These goals focus on closing success gaps for Black students and raising English assessment scores.
Following multiple discussions to narrow down its areas and student demographics of focus, the Long Beach Unified School District board officially approved its goals and guardrails for the next five years.
With only a few minor updates since they last discussed these, the board approved the following goals:
- The percentage of grade 3 students who meet or exceed grade-level standards on the state English Language Arts SBAC assessment will grow from 48% in June 2023 to 70% by June 2028
- The percentage of students in Grades 4-8 improving their SBAC-English Language Arts assessment from ‘not met’ to the goal target will increase from 28% in June 2023 to 60% in June 2028.
- In pursuit of having more than 80% of Black students meet the Algebra A-G requirement by the end of Grade 9, the proficiency gap between Black students and all other students will decline from 5% in June 2023 to 0% by June 2028.
- In pursuit of having more than 66% of Black graduating seniors AG eligible, the proficiency gap between Black students and all other students will decline from 15% in June 2023 to 0% by June 2028.
“As board members, we are elected to uphold and represent the community’s vision around student success, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to uphold through the development of these goals and guardrails,” board member Juan Benitez said.
The decision on what goals to focus on came from different engagement events and meetings with different community members and leaders, according to Benitez.
“It’s the end of the very beginning of the work. Now that the easy part is done, the harder task is how do we actually reorganize an entire school system to be in alignment with the community’s vision, goals, values and guardrails. That is a much harder journey,” said AJ Crabill, an education reform advocate who has been assisting LBUSD with this process.
Now that the board has approved these goals and guardrails, the next step in the process is for the district administration to create a goal-monitoring calendar that will describe exactly which of the goals they’ll be monitoring each month through June 2028. Multiple drafts will be presented to the board before they approve a finalized version.
Crabill will assist district administration with building out the monitoring calendar as well as helping the board with monitoring practice. He recommended that following the approval of the goals, the board reach a point where they are ”spending 50% of [their] time each month monitoring progress toward [their] goals.”
“Monitoring is a very different thing. It is not just randomly asking questions; there’s an intentionality and purpose behind monitoring,” Crabill said.
Disagreement among the board
At a previous board meeting, board member Maria Isabel Lopez had requested data on Long-Term English Learners (LTEL) to consider them as a potential subgroup for these goals. She said the data had not been presented to her, but she still wanted to include the demographic.
“I believe we need to continue to look at our students who are underperforming and if there is one more group, I think it would only be a good idea to center our work around them,” Lopez said.
However, board member Doug Otto and board president Diana Craighead worried about the goal being less effective if it involved too many student subgroups.
“I, for one, am not willing to change the focus of the goal for all the reasons that were stated earlier: that if we don’t have a clear focus, then we’re not giving clear direction to staff and that the monitoring of this goal will not be straightforward,” Craighead. “Adopting this goal is not saying that we’re not going to pay attention to our other groups, it’s just we’re saying this is the subset of students that needs the most help.”
Ultimately, Lopez voted yes on both goals.
“I think it’s critical that we center work on Black students,” Lopez said. “I want to be clear that I don’t believe it’s an impossible task to include our LTEL students here, but I’m going to vote yes on this.”
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