About Elk Grove Unified School District
California | 68 schools | 64,000 students | 7,000 employees | 91% graduation rate
Key results
- 68% of students achieved ‘Ready’ or ‘Highly Ready’ status for postsecondary success (up from 66% in 2022)
- CTE concentrators increased to 31%, demonstrating stronger career pathway completion
- 100% district-wide participation in data-driven strategic scheduling and goal setting
- All schools established site-specific goals focused on increasing advanced course enrollment and persistence in rigorous coursework
- Identified systemic scheduling barriers limiting student access to college preparatory coursework across multiple school sites
The challenge: closing the gap between preparation and opportunity
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Elk Grove Unified School District—California’s fourth-largest district—faced a reality familiar to districts nationwide: many students were primed for more rigorous coursework but weren’t accessing it.
The data told a clear story. While nearly half of Elk Grove students were enrolled in intense coursework overall, significant gaps existed across the district. Math stood out as a particular concern: only 29% of students were accessing intense math coursework, despite the subject’s critical role in college and career readiness.
For Elk Grove’s leadership team, the question wasn’t whether students could handle more rigorous courses—it was how to remove the barriers preventing access. And to do that, they needed precise, actionable data about who was—and wasn’t—accessing advanced coursework, and internal capacity-building to confront why.
Traditional outcome data could identify the problem, but it couldn’t pinpoint the root causes or provide the faster feedback loop necessary to make mid-year adjustments. The team needed insight into enrollment patterns, course offerings, and how scheduling decisions were affecting student trajectories. In 2021, Elk Grove partnered with Abl, a BetterLesson company, to go deeper.
Abl became part of BetterLesson in early 2025, expanding our K-12 solutions through groundbreaking academic scheduling analytics and optimization tools.
Learn more about Integrated InsightsThe solution: data that drives action
BetterLesson’s approach surfaces leading indicators of postsecondary success, revealing not just outcomes but the scheduling decisions and other system decisions driving those outcomes.
The master schedule is your community, school, teacher, and student culture. It's one of the most important things you can do as a site administrator to ensure success for your students. And it’s also the one thing that may not get enough attention. Most master schedules are teacher-centric. We’ve changed that in Elk Grove—we've committed to building schedules that prioritize our students’ needs.
Sue Hubbard, Director of College & Career ConnectionsAnalyzing student coursetaking data
BetterLesson’s approach starts with inspecting the complete course-taking histories of the most recent graduating cohort. A thorough review and coding process enables trend and pattern analysis that traditional student information systems simply can’t provide.
Elk Grove’s leadership teams received a comprehensive dataset including:
- Student multidimensional college readiness with detailed breakdowns of course intensity, GPA, and test scores
- Course intensity profiles showing readiness for various postsecondary pathways
- Subject-by-subject analysis revealing persistence rates, advanced coursework enrollment, and access disparities across schools
Quantifying academic intensity
At the heart of the analysis is the Academic Intensity Measure (AIM score), a composite metric based on three key factors: persistence, advanced coursework, and course progression.
The AIM score does something powerful: it quantifies the rigor of a student’s four-year course-taking pattern, predicting preparedness for college or career. Students fall into four categories—Far from Ready, Approaching Ready, Ready, and Highly Ready—giving schools actionable insight into who needs support and who’s ready for more challenge academically.
👉 Learn more about how you can use BetterLesson’s Integrated Insights solution to apply a similar methodology to your school district.
Identifying gaps
The data revealed what many educators suspected but couldn’t quantify. While 58% of Elk Grove students overall took four years of math, persistence rates varied significantly across schools and student populations. More telling: while 40% of students completed at least one advanced math course, significant gaps existed in who was enrolling in rigorous coursework.
The pattern suggested not a lack of capable students, but scheduling and advising systems that weren’t consistently connecting prepared students to advanced courses.
By drilling down to individual schools, teams could see exactly how these trends played out in their own buildings—and, critically, identify which students demonstrated readiness for more rigorous coursework but weren’t being scheduled into those classes.
The reality was stark but actionable: Elk Grove had students ready for more. They just needed a system to get them there.
Standardizing course offerings for consistency
Using their data, Elk Grove established clear district-wide priorities for the 2022-2023 school year. Every school would address identified gaps, but each would do so in ways tailored to their specific context.
Leveraging BetterLesson’s analytics, school teams built action plans that dug into root causes. Why did course intensity vary across schools? Where did students get off-track from advanced pathways? And most importantly: what strategies would move the needle?
Before scheduling began, Elk Grove took another critical step: standardizing course offerings across schools. Students’ opportunities shouldn’t depend on which high school they attend. Course catalogs were aligned with postsecondary success and made uniform across the district.
With clear goals, detailed action plans, and standardized offerings in place, schools were ready to build schedules differently.
Building student-centered schedules
Schools focused on proactively recruiting students who demonstrated academic readiness for more rigorous coursework. Using BetterLesson’s advanced course recommendations, counselors could identify students whose prior academic performance suggested they were prepared for greater intensity and reach out before course selection, not after.
This shift—from reactive schedule-fixing to proactive student recruitment—proved transformative. Instead of discovering gaps when schedules were already built, schools were shaping enrollment intentionally on the front end.
Throughout the process, district leadership tracked key performance indicators, monitoring progress toward goals in real-time. Schools shared successes and challenges with each other, and effective practices spread across the district.
Key results
In their first year with BetterLesson, Elk Grove achieved measurable progress across multiple indicators.
District-wide commitment to student-centered scheduling
100% of schools completed scheduling with Abl and established strategic goals:
- Seven schools set goals to increase years of coursework in target subject areas
- Six schools focused on expanding advanced course enrollment for underrepresented populations
- Five schools prioritized increasing persistence in advanced course sequences
Measurable gains in college and career readiness
The district showed progress across key metrics:
- 68% of students achieved ‘Ready’ or ‘Highly Ready’ status for postsecondary success (up from 66% in 2022)
- CTE concentrators increased to 31%, demonstrating stronger career pathway completion
More efficient, student-centered schedules
Of the 10 schools that completed scheduling with BetterLesson, nine successfully built complete schedules for the majority of their students.
The process also surfaced opportunities for improvement: when three schools discovered they couldn’t honor most students’ course requests while building complete schedules, they adapted their process moving forward to incorporate more student voice, earlier in the process.
Having the majority of our students' schedules finalized in June meant that when our counselors returned in August, they didn’t need to spend two weeks cleaning up schedules. Instead, they were able to spend time checking in with students and providing social emotional support. Our counselors were ecstatic to regain time to do what they love in service of our students.
Sue Hubbard, Director of College & Career ConnectionsMoving forward together
Strategic scheduling isn’t just about filling seats in classes. It’s about intentionally designing student experiences that prepare them for what comes next.
Elk Grove Unified School District demonstrates what becomes possible when districts move beyond good intentions to data-informed action. When you can see precisely where opportunities exist, you can design systems to seize them.
The result? A district where every student’s access to rigorous, college-preparatory coursework isn’t left to chance—it’s built into the system.
Discover how BetterLesson’s Integrated Insights can help your district conduct a comprehensive analysis similar to Elk Grove’s—identifying opportunities to address enrollment disparities while ensuring all students have access to the coursework that prepares them for success.
BetterLesson is the leading provider of data-driven, high-impact, system-wide K-12 teaching and learning solutions. States and districts partner with BetterLesson to align resources to strategic plans, build leadership capacity, and implement high-quality curriculum and instructional practices.
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