California posted a near all-time high graduation rate — 83 percent for the Class of 2018 — but the rate of students eligible to apply for state universities hasn’t budged, according to data released last week by the California Department of Education.

In LA Unified, the state’s largest school district, the graduation rate rose to 76.6 percent.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a news release that “much work needs to be done to make certain all students graduate and to close the continuing achievement gaps between student groups.”

BY SONALI KOHLI
OCT. 9, 2019 12:29 PM PT Just over half of public school students who took the state’s standardized English language arts test performed at grade level, while only 4 in 10 are proficient in math, scores that represent a slow upward trend over the past four years, according to data released Wednesday by the state Department of Education.

Proficiency rates rose about 1 percentage point each in both English and math between 2018 and 2019, with 50.9% of students meeting English standards and 39.7% of students meeting math standards on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, designed to test Common Core concepts. However, scores among African American students are markedly lower, prompting calls from educators to address the achievement gap.

Forty thousand high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are at risk of not graduating — including 6,000 this year — according to a new analysis that tracks the effects of school closures on students in the nation’s second largest district.

In middle school, about a third of students in the district are currently on grade level in reading and math. Some of the worst learning loss was found in the early grades, where reading skills declined the most in kindergarten and first grade compared to the 2019-20 school year.

With the district preparing to reopen in two weeks, the report, from advocacy group Great Public Schools Now, shows engagement in remote classes has sharply increased since the beginning of the pandemic. But even with that improvement, more than a third of middle and high school students weren’t actively participating in online work last fall, the report found

Other challenges to increasing learning time for students involve the district’s negotiations with the teachers union last summer over the length of the teacher workday. Hoping not to “shortchange” students, court transcripts show, district negotiators asked for a full, eight-hour day, but the union was able to whittle it down to six, with just four hours and 45 minutes of actual instructional time.

Based on reviews of union agreements in five large districts in California, the report notes that Los Angeles Unified students have the least average number of daily live instructional minutes this year — 114 at the elementary level compared to 255 in Long Beach Unified, which had the most.

A total of 214 children 17 years old or younger have died of COVID-19 so far this year in the country. Comparatively, Chicago police told FOX 32 Chicagoearlier this week that 261 children have been shot — 41 of whom have died.

While COVID-19 cases among children increased significantly between August and September, deaths among this group make up 0-0.27% of all COVID-19 deaths in the states reporting data. Seven states reported zero deaths among children, according to the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics.