Eric.ed.gov – Citywide Education Progress Report: Los Angeles

The Citywide Education Progress Report looks at how a city is doing across three goals: (1) The education system is continuously improving; (2) All students have access to a high-quality education; and (3) The education strategy is rooted in the community. Across each goal it presents indicators of what the city is doing and how it is doing. The reports focus on education strategies for the 2017-18 school year. The analyses reflect developments through June 2018. These are updates to the original reports from the 2016-17 school year. In recent years, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has experienced declining enrollment, increased competition between its district and charter schools, and an often divided school board. However, education leaders instituted new reforms in the 2017-18 school year, resulting in simplified school enrollment and new talent pipelines. Los Angeles has a strong grassroots presence, and the community regularly shapes the school opening process. Access to high-quality school options remains a significant challenge. Families lack consistent, comprehensive, user-friendly information about all their school options, and there is no citywide data-driven strategy to guide school siting and facilities access, or to hold schools accountable for poor performance and underenrollment. Graduation rates were at about 6 percentage points below state averages in 2014-15. Low-income students perform slightly worse on reading and math assessments when compared to low-income students nationally, but their relative performance did improve between 2010-11 and 2014-15. Hispanic students were enrolled in high school advanced math coursework at rates below their enrollment, while Asian American and Pacific Islander students had disproportionately high enrollment. [For the main report, “Stepping Up: How Are American Cities Delivering on the Promise of Public School Choice?,” see ED578178.]