Nearly half of California students arent ready for jobs or college as major school district admits its significantly off track
More than 44% of California students are not considered ready for college or a career, according to recently released academic performance stats — and one major school district acknowledged Tuesday it’s falling well short of a meager goal to improve its results.The California Department of Education released its 2026 performance metrics for all school districts, which also revealed that a majority of California students still can’t read or do math at grade level.Statewide, only 55% were considered ready for college or careers, which is determined through a variety of indicators such as completion of graduation requirements or technical education courses.
San Francisco Unified School District has been trying to boost its readiness numbers to 70% of graduates by June 2027 — but at a Tuesday meeting, the district made the damning admission that it won’t reach that goal.This year, only 59.2% of the graduating cohort in San Francisco was marked ready.The district now has less than a year to reach that 70% target it set back in 2022, when it wanted to improve on its 57.5% readiness grade back in 2020.But Superintendent Maria Su said Tuesday that the district is far from meeting that goal.
“We have decided to rate our progress towards this goal as significantly off track,” Su said.“The only reason why we are rating ourselves as significantly off track is because we’re not moving fast enough for our own target that we’ve assigned for ourselves.”Su noted the district, which is slightly ahead of the state average on student readiness, is going in the “right direction.” California gave the San Francisco district a “green” rating on college and career readiness, an improvement from “yellow” last year.California tracks readiness through a variety of indicators, including whether graduation requirements are met, the completion of Advanced Placement or other accelerated coursework, scores on statewide assessments or grades on designated courses...