasive problem is another issue—how the values and expectations of students’ backgrounds and communities influence their attitudes about schooling and academic performance.

The extent to which culture affects attitude and achievement is a politically sensitive and controversial subject. The variables most consistently correlated with low student achievement are poverty and low parent education level. Yet even among students coming from poor families, some cultural groups generally and consistently outperform others in school. And, among wealthier students, some groups of students—for example, middle class African American males—consistently lag behind their white classmates.

Researchers differ regarding the causes of these gaps. Temple University professor Laurence Steinberg has found that while Asian students associate negative life consequences with poor school performance, African American and Hispanic students do not.

University of California, Berkeley, Professor John Ogbu argues that community-based "folk theories" contribute to self-defeating behaviors. (An example of a folk theory would be that because of the history of discrimination against African Americans, even those who work hard will never reap the rewards that whites do.)

Others theorize that the efforts of even the most supportive parents and communities can be undermined by teens’ need for peer approval.

Policies and programs that address home-based factors

Federal, state, and local policies and programs attempt to address home-based risk factors. Generally, solutions focus on raising families out of poverty and providing the care and experiences presumed to be missing in the lives of poor children. Federal and state policies around improving family income usually come in the form of tax relief or public assistance. These policies do not fully account for the high cost of living in many areas of California nor do they address payroll taxes, which are a great burden on poor workers.

Public assistance programs, such as CalWORKS—California’s version of the 1996 federal Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) legislation—offer cash assistance, as well as education programs and childcare services. Health programs are also intended to combat the effects of poverty. State Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, and Child Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP), and the federal program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provide healthcare, education, and referral services for poor families.

A few programs provide preschool for California’s low-income children, including State Preschool, General Child Care and Development, and Migrant Child Care programs (see the California Department of Education), as well as the federal Head Start program.

Schools can play a role in narrowing the gap
A driving force in education reform for decades has been optimism that schools can help students overcome the disadvantages they bring with them to school. For more than 40 years, researchers have conducted extensive investigations to determine which school factors influence student achievement. However, results of this research are inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. With the best evidence available, or sometimes in spite of it, California policymakers have crafted many policies and programs aimed at narrowing the achievement gap. Generally these policies address funding, teacher quality and distribution, student intervention programs, accountability for student performance, and school administration and organization.

School funding
One of the most commonly accepted explanations for the differences in student performance has been the notion that unequal access to funding is linked to unequal educational opportunity, which in turn results in unequal academic performance. The research on the connection between money and student achievement is inconclusive and highly controversial.

In California, policymakers have approached the issue of funding in two ways: by equalizing the amount of general funds given to districts and by earmarking additional funds, or categoricals, for disadvantaged students.

Funding equalization: As a result of the Serrano v. Priest court decision in the 1970s, California’s school funding system is one of the most equalized district-level funding systems in the country. From district to district, there is little difference in the amount of general purpose state revenues received per pupil. However, the state achieved its equalization by slowing the growth of spending by wealthier districts rather than by raising spending in poorer districts.

Despite equalization, the achievement gap persists. It can be argued that equalization to low levels of funding, as in California, would have little effect on student performance. However, in New Jersey, where funding for districts serving high percentages of disadvantaged students was by court order raised to that of the highest-spending districts in the state, student performance remains low.

Categorical funding: Roughly one-third of the state’s K–12 funds is earmarked for categorical programs, some of which target the needs of disadvantaged students. However, there is little conclusive evidence of program success or failure, and policymakers are increasingly questioning the state's approach to categorical programs.

Teacher quality and distribution
According to much of the research, the single most important school resource linked to academic success is the teacher. However, research findings are mixed as to what specific teacher characteristics—credentials, courses studied in college, quality of college attended, years of experience—have the greatest impact on student achievement. In addition, no matter how it is defined, teacher quality is associated only with modest gains in student performance, according to most research findings.

Nevertheless, educators, researchers, and policymakers have been alarmed by California’s statistics confirming that the state’s lowest-performing schools have a disproportionate share of inexperienced and underqualified teachers. A number of incentive programs have been put in place since the late 1990s to encourage individuals to teach in low-performing schools and to help districts recruit qualified teachers.

