Most California Kids Can't Read Well or Do Basic Math, per New Test Results, per NYP
Most students are still below grade level
Most California kids cannot read well or do basic math, per new test results, per the New York Post.
The state's 2025-26 scores, released Thursday, show the majority of students below grade level standards in every subject tested. In English language arts, 49.3 percent of students scored proficient or advanced, and in math just 38.4 percent did, meaning most California students are below grade level in both subjects.
Science was no better. Just 36 percent of students scored proficient or advanced, even though science posted the largest gain of the three subjects.
Improvement, at a crawl
The results did move in the right direction. English proficiency rose half a percentage point from the year before, math rose 1.2 points, and science rose 3.3 points, per the state figures.
But the state is still chasing its own pre-pandemic baseline. In 2018-19, 51.7 percent of students met or exceeded standards in English and 39.7 percent did so in math. At the current pace in English, it would take about four more years just to get back to where students were in 2019.
The gaps underneath the averages remain wide. Black students scored 33.7 percent proficient in English, 21.5 percent in math and 20.5 percent in science, and the state board noted achievement gaps of roughly 28 to 49 percentage points separating Black students from white and Asian students. Chronic absenteeism also remains elevated at 18.3 percent, well above the 10.8 percent recorded in 2016-17.
Progress or failure, depending on who is talking
State officials framed the release as momentum. "Today's results tell a story of continued progress, but also of the work that remains ahead," said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education.
Governor Gavin Newsom credited state investments, including transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds, free school meals and community schools. Outgoing state schools chief Tony Thurmond said the pace of improvement showed more work remains.
The numbers land in the middle of a fight over the state's schools leadership, with the race for state superintendent turning on whether California is lowering the bar. Even before the pandemic, roughly half of California students were not meeting state learning goals.
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Options market and stocks to watch
There is no direct earnings read-through from state test scores, and no listed company reports revenue off the CAASPP. The tradable angle is the long skills story: employers and investors have spent years pricing a workforce pipeline that these numbers describe as still leaking.
The listed education names are where the theme trades when it trades at all. LRN, the online school operator Stride, is the biggest of them, and supplemental education demand is the pitch behind smaller names like CHGG.
Treat any flow there as sentiment rather than fundamentals. The broader read is labor quality over a decade, not a quarter, and it is one more input into the productivity debate that sits underneath SPY valuations. Follow education and policy names on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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