Daily Writing Is Way to Success for Santa Ana Unified

While Orange County’s eighth-grade writing scores generally top the state average, the county’s largest district, Santa Ana Unified, particularly stands out.

Despite having one of the highest ratios of limited-English-speaking students in California, Santa Ana scored an average of 255, higher even than for Newport-Mesa Unified School District, an affluent district with considerably fewer immigrant students.

Santa Ana officials said Sunday that the good showing simply reflects a back-to-basics requirement: every student must write, every day.

“We have a daily exercise in writing at all of our elementary and intermediary schools,” said Anthony J. Dalessi, assistant superintendent of Santa Ana Unified. “Obviously, it’s paying off.”

The daily writing assignments, Dalessi said, “are not long. But the writing is done every day in each student’s English class. The work is critiqued by fellow students, which helps the learning process, he said.

In Santa Ana, 28.8% of the students are Spanish-speaking immigrants not fluent in English, which usually results in below-average test scores.

Immigrant Students Learning

But the new scores show that immigrant students not only are learning the mechanics of English, such as grammar, but how to express themselves well in the language, Dalessi said.

“The scores show we’re doing a good job. We think writing is important, and we’ve found that writing English assignments every day is a very good way of helping our limited-English-proficient students learn the language,” he said.

“A lot of parents would be pleased to know how much we stress this.”

In Fountain Valley Elementary School District, which did well on the test, officials also credit an emphasis on writing assignments.

The district had an average score of 288, considerably higher than the 250 state average.

“We’ve emphasized writing in our schools as a strategy for at least five years,” said Cheryl Norton, spokeswoman for the school district. “We emphasize writing in all our classes--history, social science, science, everything--because we believe writing is so important.”

The top-scoring school district in Orange County on the new writing tests was Laguna Beach Unified, which posted an impressive average of 308. But because the district is small, the score reflects only one school, Thurston Middle.

The individual school with the highest writing score in Orange County was Marine View School, in the Huntington Harbour area of Huntington Beach. Marine View, part of Ocean View Elementary School District, had a phenomenal score of 331.

Marine View Principal Robert Vouga said, “I’d like to tell you that that high score reflects my administrative skill, but the fact is our school is the site for GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), and therefore many of our students are in that special category.” GATE students are those with higher learning abilities who take more challenging classes and assignments.