County Students Again Excel in National Test

Drilled on their reading, language and math skills, Ventura County students continued to outpace their peers nationwide on a standardized test, while pupils in the Oxnard area still lag behind.

Recently released scores show that Oxnard high school students remain well below the national average on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, a phenomenon that educators attribute to a high percentage of Spanish-speaking or Spanish-dominant students.

Meantime, students in Moorpark, Ventura and Simi Valley comfortably chalked up scores at or above the national norm. Several school districts, including those in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, did not administer the standardized tests this year.

“On all tests, our kids in Ventura County do better than kids in the rest of the state and, often, in the nation,” said Charles Weis, county superintendent of schools. “In the state, our county’s achievement is usually the first or second, behind only Orange County.”

The scores are given as a percentile, with a 50 representing that national average. A score lower than 50 is thus below par, while a higher score means better-than-average performance.

But the test’s publishers are careful to point out that comparing percentiles from district to district is difficult, if not meaningless. A district may, for example, choose to take a 1992 or 1995 version of the test, a shortened or more comprehensive version, as well as different parts of the same test.

Sometimes comparisons from year to year in the same district are also difficult. For instance, Ventura Unified School District in 1995 had students take a vocabulary section, which was calculated in the reading score, but dropped that section in 1996.

Citing a shortage of funds, state officials in 1992 gutted the California Assessment Program, a test that could compare how districts were doing.

“With the new assessment strategy, there’s a high variability between districts and it’s rather unfortunate we don’t have many ways to compare,” Weis said.

What educators say is more useful is to see whether students have improved over the years on the same test.

All schools in the Oxnard Union High School District, with the exception of Adolfo Camarillo, scored below the national average, often by more than 20 points.

But over the years, the students made significant gains, said Gary Davis, assistant superintendent of educational services.

For example, Davis points out, in 1993, the Hueneme High ninth-grade class read at a sixth-grade level, but as seniors this fall, the same students read at about a 10th-grade level.

“Look at where they were when they were freshmen, and that’s the kind of growth that we’re making,” Davis said. “They were making at least a year for year growth, a 4.2 growth in four years. That’s a tremendous achievement.

“It isn’t only kids from Camarillo that are achieving. They are also coming in from our other four schools; they’re coming in below average but are making substantial progress in four years.”

At the Oxnard Elementary School District, almost half the students in the lower elementary grades take the Spanish version of the test, called SABE, or Spanish Assessment Basic Education. They then go on to take the CTBS, often in third or fourth grade, once their English becomes stronger.

For fourth-graders, the math scores have risen from 45 to 50 since 1992. At the same time, reading in the fifth grade has suffered: It went from the 39th percentile in 1992, up to the 47th in 1993 and 1994, but down to 35th in 1996.

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Parental involvement with schools, socioeconomic status, race, language dominance and prior achievement are all contributing factors in a student’s success on standardized tests, Weis said.

“If you put all these things together, Oxnard is a middle- to lower-middle-class socioeconomic community with a high percentage of students with limited English proficiency and a high percentage of minority students,” he said.

While not as successful as many of their Ventura County counterparts, he added, Oxnard students consistently garner higher scores than students in districts with similar demographics.

Santa Paula, another high school district with a large Spanish-speaking population, also recorded scores below the national average.

“We’re looking at all our courses and curriculum, and the department is continuing to develop them and align their courses with the course work,” said Jose Antonio Gaitan, principal of Santa Paula High School. “From here, we’re going to look at it and develop programs that will help improve our scores.”

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The Ventura Unified School District reports scores that are above the national average in math and reading for all grade levels, with the exception of fifth-grade reading, which came in at the 45th percentile, and language, at the 48th.

Administrators plan to analyze results of the spring tests and present their findings to the board during its first January meeting.

Across the county in Moorpark, students in third, fifth, seventh and ninth grades significantly bested the national averages, boasting rankings in the 60th, 70th and 84th percentiles when they took the test in the spring.

Moorpark third-graders, in particular, excelled in mathematics, scoring in the 84th percentile.

Campus Canyon Principal Linda Bowe credited the achievement to great kids and a course of study that uses word problems to emphasize comprehension.

“The curriculum stresses independent thinking that involves children in math so they understand the concept rather than just memorizing rotely,” she said.

In Simi Valley, third-, fifth-, eighth and 10th-grade students showed well too, despite dropping a notch or two over their performance in previous years.

In math and language tests, Simi Valley third-graders have slipped somewhat over the last five years, with math scores falling from 64 in 1995 to 56 in the spring. Similarly, language results have dipped from a high of 61 five years ago to a 1996 level of 55.