In addition, California revamped its state-supported teacher professional development program, creating Professional Development Institutes (PDI) and later the Mathematics and Reading Professional Development Program to provide intensive teacher training tied to state content standards. From the perspective of narrowing the achievement gap, lawmakers expected that these programs would raise the knowledge and skill levels of inexperienced and underqualified teachers.

Student interventions
Most student intervention programs sponsored by the state provide funds for schools to offer additional learning opportunities to struggling students. Typically, these are intensive academic study programs during regular school hours, after school, or over summer and holiday breaks. State programs include the Elementary School Intensive Reading Program, English Language and Intensive Literacy Program, and the English Language Acquisition Program.

After-school programs, such as California’s After School Education and Safety Program and the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers provide both academic support and enrichment activities during nonschool hours.

In 1996 California created the K–3 Class Size Reduction (CSR) program, a nearly $2 billion per year program to reduce class sizes. While state funds for CSR were available to all districts—not just those serving disadvantaged students—lawmakers hoped that smaller classes would help to narrow the achievement gap, as they had done in the Tennessee's Project STAR. California’s CSR program was quite different from Tennessee’s; and after four years of implementation, a recent evaluation found that the California CSR effects on achievement were marginal. (To learn more, see the CSR capstone report at: www.classize.org.)

No issue, perhaps, has been more contentious in California than how to best teach English learners. After voters approved Proposition 227 in 1998, English immersion became the required instructional approach in most California classrooms. Early findings of a study of the effects of Proposition 227 found that significant gaps persist between English learners and native English speakers, though they narrowed slightly between 1998 and 2002.

Accountability and market pressure
Since the late 1990s, California lawmakers have increasingly focused their education policy on the concept of accountability, with the state holding students, schools, and districts responsible for educational outcomes. If those being held accountable fail to meet expectations, they face sanctions. For example, under California’s Public Schools Accountability Act, the state can reconstitute or takeover any school that is persistently low-performing and fails to raise student achievement. A second example—the Academic Performance Index (API) which ranks California’s K–12 public schools—serves both to help the state monitor schools’ progress and to provide the public with a tool for pressuring its local schools to improve. (For more on this, see our web section on Accountability.)

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 reinforces the public—and particularly parents’—capability to exert pressure on schools by giving parents of students in failing schools the option to send their children elsewhere. According to NCLB, student can exercise this option if they attend a school that is not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or is deemed persistently dangerous.

Some cities and states have taken accountability to a new level by offering educational vouchers as a means to help students in chronically low-performing schools and districts transfer to private schools. It is too early to know what impact these strategies have on student achievement and narrowing the gap, but they are being studied. During the last decade, California voters have rejected two statewide voucher initiatives.

School management and climate
School organization, climate, and leadership have long been thought to play an important role in raising student achievement, particularly in schools that serve predominantly disadvantaged students. Effective Schools research has demonstrated the importance of a school leader who instills in the staff a shared understanding and belief that the mission of the school is "learning for all." California policymakers have given a nod to the importance of school leadership with some of their reforms, including the Principal Training Act. A number of other policies have broached the topic of school climate, including NCLB’s parent choice component.

California’s students are as diverse as the landscape itself, and the state’s public education system must serve all of them. The work of serving all students and serving them well is both challenging and of vital importance. While every student in California is constitutionally guaranteed a free, basic education, the means to that may not always look the same. To attempt to meet this guarantee—or better yet, exceed it—lawmakers have used a range of policy strategies, from funding equalization to incentives for teachers to teach in underserved schools, from after-school programs to accountability measures. Over the last four decades, much has been learned about the factors that contribute to the achievement gap, but we are only beginning to understand which strategies and under what conditions the gap can be narrowed. With its size and diversity, California schools—for better or for worse—are fertile ground for exploring and solving this universal problem.

Special student issues
Beyond the achievement gap are issues related to educating English learners, gifted and talented (GATE) students, and other children with special educational needs.