LAUSD’s 100 priority schools target district’s highest-need students

Shortly after Alberto Carvalho became superintendent of LAUSD two years ago, he created a 100-day plan and named the district’s top 100 priority schools. 

At the time, neither Carvalho nor district staff publicly identified the schools. However, LAUSD has continuously maintained that the schools are some of the district’s lowest-performing campuses in all measures, and that they would serve as the focal point of various district initiatives, such as decisions on adding additional instructional days to help students recover from pandemic learning loss and the new policy precluding charter schools from sharing their campuses. 

LAUSD’s 100 priority schools were selected based on considerations about what schools had the greatest need to improve in areas such as attendance rates, performance on the state Smarter Balanced Assessment and interim assessments, rates of completion of college-required courses (known as A-G), and proportion of students who are English learners, a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource this month. 

The district also ensures that the principals of these priority schools participate in special programs where they can identify and express their schools’ special needs in academics, facilities or human resources. 

The principals then receive an immediate response from support personnel with the goal of rapidly accelerating student achievement, the district spokesperson said. 

Schools on the LAUSD priority list 

Enrollment numbers at LAUSD’s priority schools 

LAUSD’s overall enrollment, excluding charter schools, is 533,495. Based on census day enrollment data from the 2022-23 academic year, 53,959 students attend the district’s priority schools. 

Of the 100 priority schools, there are 12 high schools, 20 middle schools and 63 elementary schools. Two are listed as K-12 schools, while three are alternative schools of choice. 

Demographic breakdown of students

More than 80% of students enrolled in the district’s priority schools are Hispanic/Latino, and roughly 5% are Black. Asian and white students collectively make up 1% of students enrolled at these schools. 

English learners make up 32.1% of the schools’ collective population. Meanwhile, just over 1% of the schools’ students are foster youth, while nearly 3% are homeless. 

By comparison, 74.2% of all district students are Hispanic/Latino, and 3.8% are Black. Asian students make up 2.5% of the district’s population, while white students make up 4.8%. 

And just over 21% of students across LAUSD are English learners; 1.7% are homeless; and 0.7% are foster youth. 

(According to information on the California Department of Education’s DataQuest portal, there may be errors in LAUSD’s reporting of district ethnicity data.) 

Chronic absenteeism rates 

The schools sustained a chronic absenteeism rate of 38.2% in the 2022-23 academic year, meaning that 38.2% of students missed at least 10% of school. 

LAUSD on the whole, however, sustained a 32.8% rate of chronic absenteeism. 

Performance on state assessments 

Just over 23% of students attending priority schools have met or exceeded English standards, while 16.12% have met or exceeded math standards. 

By comparison, across the district, 41.17% of students met or exceeded state standards in English, according to Smarter Balanced test results, while 30.5% met or exceeded state standards in math. 

High school graduation rates 

During the 2022-23 academic year, LAUSD sustained a graduation rate of 90.4, while, on average, nearly 80.74% of students enrolled at Priority high schools graduated. 

Rate of  A-G requirements completion 

Across LAUSD, 43.8% of students in the 2022-23 academic year did not complete the A-G requirements and were thus ineligible for admission to the California State University and University of California systems. 

At the priority schools, however, 69.18% graduates did not complete their A-G requirements. 

Yuxuan Xie, EdSource data visualization specialist, contributed data analysis to this report.