By Jarret Liotta, Contributing writer
Citing historic improvements tied to recent initiatives, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho lauded newly released state data showing an increased graduation rate and other gains for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Carvalho and members of the LAUSD Board of Education held a press conference Friday morning at Thomas Jefferson High School to share district results from the Department of Education’s California School Dashboard data. The graduation rate for LAUSD climbed from 83.6% in 2023 to 86.7% in 2024.
‘”That is a historically high graduation level,” Carvalho said. “The value of our investment in the summer school actually improved that narrative,” he said.
“Summer school, a month-long summer school attended by 100,000 students in Los Angeles,” he added, “allowed many high school students to actually get credit recovery and make up time and credits allowing them to graduate.”
While he said they had expected some increase in this category, it was one percentage point greater than anticipated. “That was one of the strategies that led to that additional one-percent increase,” he said of the summer school.
“When we talk about kids who are living at or below poverty levels, their graduation rate actually improved above the district rate by 3.2%,” Carvalho said. “When we’re talking about English Language Learners, Latino students, homeless students, foster care kids, they too improved their graduation rates,” he said, with the rate of Latino students that graduated going up 8%.
“These are phenomenal sets of data that represent the hard work of our teachers, our support staff, the coherence across the district, the leadership of our principals, and the vision of this board,” he said.
Carvalho also spoke to the seven “key indicators” summarized in the state data, which include chronic absenteeism, suspension rate, graduate rate, college/career preparedness, mathematics, English language arts, and English learner progress.
The results of these seven indicators are shown using a five-color meter that runs from red, signifying very low, to orange for low, yellow for medium, green for high, and finally up to blue for very high.
“For the very first time in the history of our district, we have no category, no indicator in the red or orange level,” Carvalho said, with the district maintaining yellow ratings for chronic absenteeism, English Learner Progress, English Language Arts, and Mathematics.
“We are a district that has two categories in the green and one in the blue for the first time in the history of our district,” he said, respectively referencing college/career preparedness, which increased by 2.7% in 2024 to 45.4%, the graduation rate, and student suspension rate, which remained low and showed only 0.4% of students seeing suspension for one day or more.
Carvalho said it represented LAUSD’s long-standing belief "that suspending kids from school is not the appropriate measure.”
State data also found that chronic absenteeism declined by 7.7%, with 23.3% of students still chronically absent.
“We looked at districts like San Jose and San Francisco and Long Beach and San Diego … None of these districts can boast above our dashboard performance this year,” Carvalho said, noting that LAUSD also saw improvements in English Language Arts and English Learner Progress.
“At last, we can say that once again Los Angeles Unified has overpowered, outperformed other urban districts across the state,” he said.
Although LAUSD officials welcomed the latest state data, the past several years haven’t always been easy for students in the nation’s second-largest school district.
Learning losses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic did not go unnoticed.
In 2022, students in grades 3-8 and 11 saw overall drops in reading and math proficiency based on the state’s Smarter Balanced assessments. That year, 41.7% of LAUSD students who were tested met or exceeded standards in English language arts compare to 44.1% three years earlier – before the pandemic. Likewise, in 2022, 28.5% met or exceeded standards in math compared to 33.5% pre-pandemic.
Carvalho said around that time LAUSD students had lost about five years of progress.
According to state statistics, 84.6% of the 381,116 students enrollment with LAUSD are considered socioeconomically disadvantaged. Of its student population, 21.2% are English Learners, with 0.7% Foster Youth.
Scott Schmerelson, board vice president, District 3, said of the new data, “It’s so wonderful to hear the good news about LAUSD moving forward … I’m just so proud of everyone,” he said.
“Let me just mention to everyone, it’s not just the academics that are moving forward. We are doing a great deal of work in helping students with their social and emotional needs,” he said.
District 6 board member Kelly Gonez gave praise to the district’s staff. “What’s happening here is unique (and) it’s not happening accidentally,” she said.
“I’m just so proud of what this moment represents for our school system,” she said, “and grateful to the thousands of employees across our schools who are making this happen every single day for the students and families that they serve.”
District 4 board member Nick Melvoin identified LAUSD as a leader in keeping students in school through restorative practices, rather than just suspending them in large numbers.
“I’m not satisfied until we see universal progress, and universal blue and green dashboard indicators, (but) this progress is exciting,” he said. He cited a range of new initiatives as helping make the district better, including a longer school year, expansion of early education, winter academy, and interventions in math and ELA.
“We’re seeing promising results,” Melvoin said.
Carvalho summarized, “This is a terrific day for Los Angles Unified. We have proven that at last our district is punching at its weight and soon to be punching above its weight.”
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