Eighth-grade Longfellow Middle School English students sit in class. File photo: Natalie Orenstein
Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) staff have reported notable progress among Latino students, but new data presented at the year’s first board meeting show that English learners (especially long-term students) continue to lag far behind their peers in academic achievement and college readiness.
District staff presented this information in its annual update on BUSD’s Latinx Resolution and its Multilingual Learner Master Plan, which was created in 2013 to increase English language proficiency, family engagement, and college and career readiness among English learners.
There are about 600 multilingual students in BUSD, with most concentrated in the lower grade levels. According to state data, almost half speak Spanish as their first language, with Arabic coming in second at nearly 12%.
Recent data from the California School Dashboard shows that BUSD Latino students reached the state’s highest performance level — blue — in English language arts assessments for the first time, with a 20-point jump from the previous year. California’s dashboard uses a color scale to depict academic performance, with blue, green, yellow, orange and red in descending order.
English learners as a group are in the yellow category, with 10% deemed proficient in English language and 18% deemed proficient in math. According to 2025 dashboard data, just under 30% of these students identified as career-and-college ready.
According to the dashboard, about 50% of English learners made progress toward English proficiency last school year, down from 57% the year before. Though for long-term English learners — students classified as English learners for at least 6 years — 57% made progress toward proficiency last school year,up from52% the year before.
Last year, 132 multilingual learners were reclassified to fluent English proficiency — a significant decline from the 232 students who were reclassified the previous year.
“We are seeing English proficiency rates and reclassification stagger a little bit further behind,” BUSD Director of Curriculum and Instruction Chris Albeck said Wednesday night during the board meeting. “Equitable outcomes depend not only on our plan, but on how consistently our plans are implemented across BUSD schools to ensure that all the time, resources and intentions behind our efforts are implemented.”
Staff acknowledged differences in when students are reclassified across school sites, noting that bilingual immersion programs offered at schools like Sylvia Mendez Elementary reclassifies students later due to program trajectory. In the last three years, average annual reclassification rates reached up to 17% for English learners and 20.5% for Spanish-speaking English learners. BUSD said they will conduct a long-term study of all sites to ensure consistent outcomes.
Contrasting with declines in proficiency and reclassification rates, all English learners showed year-over-year double-digit increases in English and math test scores, staff said, citing recent data from the California dashboard. According to the Smarter Balanced standardized test results, long-term English learners scored 95 points below the standard in English language arts and 140 points below the standard in math in 2025, compared with 2024, when they were 117 points below in English and 160 points below in math. English learners overall were 36 points below the standard in English and 43 points below in math in 2025, compared with 51.6 and 72.9 points, respectively in 2024.
The chart shows results for the last three years of Smarter Balanced standardized assessment scores for Latinx and English learner students at Berkeley Unified. The tests are taken each year in grades 3-8 and 11. Courtesy: BUSD
Among English learners, 87% graduated within five years, and nearly 30% of graduates met college and career readiness standards, staff said. In 2024, slightly over 90% of BUSD long-term English learners and about 86% of English learners graduated, according to state data.
District staff highlighted the Puente Program, which supports many Latino and first-generation students to prepare them for life after high school. Of the 135 students in its cohort, more than 70% graduated in 2025, with 92% admitted to four-year universities. Sixty percent of students in this group were socioeconomically disadvantaged, with more than a third having specialized education plans.
BUSD working to increase Latino student and family engagement
This year, 2,087 BUSD students out of more than 9,400 total identified as Latino or Latinx. Across elementary, middle and high school levels, the BUSD Latino population has remained at about 22% in the last three school years.
Staff on Wednesday reported that the overall number of newcomer students in BUSD has decreased in the last few years, with some recent enrollments coming from “visiting scholars” with short stays. According to the board presentation, just under half, or 242, of English learners in BUSD are Latino. There are about 50 Spanish‑speaking English learners at Berkeley High, staff said, with the highest groups at the elementary level.
During the board meeting presentations, district staff emphasized culturally responsive instruction and engagement with Latino families. On Wednesday, BUSD announced it would be using Wordly, an AI-powered translation software, to add live interpretation and closed captioning during school board meetings.
BUSD board member Ana Vasudeo said Wednesday that the software was a way of “increasing language access and culturally responsive engagement. As one of the few board members that speak Spanish, it’s really nice not to be the interpreter tonight, so I appreciate that on a personal level,” she said.
BUSD staff are also planning a series of Spanish-language workshops led by parents to help families navigate the school system and manage their students’ well‑being. The next workshop is on Jan. 20.
All schools with 21 or more multilingual learners also have active English learner advisory committees that share suggestions with the district on how to best serve this student population, staff said. The district said it is planning to launch an Immigrant Rights Ambassadors program (modeled after an initiative at Oakland Unified) at every school site with support from the Berkeley Federation of Teachers. District staff also mentioned the existence of encrypted group chats that families can join to stay informed.
“We have a number of strategies in place to support our community in partnership with the city, as well as other folks that are internal and external,” Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel said during the board meeting. “We want to be careful to not display them publicly, but just know that is our intention.”
Staff also noted Latino student clubs are hosted at Longfellow, Willard and King middle schools, at Berkeley High, and at Thousand Oaks Elementary.
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