Math, Reading Below Average as Fillmore Students Struggle With Exam : Class: District results are lower than those of California pupils as a whole. Assistant superintendent sees a challenge.

Not only were those crazy tests last spring a waste of time, said Alicia Peacock, now a junior at Fillmore High School, but they asked some weird questions.

Like they wanted you to interpret literature. “In reading, they asked for things that weren’t even there,” Alicia said. “It was strange. I’m more used to things that are there, that you don’t have to think about, where the answers are always in the text.”

By her own admission, Alicia does not like to read. But she was not the only Fillmore student who struggled with the exams, known as the California Learning Assessment Systems tests.

From elementary through high school, Fillmore’s students tested significantly below state averages on a rigorous new exam administered to California students last spring.

State administrators deplored how poorly California students did on the CLAS exams, and Fillmore students scored even lower in reading, writing and math skills than California students as a whole. The test was administered to fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders statewide.

Nearly half--49%--of all Fillmore 10th-graders placed at the lowest level on the math test, indicating little or no grasp of basic mathematical concepts. Less than a third of Fillmore’s fourth- and 10th-graders, and just above a third of the eighth-graders, demonstrated a solid understanding of texts they read and an ability to place what they had read within a wider context.

The district’s assistant superintendent said he sees the district’s state test scores as more of a challenge than as a disappointment.

“Now we’re better able to reach the standards, because we know what they are,” Mario Contini said. “But of course, we’re never satisfied unless all our students” get the highest possible scores.

Fillmore’s high school students scored among the lowest in the district, as well as testing lower than any other high school students in Ventura County. “From what I’m seeing as far as teachers working within the (state education) framework, I’m surprised the students scored as low as they did,” said Lynn Johnson, the principal at Fillmore High School.

Johnson said she had yet to show the scores to the school’s teachers or to really analyze them herself, so she could not say why the students tested so poorly.

Officials at Fillmore Junior High School refused to comment on the test results. Fillmore eighth-graders scored below state averages on the reading, writing and math sections. On the math test, the eighth-graders did particularly poorly, with 79% of the students scoring below a basic proficiency level.

One district school where students did perform above the state average was at tiny Piru Elementary School, where 35% of all fourth-graders scored a four or a five (out of a possible six points) on the reading test. Statewide, 30% of fourth graders received a four or higher on the reading portion of the exam.

“I’m amazed,” said Joanna Michel, a fourth-grade teacher at the school. “We must be doing something right.”

Michel and two other fourth-grade teachers had feared their students would fall below statewide averages.

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A third of all fourth-graders taking the test at Piru Elementary had only limited proficiency in English--many others still spoke so little English that they were ineligible to participate in the exam. Furthermore, Piru Elementary does not ask students struggling to speak English to learn in English until the end of third grade or the beginning of fourth grade, so many students taking the test had only been studying in English for six to eight months.

Like the rest of Fillmore Unified--and state students in general--Piru Elementary’s downfall was the math test. Less than a third of the school’s fourth-graders had even a partial understanding of basic math principles, and 45% of all fourth-graders showed little or no ability to do mathematical problems.

The three fourth-grade teachers and the school’s principal said the troubles may be due in part to the test format, which the students were unfamiliar with last spring.

Exam questions asked the children not just to compute problems, but to explain how they reached their answers and why their answers were correct. The school’s teachers have since adopted the test’s approach in their instruction of math and found to their surprise that it’s very effective with the students.

“At first, I balked and said, ‘Oh no, it’s one more thing to correct,’ ” Michel said. “But now I think it’s wonderful. Not only are you teaching computation, you are teaching them how to explain what’s going on in their minds.”

After some griping, the students reluctantly agree. “I liked it the other way better because you didn’t have to write all that stuff down and because I had less homework,” said Adrianna Jimenez, a fifth-grader at the school who said she remembers being stumped by the test format last year.

Later, however, Adrianna admitted that she’s probably learning a lot more in math class this year than last. “Now, you have to pay more attention in math and that’s important, because if you want to do something, you have to pay attention,” she said. “Like if you want to be an accountant, you have to pay attention in math.”