As Angelenos are losing confidence in the quality of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which is troubled by declining academic performance and enrollment, district officials are looking into tutoring as a potential solution for learning loss during the pandemic.
The recent poll conducted by Great Public Schools Now, a nonprofit organization focusing on LA’s public education, reported that 70 percent of participants rated LAUSD schools’ quality of education negatively, and 73 percent of voters voted “no” when the poll asked if they believed every LA neighborhood has a good K–12 school.
This lack of faith in Los Angeles’s education system is backed up by declining academic performance numbers in the district.
According to an LAUSD spokesperson, only 48 percent of kindergarten students met the state’s early literacy benchmarks in the 2020–21 school year—a three percent drop from the previous year, and a 19 percent drop from the 2018–19 school year.
Meanwhile, only 81 percent of four-year cohort seniors in the district’s high schools made it to graduation last school year though that number is up about 1 percent from the previous year and two percent from the 2018–19 school year—when the national average graduation rate for public high schools was 86 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
This comes as the state’s largest school district is seeing a decline in enrollment numbers, with LAUSD officials projecting earlier this month that enrollment will drop by about 4 percent each year over the next decade—reaching below 400,000 in two years.
Dr. Stefan Bean, a 24-year educator who formerly served as superintendent of Aspire Public Schools in LA, was “not really that surprised” about the decline in LAUSD’s enrollment, he said in an interview with the EpochTV’s California Insider program.
Though Bean pointed out that the enrollment decline has been ongoing since pre-pandemic and can be partially attributed to population decrease—as Los Angeles has 185,000 fewer people from 2020 to 2021, according to census data—he said he hopes the decline will serve as a wake-up call for public schools to evaluate how they should improve.
Story continues at: LAUSD failing
