Call it graduation inflation. The latest California School Dashboard, compiled by the state Board of Education, showed the graduation rate for all students rose to 87.8% in 2025, up 1 percentage point from 2024. It included all public schools, folding charters into their local districts or county departments of education (not the chartering authorities).

According to the state’s 2024-25 Smarter Balanced tests, only 48.8% of all students met the state’s English Language Arts standards and just 37% their grade-appropriate math standards. That’s still down from the abysmal 2018-19 figures of 51.1% proficiency in English Language Arts and 39.7% in math.

It doesn’t do students any good to hand them diplomas and tell them they have succeeded, when they have not, but that’s exactly what California’s K-12 public schools are doing.

That’s underscored by a Nov. 6 report by the Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions at UC San Diego on the difficulties faced by incoming students.

“Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort,” they report, also noting declining writing and language skills.

The report blamed the COVID-19 pandemic, but also “the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.”

The report also observed grade inflation, with students needing remedial math at UCSD having average high school GPAs of 3.47 in 2019 to 3.65 in 2024. Not only are our schools moving along students without equipping them with basic skills, but inflating their sense of competence.

“The policies are a disservice to these students by giving them the illusion of success, but delivering a future of failure,” Lance Izumi told us; he’s the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He blamed recent policies eliminating D and F grades, which “lowered the benchmark for passing” and state efforts to get around Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative that banned affirmative action in all state programs.

These policies have included the admission of kids based on inflated grade point averages and rankings in high school classes, as well as the elimination in 2020 of the SAT in UC admissions.

Covering up low academic performance with graduation inflation also lets state and local education authorities, especially the powerful teachers unions, off the hook. The state now spends $25,155 per pupil, or $754,650 for a class of 30.

Especially in this high-tech state, now the world center of the AI revolution, not producing an adequate number of students excelling in math is more than a waste of precious tax dollars. It’s a crime against California’s future to allow the government education system to fail this spectacularly.

The worst thing is these kids aren’t being properly schooled. It’s a hard world out there, as the students soon will find out. Perform or fail. Someday the unions’ power will have to be curbed and real reform implemented. But that can only begin when Californians demand results and demand competence.

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