For the fifth time in a school week, Van Nuys High School theater teacher Justin Baldridge stood facing a nearly empty classroom.
A mere eight of his 24 students sat in his third period class.
As he took attendance, he questioned the students about their classmates.
And the answers were all the same — pulled for district and standardized testing.
Throughout the school year, Los Angeles Unified students are bombarded with test after test.
Students take quarterly math and English diagnostics through i-Ready as a way for schools to track their progress. Then comes annual standardized testing meant to track progress at the state level in early April, which ends just before Advanced Placement exam season in May.
If they miss a day or fail to finish a test, students might be pulled from class as well.
Emphasis on testing has grown across LAUSD in recent years, according to teachers and students. During the pandemic, the number of students meeting state standards dropped as classes were held virtually and chronic absenteeism spiked. When Superintendent Alberto Carvalho took the lead at LAUSD in 2022, he pledged to accelerate the district’s recovery, relying on test scores as a way to measure those improvements.
Now, test scores have gone up. But not everyone is convinced that the change tells the full story. Teachers and students say that the focus on testing has significantly altered the classroom, making the practice more disruptive than beneficial to student learning.
“Testing has been an absolute overload of an ask by the district and it’s increasing every year to the point where our teachers, students and classes are being impacted,” said Alex Orozco, secondary vice president of LAUSD’s teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles.
According to LAUSD, in a single school year, all LAUSD math and English classes are required to spend eight weeks of instruction administering these tests. Baldridge said there isn’t enough time to teach curriculum when students are being pulled for testing from his class nearly every day.
“We’re celebrating small victories with an impact that is not being felt in the classroom,” Baldridge said.
In 2019, 56% of students met grade level requirements in English, and 33% of students met them in math. Those rates dropped by 14 percentage points and 5 percentage points, respectively, across LAUSD by 2022 — the first time students were tested following the pandemic.
English rates rose 1% and math rates 4% this year. Though this spike in test scores is an improvement from the previous year, it’s still well below pre-pandemic levels and below state averages.
Still, Carvalho is proud of the growth.
“This is quite stunning that every single demographic improved,” Carvalho told the L.A. Times in July.
LAUSD alumnus Colleen MacDonald, who graduated in 2023, said standardized testing benefits the school district and no one else.
“We were wasting valuable class time when we could be learning so much more,” they said.
Though the percentage of students meeting state standards has remained below pre-pandemic levels, graduation rates haven’t slowed. LAUSD saw a seven-point increase in graduation rates this year compared to 2019, matching the “record-setting” graduation rate of 86% it hit in 2022.
“LAUSD and our principal tout how great our graduation rates were in 2023,” Baldridge said. “Yet, when I got students in my classes last year, their comprehension skills were atrocious. At one point, I was having to teach the middle school curriculum… [to my students] because their reading, writing and comprehension skills were so low.”
A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Education said standardized test scores have taken a hit because of students not attending class, a lack of engagement, and a lack of access to “high-quality teachers.”
An LAUSD Elementary teacher, who wished to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, explained that these issues are starting at the elementary level.
“Look at how many people are left behind,” the LAUSD elementary teacher said.“You have fifth graders who are going to sixth grade who are reading at second grade level.”
Orozco explained that testing has become nothing more than a data collection tool. He said testing in LAUSD isn’t representative of students’ academic achievement.
“The district wants those numbers,” he said. “They want that data. It might have had some merit at some point, but overall, it’s absolutely useless. Those policies are top down and do nothing for the morale of the students or the teachers.”
Orozco said standardized tests don’t reflect a student’s academic career.
“Some students may be excellent test takers, while others may not,” Orozco said. “You don’t know what that particular student might be going through that week or the day, and how serious they may be taking the exam.”
i-Ready assessments are administered to LAUSD students eight times each school year. The new test is designed to adapt to students’ performance as they take it. For example, if a student does well, they will be given harder questions to answer. (Madison Thacker / High School Insider)
An elementary school teacher said LAUSD teachers, who are in the classroom facing these issues, don’t feel they are heard by administrators.
“LAUSD needs to understand that what they’re doing is not working,” she said. And we have suggestions, we give the suggestions, but they don’t work, because they don’t want to hear from the little people.”
This is leading some teachers to feel helpless.
“I think education is not taken seriously anymore,” an elementary school teacher said. “LAUSD is making it harder by going from one curriculum to another curriculum to another curriculum. Because of that, education is going down the drain.”
Baldridge said many of these issues come from new LAUSD policies, most notably an unlimited late work policy, that allows students to turn in work at any time up until the last week in a semester, without penalty.
“Unlimited late work is the worst policy ever,” he said. “Students are realizing that they can not do anything for weeks, and turn it all in at the last minute and recover their grade magically.”
LAUSD’ late work policy, set forth after the pandemic in 2020, allows students to turn in work at any point, up until the last week in a semester. (Madison Thacker / High School Insider)
This unlimited late work policy was put in place to help the school district become more forgiving, said Denise Clark Pope, a Stanford Professor of Education.
“The way we do education in the United States is very forgiving on purpose, because things happen to people, and then circumstances change,” Clark Pope said. “I’m proud of the fact that we give people multiple chances.”
MacDonald, who is studying at the University of Oregon, said LAUSD’s “forgiving policings” set them up for failure in college.
“I started taking these classes, and I realized I knew nothing,” they said. “I was not prepared for the heavy workloads with all of these very strict deadlines, because of all these weird little policies they decided to start making while I was in high school.”
Baldridge said he believes that beyond college, these policies are destroying students’ preparedness for the real world.
“We are teaching students that responsibility doesn’t matter anymore,” Baldridge said. “There’s no sense of accountability because they have so many loopholes and now the teachers have lost any kind of control in the classroom.”
Board District Three representative Scott Schmerelson explained that LAUSD created these policies with the idea that relaxed deadlines would remove stress from the classroom.
Yet MacDonald believes that stress, to a certain extent, is critical for a classroom.
“There has to be an element of stress,” they said. “If schools are prioritizing the idea of preparing students for the real world then throwing in all these policies is counteractive. College will not do that. They will not let you turn in work when it’s convenient for you.
Schmerelson, who is running for board member again this November, plans to work hard to increase student learning, and not just increase a student’s class credits.
“We’re a public school and we want to do the best we can for every kid and give them all the opportunities as they can to learn and to make up work,” Schmerelson said.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said they are very invested in all students’ futures.
“We want to see those test scores above the pandemic levels,” they said. “We don’t want to just be recovering from the pandemic, but we want to be thriving.”
