State lags in students’ writing skills

Despite progress, California schools remain mired near the bottom of the latest national assessment of students’ writing ability, largely because the state has so many immigrants who learn English as a second language.

Los Angeles schools, in particular, showed sharp gains in the latest edition of the “Nation’s Report Card,” issued Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education. But those improvements still left the city’s students far below the national average in writing abilities, at least in part because the Los Angeles Unified School District has hundreds of thousands of students who are learning English.

Los Angeles students can be grateful for the existence of Cleveland, because it was the only big city whose students scored worse overall.

“These results show us that too many of our English learners are underperforming, and we have much work ahead to close this gap,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell.

The “Nation’s Report Card,” the nickname given to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is conducted periodically in several subjects. Thursday’s was for writing only and was based on tests conducted last year among a sampling of eighth- and 12th-graders in public and private schools nationwide.

If it were truly a student’s report card, it is tempting to say, it would come home crumpled deep inside an overstuffed backpack, far from the eyes of many parents.

The report makes clear that many American students have barely a basic grasp on the written expression of English, with just over a third of eighth-graders and fewer than one-quarter of 12th-graders scoring at or above the “proficient” level in writing.

Private school students scored higher than public school students, and Catholic school students scored the highest of all.

In California, fully three-quarters of all eighth-graders performed at or below the “basic” level; in Los Angeles, 87% were at or below basic. Too few 12th-graders were tested to break out the results below the national level.

Nationally, and at the local level, educators preferred to accentuate the positive. Los Angeles Unified officials focused on the district’s large jump in achievement from the last assessment, in 2002.

Among L.A. Unified students, 77% scored at or above the “basic” level in 2007, up from 64% in 2002. Even more impressive was the leap among those identified as English language learners: The proportion scoring basic or above soared from 31% to 52%.

“I would like to focus on this really amazing growth that we’ve had in eighth grade,” said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent for planning, assessment and research. “I would agree that this district has challenges, and that we have children who are at risk, but I think that with the gains in this particular test, I just have to say that we’ve made great progress.”

Wong said the improvement may stem, in part, from the districtwide adoption of the controversial Open Court reading program. She said the eighth-graders tested last year would have been in second or third grade when it became a mandatory part of schools’ curriculum. Open Court has been credited with raising the district’s reading scores, but many teachers complain that it is overly rigid.

Students in San Diego, included in the district-level report for the first time, scored slightly higher than their counterparts in Los Angeles.

Statewide, California eighth-graders scored above students in only Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and West Virginia. They were well below the national average and far below the level of the top-performing states, New Jersey and Connecticut.

But broken down by English language ability, California students who are still learning English score at the same level as their counterparts nationally. California students fluent in English also score near the national average for their peers. But because California has so many more non-English speakers than any other state, its overall results are skewed downward.

“We really are competing with our peers around the country,” said Jessica Valdez, the California coordinator for the National Assessment.

Both within California and nationally, the report showed large, and largely unchanged, differences in achievement separating whites and Asian Americans from African Americans and Latinos. Just as striking was a huge gap in performance between girls and boys. Among eighth-graders, girls were more than twice as likely to score at the “proficient” level than boys.

Amanda Avallone, an English teacher from Boulder, Colo., who is a member of the National Assessment Governing Board that produced the report, said the gender gap “troubles and mystifies me.”

“Nothing in my experience tells me that boys cannot write,” she said at a presentation of the report at the Library of Congress in Washington.

--

mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com