High school students in the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) are seeing slow growth in A-G completion and graduation rates, according to data presented to the board on Wednesday.
A-G requirements are 15 courses students must complete with a grade of C or higher to meet the minimum requirements to apply to CSUs and UCs.
LBUSD’s graduation requirements differ in that they are above the minimum A-G requirements in math and history and include a state requirement of two years of PE. Seniors need a total of 220 credits to graduate.
Assistant Superintendent of Research Chris Brown said that “unsurprisingly” there was a slight lowering in graduation rates during the pandemic, but that there has been some recovery over the past year.
Although the graduation rate for all student demographics has somewhat recovered with a 2% increase, students of color have recovered at a slightly lower rate than white or Asian students.
The district’s overall A-G completion rate is 58%, 2% shy of their 60% target goal.
“It’s been relatively stable in the years pre-pandemic; there was a large rise in the 10 years, sort of prior to that, but in the last three or four years, it’s been a pretty stable number,” Brown said.
However, Brown said that there was a boost in A-G completion most likely due to the “credit/no credit” grading system the district transitioned to over the pandemic. This meant that students were receiving “passing” grades instead of D’s; allowing them to fulfill the A-G requirements. Brown said it has since come back down.
For African American students, their A-G completion rate during the pandemic was 5% higher than their pre-pandemic rate. Their post-pandemic A-G completion rate, however, only went up by 1%.
Essentially, although their completion rate is still higher than it was pre-pandemic, the growth from pandemic to post-pandemic is not that high.
“It’s not surprising. You see that for pretty much all of our groups,” Brown said.
As for the A-G on-track rate, Brown said that the gaps, while very sizable, were still smaller and getting continuously smaller than they used to be. However, over the last five years, growth has been stagnant across all student groups.
Since all LBUSD pathway programs are aligned with the A-G requirements, essentially all ninth graders are 100% on track for graduating and meeting these requirements. However, if students begin to fall off in areas such as English, it is harder to recover these credits and get back on track.
Brown said that falling off in ninth grade doesn’t necessarily end a student’s ability to recover.
“It’s because we have a lot of options in our schools for credit recovery [like] summer school and additional courses in the block periods to make up those grades to get [students] to qualify for A-G,” Brown said.
The district plans to continue working with the A-G on track information to better equip students during their academic careers.
1 comment
Comments are closed.