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English and math scores in the Sacramento area’s largest school districts, as in California overall, have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to results released this week.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom touted student academic progress during the 2025-26 school year Thursday, citing gains in test scores. But the figures his office cited include students who had not reached the proficient or advanced levels, meaning they had not yet met grade-level standards.
Fewer than half of students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts and math, and many Sacramento-area schools were no exception.
Megan Welsh, an associate professor at UC Davis’ School of Education, said that it was not surprising that students affected by the pandemic were still struggling, given the time they lost in school.
“You can’t take away a year of people’s development and expect them to not be permanently altered by that,” Welsh said, while also noting cutoffs between proficiency levels are somewhat arbitrary and don’t account for the margin of error in individual students’ test scores.
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“The people involved in the decision making might wiggle the score a little bit to change the results, so that it doesn’t look so good or so bad.”
Student test scores in the largest Sacramento-region school districts generally show a similar pattern of modest gains the recent years, but achievement levels in most cases are below the pre-pandemic scores of 2018-19.
In the Sacramento region’s six largest districts, only in Folsom Cordova Unified were more than half of the students able demonstrate grade-level proficiency in English skills. None of the six districts were able to meet that threshold in math.
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