What's at stake?
Fresno Unified set a district record last year when almost 40% of students met or exceeded English-language proficiency standards. That means more than 60% still missed the mark.
Fresno Unified Superintendent Misty Her had a clear message for the community on Wednesday night.
“We are not a failing district.”
Her built her case around the latest results of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium or SBAC tests that measure proficiency and growth in English and mathematics for students in the third to the eighth grade. SBAC test results are frequently viewed as a kind of report card for school districts.
And, as has become an emerging theme in recent years, FUSD test scores are improving — but still well below minimum state standards and the growth is coming slower than Her and district leaders have promised.
“Fresno Unified has delivered four consecutive years of growth, and the district ranks No. 1 in ELA growth and No. 3 in mathematics growth in SBAC proficiency among comparable districts since 2022,” Her said Wednesday.
The latest round of SBAC scores, released earlier this month, showed that 39.92% of all students met or exceeded California state standards in English.
That’s a Fresno Unified record.
“ELA proficiency is at its highest level in district history and now it exceeds the pre-pandemic performance. And next year, we are ready and we’re going to get you more results, and we’re going to get you better results,” Her said on Wednesday, adding “Mathematics proficiency has nearly returned to its pre-pandemic high.”
And it still means that well over half of the district’s over 70,000 students — 60.08% — failed to meet averages.
And math scores, which also have been climbing, remain far below district benchmarks, with 29.46% of students meeting or exceeding standards — and a whopping 70.54% failing to meet the mark.
And the superintendent of California’s third-largest district was clear — she likes the growth but is far from ready to declare victory.
“I actually agree that it’s not enough and that it’s not quick enough. I actually agree with that,” Her told Fresnoland, “for me, sustainability is much more important than the going up one year and then going back down and then going back another year.”
At the same meeting, the superintendent emphasized bright spots among specific schools and grade levels.
Her also showed that the district surpassed its goals to improve kindergartener foundational literacy skills, achieving a mastery rate of 70.4% against its district-wide goal of 65.2%.
“I will tell you that by 2030 we will meet our goals if we just continue to focus in this way.”
And test scores are far from the only challenge facing the region’s largest school district.
Fresno Unified also currently has a chronic absenteeism rate of nearly 26%, 10 points higher than the state rate of 16%, a student-suspension rate that doubles the statewide average.
And while academic performance remains off pace, Her said the district’s momentum is real and expects solid growth to continue for the foreseeable future.
“At least now, what we can do is we can actually predict what we’re going to do. We were never able to predict before, now we can. We actually know who the kids are,” Her said. “We know exactly whose classrooms they’re sitting in, and we’re going to be able to narrow down to like what are the gaps that they’re missing that we need to fill in.”
Carlos Castillo, the district’s chief academic officer, added that though growth has taken a couple of years, a lot has developed in the short time since the pandemic that’ll lead to more growth in the long run.
“I do want to say that we are building to having more explosive growth,” Castillo said. “…a lot of first graders are reading already now at a very accelerated rate, so we are doing so many things now that are really building this.”