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While any slide concerns educators, Simi Valley Unified School District officials are still pleased with the district’s results from the April testing.

“We always score above the national average in all our grade levels,” said Becky Wetzel, director of programs and assessment for the 18,896-student district. “As a whole, it says that students and schools in Simi Valley are doing better than average.”

Each of Ventura County’s 20 school districts can select from a handful of standardized tests to determine whether students are performing at grade level. Among those state-approved options is the CTBS--which can be given to students in first through 12th grades, but is typically given in only a few benchmark years or a few grades.

This particular skills battery appears to be falling out of education vogue in Ventura County schools, however. School districts, including Conejo Valley and Fillmore, have ditched the test in favor of the Stanford Achievement, which is considered somewhat more rigorous, Weis said.

Next year, the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills will have a new version called the Terra Nova. Currently, students fill in bubbles for multiple-choice questions, but will have questions next year for which they have to write out answers. Educators say this will make it impossible to compare with the version they are now taking.

Without discounting standardized test results, Weis said it is important to keep the scores in perspective.

“The best thing a standardized test score predicts is future standardized achievement,” he said.

A high CTBS score might predict how a student would perform in a college board examination, but it can’t foresee whether a person will have a happy marriage or a blossoming career.

“It’s not a high correlation between standardized test scores and future success in life--that’s a very long leap.”

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Oxnard Results

The Oxnard Union High School District scores are broken down by school, with 1996 figures available.

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School Grade Test Score Adolfo 9 Reading 59 Camarillo Math 60 10 Reading 62 Math 61 11 Reading 58 Math 56 12 Reading 66 Math 66 Channel 9 Reading 22 Islands Math 32 10 Reading 26 Math 36 11 Reading 22 Math 32 12 Reading 26 Math 36 Hueneme 9 Reading 16 Math 18 10 Reading 21 Math 26 11 Reading 21 Math 37 12 Reading 34 Math 45 Oxnard 9 Reading 26 Math 28 10 Reading 28 Math 25 11 Reading 23 Math 25 12 Reading 30 Math 27 Rio 9 Reading 27 Math 31 10 Reading 28 Math 28 11 Reading 25 Math 30 12 Reading 36 Math 46

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Source: Oxnard Union High School district

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District Scores

The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills is a multiple-choice exam of math, reading and language used to gauge how a school district’s students perform compared to their peers nationwide. The scores are expressed as percentiles, with a score of 50 representing a national average set more than a decade ago. Because each county school district picks which standardized exam to use and which grade levels to drill, not every district took the CTBS, and tested grade levels vary from place to place. Here’s a sampling of how county students fared:

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District Grade Test 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 Simi Valley Unified 3 Reading 61 63 63 61 60 Language 61 61 59 59 55 Math 64 65 61 59 56 5 Reading 58 58 55 55 53 Language 68 68 66 66 66 Math 67 63 61 57 58 8 Reading 68 68 66 66 67 Language 56 56 56 60 60 Math 63 60 59 63 60 10 Reading 65 69 65 66 65 Language 63 66 63 63 66 Math 67 71 70 70 70 Moorpark Unified 3 Reading * 70 66 69 71 Language * 67 63 65 75 Math * 87 86 81 84 5 Reading * 53 54 57 65 Language * 62 61 64 69 Math * 68 66 63 70 7 Reading * * * 63 64 Language * * * 66 65 Math * * * 68 63 9 Reading * 56 55 57 62 Language * 53 59 61 66 Math * 56 55 53 61 Oxnard Elementary 3 Reading 40 42 38 33 40 Math 42 38 34 36 42 Language * * * * 35 4 Reading 40 45 42 34 39 Math 45 42 49 46 50 Language * * * * 40 5 Reading 39 47 47 33 35 Math 32 47 46 49 49 Language * * * * 40 8 Reading 40 41 41 34 35 Math 36 41 45 36 42 Language * * * * 38 Santa Paula Union 9 Reading * 27 21 35 25 High School Math * 27 14 31 28 Language * 15 9 40 33 10 Reading ** ** ** ** 29 Math ** ** ** ** 35 Language ** ** ** ** 34 11 Reading ** ** ** ** 31 Math ** ** ** ** 36 Language ** ** ** ** 33 Ventura Unified 3 Reading * * * 50 50 Math * * * 67 55 Language * * * * 52 5 Reading * * * 59 45 Math * * * 62 54 Language * * * * 48 8 Reading * * * 66 62 Math * * * 65 54 Language * * * * 53 10 Reading * * * * 65 Math * * * * 65 Language * * * * 52

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* Data not available

** The district did not test 10th and 11th grades prior to 1996.

Source: School districts