Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level

I presume "grade level" was defined by the median student some time ago and has not been adjusted since. The fact that it's going down seems like bad news.

EDIT: It seems the headline is misleading and my take is not accurate.

Grade level comprehension is an expectation set by the state. Having some standard to aim for gives us a better understanding of if students are generally regressing or progressing.

We're able to see tread lines over time, and raise alarms like this headline, when we know that students now are not learning as much as students of the past.

This data is from the California Dept of Education. I wonder if other states track this also.

My guess is that some states don't even bother, and their students likely don't perform as well. Then there are other states, small ones like Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, whose students might fall on the high side of the curve.

Just a guess. Anyone know?

As a California resident, I'm surprised there's no mention of % of ESL (english as a second language) students. There's a very large population of ESL students in California that drag down these statistics as the students catch up.

If english isn't your primary language, learning math that is taught in english will also be more difficult.

Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.

Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.

Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.” It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”