Last year, Bret Daniels, the mayor of the middle-class Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights, announced that he was quitting his position as mayor and moving to Kentucky, in part because of the quality of education his seven-year-old daughter was receiving. Recently released test scores show that California’s education decline is affecting all demographics, including the middle class.
Daniels said that he felt that California lawmakers were more interested in ideological issues when it came to education, so he and his wife chose to settle in Corbin, Kentucky because they could send their daughter to the town’s nationally recognized school.
Daniels is probably celebrating his decision to move in light of California’s dismal performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, often referred to as the nation’s report card.
In his proposed 2025-26 budget, Governor Gavin Newsom claimed that his administration had “improved our education system.” However, NAEP scores show that student failure to achieve proficiency in the basic subjects has increased during Newsom’s tenure.
Take, for example, California’s NAEP scores for eighth-grade reading.
In 2019, the first year of Newsom’s governorship, 70 percent of the state’s eighth graders taking the test failed to score at the proficient level on the NAEP reading exam. In 2024, the proportion of eighth graders failing to hit proficiency in reading increased to 72 percent.
On the 2019 NAEP math test, 71 percent of California eighth graders taking the exam failed to score at the proficient mark. In 2024, 75 percent failed to perform proficiently.
Politicians and educators often argue that California’s poor scores are the result of the state having significant numbers of low-income students. However, it is important to point out that failure to achieve proficiency has increased among middle-class students as well.
On the 2019 NAEP reading exam, 53 percent of California non-low-income eighth graders failed to score at the proficient level. In 2024, 56 percent of non-low-income eighth graders failed to perform proficiently.
The proficiency failure was even more pronounced in math.
On the 2019 eighth-grade math exam, 50 percent of California non-low-income students failed to hit the proficient mark. In 2024, the proportion of non-low-income eighth graders failing to score at the proficient level had increased to 55 percent.
And while a great deal of attention is rightly paid to the unacceptably high proportions of Black and Hispanic students who fail to score at the proficient level (90 percent and 85 percent, respectively, in eighth-grade math in 2024, for example), the decline in proficiency among White students is significant and often unreported.
In 2019, 55 percent of White eighth graders failed to score at the proficient level on the NAEP reading exam. In 2024, the proportion of White eighth graders failing to hit the proficient mark in reading shot up to 62 percent.
There is a similar story in math.
On the 2019 eighth-grade NAEP math exam, 53 percent of White eighth graders failed to score at the proficient level. In 2024, the proportion of White eighth graders failing to perform proficiently in math rose to 58 percent.
So while much of the commentary on the NAEP scores has focused on the achievement gaps between economic and racial demographic groups, the hidden story is that large and increasing proportions of middle-class and White students are failing to achieve proficiency in the basic subjects.
Why are rising numbers of middle-class and more affluent students failing to achieve proficiency in reading and math?
The answer lies in the use of ineffective progressive curricula and teaching methods in California’s public schools, including those in middle-class areas.
Mike Malione, a former math teacher in the affluent Bay Area town of Piedmont who now tutors students from the Piedmont area, says that the students he tutors are confused and frustrated by the progressive math forced upon them in their schools.
For example, instead of memorizing multiplication tables, the schools were telling students to draw pictures to solve multiplication problems.
Malione said that the students he tutored “don’t remember how to multiply two-digit numbers because they never practiced it enough,” which sets them up for failure when “the work is getting harder to the point that they don’t want to draw pictures every time.”
In reading, many California schools use a progressive curricula that ask students to guess at what words are rather than using the proven phonics method of sounding out letters and putting the sounds together to form words.
Unfortunately, the California Teachers Association succeeded in shelving a bill by Assembly Member Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) that would have required the phonics-based science of reading to be included in curricula and teacher training.
It is crucial to note that while test results for middle-class children are comparatively higher than those of children from low-income families, much of that divide results from middle-class families paying for tutoring for their children in order to compensate for the deficient education in their neighborhood schools.
Sugi Sorensen, a top engineer at famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory who sends his children to a school in the affluent La Canada-Flintridge area of Southern California, said that the relatively high test scores in his children’s district are “not because of the schools, it’s because of the parents and supplementation.”
He observed, “You will find the counterintuitive phenomenon that sometimes the test scores go up when you implement a really, really bad curriculum because everyone stops using it and they start using outside sources, which are many times better than what they offer in the classroom.”
So middle-class families are being doubly hammered. Their children are receiving ineffective education at neighborhood public schools and, to add insult to injury, they have to pay out of pocket for tutoring and afterschool services so that their kids can learn what they should have been taught in the schools supported by their tax dollars.
Rebeka Sinclair, a mom who recently moved from an affluent part of Orange County to Wisconsin, emphasized, “There is no accountability in education and the system today perpetuates this type of injustice because there is no accountability.”
What the recent NAEP scores show is that, despite Gavin Newsom’s claims, California public education is failing students from all demographics—Black, Brown, White, poor and non-poor. Until politicians and educators are held accountable for this failure, expect more of the same in the future, which will be a tragedy for the state’s children.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools.
