Our test scores post was one of the most-read things we've ever published. A lot of you asked the follow-up: ok but how do I know if my school is actually getting better?

The state has a tool for exactly that. It's called the California School Dashboard, and most parents we talk to have never heard of it.

This year it came out earlier than ever. The 2026 Dashboard dropped Oct 15, same day as the test scores, for the first time ever. So we pulled the colors for every public school in our coverage area. 34 schools, all in one place.

Every school gets a color for each "indicator": reading (ELA), math, chronic absenteeism, suspensions, plus grad rate and college/career readiness for high schools.

Blue is best, then green, yellow, orange, red.

Here's the part nobody explains: the color isn't just the score. It combines two things:

The state plugs both into a 5x5 grid and out comes a color. That means a super high-scoring school that slipped can land green, and a mid school that jumped a lot can land blue.

Real example: Broadway is still one of the highest-scoring elementaries on the Westside, way above standard in reading. But ELA dipped about 15 points from last year, so it got green, not blue. Meanwhile Braddock Drive scores lower than Broadway but went up a ton, and got blue in both.

So read the colors as "how is this school doing AND which way is it heading."

Quick decoder for the reading/math numbers: the Dashboard doesn't use "% met standard" like our test scores post. It uses "distance from standard," meaning how many points above or below the grade-level line the average kid scored. 0 = right at the line. +80 = way above. -30 = below.

Colors for reading, math, chronic absenteeism (with the % of kids chronically absent) and suspensions. Click any school for its full state report.

High schools don't get an absenteeism color (the state only tracks it for TK-8 on the Dashboard). They get grad rate and college/career readiness instead.

"Chronically absent" means a kid missed 10% or more of the school year. That's about 18 days, roughly 2 a month. Excused absences count too. Sick days, family trips, all of it.

On the Westside it ranges from under 5% (Edison, Mar Vista Elementary, ICEF Vista Elementary) to nearly 1 in 3 kids at Marina del Rey Middle (30.2%) and Westside Global Awareness (29.4%).

The 3 reds:

Here's the grid thing again: Westminster has the exact same rate as Walgrove (23.4%) but got orange, not red, because its rate went down a bit while Walgrove's ticked up. And MDR Middle is at 30%, the highest on this list, but got yellow because it dropped almost 11 points in one year. That's a big improvement even if the number still looks high.

For comparison, LAUSD overall is at 21.3% (orange) and SMMUSD is at 11.3% (yellow).

Why it matters for your kid: missing school is one of the most fixable things on this list, and it shows up in reading and math later. If your school is orange or red here, it's worth asking what they're doing about it at the next coffee w/ the principal.

SMASH (Santa Monica Alternative School House) got orange in both reading and math. That looks bad until you dig into it.

Federal rules require 95% of kids to take the test. If a school falls short, the state counts each missing kid as the lowest possible score. At SMASH, only 81% of kids took the ELA test and 78% took math.

Without that penalty, SMASH's reading score would be about 42 points above standard. With it, the Dashboard shows about 14 points below. Big difference.

So if you've ever thought about opting your kid out of state testing, know that it can drag your school's public color down for everyone.

We just did the sorting. Everything here comes from the state's own public files.