County 8th-Grade Test Scores Rise but Those for 3rd, 6th Grades Drop

The sixty-eight third-grade pupils at Sunkist Elementary School in Anaheim did so well on the latest California Assessment Program tests that even state officials were marveling Tuesday.

“It’s really very exceptional,” said Tom Fong, a research analyst with the program, a unit of the California Department of Education.

The average Sunkist scores for third-graders were 385 in reading, 407 in written expression and 425 in mathematics. It was the second year in a row for third-graders at the Anaheim City School District campus to break 400 in two categories. A perfect score in each would be 500.

Only six or seven of the approximately 4,500 elementary schools in the state break 400 in a given year, Fong said, adding that “to do it two years in a row is a remarkable achievement.”

Sunkist teachers attribute their success to parent involvement and to a system that emphasizes individual responsibility and accountability among pupils.

Although Orange County education officials received happy news about Sunkist and other high-scoring schools, the results for the county as a whole do not show uniform improvement.

As part of a statewide trend this year, Orange County eighth-graders posted impressive gains overall. The average reading score for the county rose seven points to 282, 26 points above the state average. The average math score rose too, up five points to 294, 25 points above the the state average.

Sixth-graders dropped five points in each of the categories. Third-graders also posted lower scores--down five points in reading, from 303 to 298; down five points in written expression, to 303 from 308, and down three points in math, from 307 to 304.

The results for individual schools are being released this week by the state Education Department. The tests are administered every spring to students in the third, sixth and eighth grades. They are intended to measure the performance of the schools, not individual students. Each year’s results are compared to those for the same grades for the year before.

The lower scores for the third and sixth grades caused some local educators concern, but they also prompted them to caution against reading too much into a single year’s numbers.

In the Irvine Unified School District, for example, scores for eighth-graders jumped 16 points in reading and five points in math. Among third-graders, they fell five points in reading and written expression and rose three points in arithmetic. And among sixth-graders, they dropped more than 10 points in all categories.

“As a district, we’re still quite stable,” said Bruce Givner, deputy superintendent for support services at Irvine Unified. “But for a couple of schools, there are going to have to be some changes.”

Despite the fact that the countywide average scores for third- and sixth-graders were lower than the year before, they were still well above state averages.

Local educators cannot fully explain the drop, but they say several factors contributed to it. Several educators suggested that because the test contents for the third and sixth grades is several years old, they may be somewhat inaccurate gauges of teaching achievement.

Still, officials said they will be combing the results to see whether curriculum changes are warranted.

“Any time you have test scores that go down, you take a look,” said Fred Lange, director of instructional services for the Orange County Education Department. “You need to find out if it’s just an aberration or whether there’s something really going on.”

CAP SCORES: Complete school-by-school score listings will be published in the Times Orange County Edition on Sunday.