The state administers its California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CASPP) annually to students in grades 3-8 and grade 11. There are four performance levels on the exam—advanced, proficient, developing, and minimal. For a student to meet grade-level standards, he or she must score at either the advanced or proficient level. Scoring at the developing or minimal levels means that the student did not score at grade level.
The just released 2025-26 CASPP showed that 49.3 percent of California students scored at proficient or advanced, i.e., at grade-level standards, on the English language arts exam, which was up a small half percentage point from the previous year. Thus, a majority—50.7 percent–of California students taking the most recent English exam failed to score at grade level.
Worse, only 38.4 percent of California students scored at the proficient or advanced level on the 2025-26 CASPP math exam, which was an increase of 1.2 percent from the year earlier. In other words, more than six out of 10–61.6 percent–of students failed to score at grade level.
As the publication EdSource plainly stated: “New California test scores show most students don’t meet standards in math, English.”
But these depressing results are reasons for celebration, according to Newsom.
In a frothy press release on the test scores, the governor claimed that academic achievements continue to rise under his administration.
According to the governor’s spin, the test-score gains in English and math show that his major investments in TK-12 are succeeding.
However, despite the minor incremental gains from 2024-25, the just released scores are still below the scores from before the COVID pandemic when Newsom took office.
For instance, in pre-pandemic 2018-19, 51.7 percent of California students scored at grade level in English, versus 49.3 in 2025-26.
Similarly, in math, 39.7 percent of students scored at grade level in math in 2018-19, compared to 38.4 percent in 2025-16.
Indeed, even if the tiny incremental improvements trumpeted by Newsom continued at their yearly pace, it would take literally decades for all children in California to achieve grade-level performance in English and math. And, of course, most children would have graduated, if they did graduate, way before that nirvana was ever reached.
No wonder that an official at the California School Board Association called the anemic rate of grade-level proficiency improvement “unacceptable.”
Most egregious, though, is Newsom’s deceptive combining of CASPP performance-level data.
In his press release, Newsom combines the grade-level categories of advanced and proficient with the non-grade-level category of developing to produce seemingly robust and impressive results.
According to his release, “students scoring Developing, Proficient, or Advanced (the percentage of students demonstrating grade level-performance with increasing accuracy and complexity) also grew to 71 percent in [English language arts], 61.8 percent in mathematics.”
However, students scoring at the developing level do not meet grade-level standards. Combining developing students, who are not achieving at grade level, with proficient/advanced students, who are at grade level, deceptively inflates the final numbers to make the results look better for the governor and his legacy.
It is why EdSource stated that the new test results show “the majority of students below grade-level standards.”
But Newsom is not done with his deception.
In his press release, the governor cited the test-score gains in several school districts but never gives the baseline proportion of students achieving at grade-level proficiency.
For example, he cited the Exeter Unified School District, saying that math scores in the district improved by 2.3 percentage points. What he does not say, though, is that only 36.9 percent of students in Exeter schools scored at the proficient or advanced levels on the math test, which is below the statewide percentage of 38.4 percent.
Also, Newsom points to the gains among black students. It is true that black students scored a 1.5 percent improvement in math. However, he fails to mention that barely one out of four—21.5 percent— black students score at the proficient/advanced levels.
Improvement and gains are important, but so is the starting point for that improvement.
Finally, news of the overall sad state of student performance in California comes despite massive increases in education spending by the Newsom administration.
In 2025-26, California under Newsom spent more than $27,000 per student, which is a 60 percent increase over 2018-19 when he first became governor.
Shockingly, Newsom’s press release cited State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. After obligatory praise for Newsom’s education spending agenda, Thurmond admitted: “These investments have laid an important foundation, but we must do more to translate them into stronger academic outcomes.” In other words, all of Newsom’s spending has not given California taxpayers much bang for their billions of bucks.
In conclusion, Newsom’s press release touts his administration’s focus on “prioritizing equity.” My new book The Great Equity Epidemic, which I co-authored with Wenyuan Wu, shows that equity forces an artificial sameness of results for all students, regardless of their individual merits. That is exactly what Newsom tried to do by combining non-grade-level and grade-level students together in order to achieve the seemingly equitable result that most kids are doing just fine. The reality is that most kids are failing to achieve proficiency, and to pretend otherwise is educational propaganda.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is that co-author, along with Wenyuan Wu, of the newly released PRI book The Great Equity Epidemic: Students, Parents and Educators Reveal How DEI Is Destroying American Education.