It’s been two years since California’s students returned to the classroom. But the Golden State’s newly released assessment test scores show that across both the Bay Area and the state, students’ performance is still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels — and the most vulnerable students continue to show the steepest losses. The Bay Area fared better than the state as a whole in 2022-23, but with just 55.4% of students from Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties passing or exceeding the standards for English, and 46.5% for mathematics. That’s according to results of the Smarter Balanced exams, an assessment given to California students in grades three through eight and grade 11 every year. But when compared to 2018-19, the year before COVID turned schools upside down, the region’s average pass rates are 3-percentage points lower in English and 4 points lower in mathematics. And for every county but San Francisco, this past year’s scores showed less than a 1-percentage point improvement when compared to 2021-22. Across the state, California students passed or exceeded state standards at an average rate of 46.6% for English. That number fell to 34.6% for mathematics statewide — increasing slightly from the 2021-22 academic year but still resulting in a 5-percentage point drop since the year before the pandemic. “Between 2022 and 2023, there was hope that we’d see a strong and fast improvement — and that would be evidence that the pandemic produced a blip,” said Heather Hough, the executive director of the Stanford-based research center, Policy Analysis for California Education. ”Instead, we saw essentially no change … at least, not anything that gets us close enough to what was lost between grades pre-pandemic to post-pandemic.”