Ideology Over Education: Why California’s Schools Are Failing

California’s educational outcomes rank among the worst in the nation when compared with other large states.

Blue states spend far more time on DEI-related lessons than red states, experience more student walkouts and protests, and have seen more strike activity in recent years, resulting in lost instructional days.

Large amounts of classroom time are wasted on ideological nonsense instead of academics.

Approved curricula in blue states prioritize many courses that conservative parents would view as a waste of time.

These programs also exist in red states, largely because cities in red states tend to be blue, but they are far more common and entrenched in blue states.

Social-emotional learning exists in both red and blue states, but blue states impose formal frameworks and statewide standards, while red states apply it more loosely or locally.

Climate change education shows a clear divide, with blue states mandating strong standards and providing state funding, while red states vary widely and mostly offer limited courses.

Ethnic studies is largely unique to California, with no comparable statewide equivalent in red states.

Discipline policies also differ sharply. Blue states emphasize restorative justice and reduced suspensions, while red states retain traditional discipline approaches.

Some blue districts have adopted “equitable grading” that deemphasizes tests, deadlines, and penalties, while red states rely on traditional grading systems.

To illustrate the difference between red and blue states, this article compares California with Florida and Indiana.

Florida was selected because both Florida and California have large Latino populations, yet conservative Florida scores significantly higher across many educational outcomes while spending less money.

This demonstrates that outcomes are not determined by race or funding, but by focus and hard work.

The data reflects this gap clearly. In the 2024 NAEP assessments, only 31 percent of California fourth graders achieved reading proficiency, a lower rate than both Florida and Indiana.

In eighth-grade math, California recorded just 23 percent proficiency, compared with 27 percent in Indiana and 26 percent in Florida.

California’s high school graduation rate stands at 84.8 percent, the lowest among the three states, while its dropout rate of 8.9 percent is nearly triple Florida’s 3.1 percent.

California students lose a massive amount of instructional time to nonacademic coursework. Ethnic studies alone consumes approximately 90 to 180 hours, the equivalent of a full semester to a year-long course.

When combined with formal social-emotional learning programs at roughly 30 to 40 hours per year, enhanced climate education beyond basic science instruction at 15 to 20 hours, and restorative justice practices consuming another 20 to 30 hours, the total reaches approximately 200 to 250 or more hours annually.

This is instructional time that students in red states spend on traditional academics.

That loss is equivalent to one to one-and-a-half full-year courses not spent on mathematics, reading, science depth, history, or foreign languages.

This displacement is especially damaging for California’s English Learner population, which makes up roughly 19 percent of the state’s students and urgently needs maximum time devoted to core academics and English language development, not ethnic studies and ideological coursework.

This instructional imbalance helps explain why red states such as Mississippi and Alabama recovered more effectively from pandemic learning loss and are now outperforming blue states like California and Oregon on NAEP assessments.

Students in red states receive more actual academic instruction time, while California diverts hundreds of hours away from core subjects that students, especially English Learners, need most.

As bad as California’s official numbers are, the reality is worse. California uses accountability exclusions that affect how student scores are counted in public reporting.

Under federal accountability rules in ESSA, students must be enrolled in a school for at least one full year, from Census Day in October through testing in May, for their scores to count toward that school’s or district’s performance rating.

Migrant and some newcomer students move frequently and often remain in a school for only three to six months, which means their scores are often excluded from School Dashboard ratings. Those scores still exist in the state database, but they do not count toward a school’s public performance grade.

Under California’s Assembly Bill 714, passed in 2024, newcomer pupils who have been in the United States for less than three years are eligible for exemptions from certain local graduation requirements and may be granted a fifth year of high school.

As a result, students who take longer to complete graduation requirements are not immediately counted as dropouts.

Even when it comes to migrants, California fails. California’s migrant students perform significantly worse than migrant students in other states.

Migrant students are children whose families move for agricultural or fishing work and represent a small subset of the total student population. Among migrant students, California achieves only 12.1 percent math proficiency, compared with 18.5 percent in Florida and 15.2 percent in Indiana.

California’s migrant students also have higher dropout rates at 17.8 percent, compared with 10.2 percent in Florida and 11.1 percent in Indiana.

Chronic absenteeism among California’s migrant students reaches 34.2 percent, compared with 29.1 percent in Florida and 26.5 percent in Indiana. These comparisons reflect migrant student populations only, not overall statewide performance.

In California, students are often placed in grades based on chronological age rather than prior academic completion. Research from the Public Policy Institute of California confirms that many immigrant students enter the system with interrupted formal education.

Because of federal and state laws, a 15-year-old who may have only completed fourth grade in their home country is often placed directly into ninth or tenth grade in a U.S. high school.

This results in lower scores because students are tested on high-school-level material such as Algebra or Biology without having completed foundational fifth through eighth grade coursework.

Yes, California scores are lower as a result, but liberals believe diversity is our strength.

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