Shut down schools. Reopen schools and claim credit for test scores that still don’t meet pre-pandemic numbers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s two step plan for fixing education
1. Shut down schools and send test scores cratering
2. Reopen schools and claim credit for test score increases that still don’t meet pre-pandemic numbers
Gov. Gavin Newsom put on another one of his press events, blasting Trump and acting as if he had saved public education in California.
Governor Gavin Newsom today announced Californian student test scores for the 2024-2025 school year, which show significant continued progress made by K-12 students – with low-income students, Black students, and Latino students seeing particularly notable progress.
What does “notable progress” look like? Even the LA Times lists the actual sad numbers.
On the statewide tests, which were taken in the spring, 48.8% of students scored as “proficient” or “advanced” in English Language Arts, a gain of 1.8 percentage points from the spring of 2024, which built on smaller gains from the previous year. Still, the percentage scoring as advanced or proficient was 2.1 percentage points lower than in 2018-19, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The trend was similar for math, with fewer students advanced or proficient overall. In math, 37.3% of tested students scored as proficient or advanced, again an increase of 1.8 percentage points from 2024. And 2024 was .9% percentage points better than 2023. However, the percentage of proficient students was lower than pre-pandemic, by 2.4 percentage points.
There’s a pattern here.
Democrats unleashed criminals in the Year of BLM and now keep protesting that crime is going down from the 2020 highs so their policies must be working.
They’re doing the same thing with test scores. After shutting down public education at the behest of teachers’ unions during the pandemic, now they suddenly want credit for improvements from their own manufactured crisis.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Daniel became CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2025.
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