S.F. Schools on a Winning Streak

When urban school superintendents gather to discuss test scores, usually no one has cause to break out the champagne.

The reasons--or excuses, as critics would cast it--for big-city schools’ below-par performance are serious: They have students mired in poverty and hobbled by language gaps. And they don’t have enough qualified teachers or enough money to buy books or upgrade deteriorating campuses. So test scores--the bane of teachers, principals and superintendents but the public’s main gauge of educational quality--rarely bring urban schools good news.

In San Francisco, however, Supt. Bill Rojas is smiling--and his smile has been growing a little wider every year for the last five.

California’s fifth-largest school district, with 64,000 students, reported this month that it has surpassed the national average in both reading and math on a widely used standardized exam for the second year in a row. Its scores have inched upward for nearly every racial and ethnic group every year since 1992.

No other large urban district in the nation can equal that achievement.

“It’s pretty remarkable,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents 50 of the nation’s largest city school systems. “What is really promising and encouraging is the strength and length of their trend line.”

The achievement of San Francisco’s black and Latino students is still 7 to 12 points below national norms--and lags behind that of the city’s Asians and whites. But in an unusual--and some say gutsy--statement, Rojas has pledged that black and Latino students will reach the national average by 1999.

The signs so far are promising. The district is moving more black and Latino youngsters out of the bottom quarter of achievement on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, which measures students’ strengths and weaknesses in specific skills, such as reading, math and spelling. At the same time, its highest-achieving students continue to move up the ladder.

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What accounts for San Francisco’s success? Rojas credits strong community support and a number of reforms, from beefed-up teacher training to smaller classes. Others say the gains are the result of factors unique to San Francisco, one of a dwindling number of urban systems still governed by a court-monitored desegregation plan. That plan has required some painful strategies, including wholesale overhauls of school staffs. Still other experts say that considerable credit for the improved learning belongs to Rojas himself, whose five-year tenure is remarkably long for an urban school chief.

While California as a whole struggles to overcome dismal performances in math and reading, math scores in the San Francisco district have exceeded the national average of 50 for at least five years. In the last two years, its reading scores finally broke 50 as well.

Overall, students in grades 2 through 11 in San Francisco scored 50.8 in reading and 55.3 in math on the CTBS, which was administered in the spring.

Scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which tested grades four, seven and nine in the most recent school year, remain at the bottom of the pack by national standards. At each grade level, averages in the Los Angeles district hug the 30th to 40th percentiles, with ninth-graders making the poorest showing, scoring in the mid- to high 20s.

The most significant gains in San Francisco were made in the elementary and middle grades, where students generally showed more than one year’s growth in reading and math. Though the highest average scores were reported for students of Japanese, Korean and Chinese descent, the gains cut across every ethnic group in the polyglot district.

The scores do not reflect the achievement of as many as half of the 19,000 students who are not fluent in English. On a separate exam administered this year in Spanish, Spanish-speaking students scored below national averages. But they did show one year’s growth in math and reading.

Rojas, who directed special education in the New York City school system before landing San Francisco’s top job in 1992, said that better training of classroom teachers has been a key ingredient in the district’s success. Rojas recruited a top-notch team to revise the district’s training programs and refocused the training to emphasize better instruction in math and literacy. Teachers helped design programs that fit their schools’ particular needs, and every school has a teacher with extra training in each of the two key subjects.

“It isn’t that we just got lucky for five years in a row,” Rojas said. “It’s by design . . . a design that makes you rethink the delivery of services. Who is on the front line with ‘the customer’ and how well prepared are they?”

Rojas said class-size reduction also has made a major impact, resulting in particularly impressive gains in the primary grades. San Francisco had begun planning for smaller classes before Gov. Pete Wilson announced his multimillion-dollar initiative to shrink classes in kindergarten through third grade last year, enabling it to move more swiftly than most districts. During the past school year the district had a 20-1 student-to-teacher ratio in all kindergarten classes, a grade most districts are tackling this fall.

Statewide, only 14% of kindergarten classes were that small. And San Francisco’s record of cutting class size in first through third grades similarly far surpassed the statewide averages.

Rojas also credited San Franciscans for supporting the city schools at the ballot box, passing more than $200 million in school bonds since 1993, along with a quarter-cent sales tax dedicated mostly to the local school system. The bonds passed with at least 69% of the vote, contrasted with only 50% for a bond to build the a new stadium for the 49ers football team.

Test scores have risen despite signs that more poor students are entering the district. Last year, about 60% of San Francisco’s students received free or subsidized lunches from a federal program, up from 31% five years ago, though some of that rise is the result of aggressive efforts by schools to bolster participation, Rojas said.

The racial and ethnic composition of the district has been fairly stable over the past five years. The district is 12.7% white, 36.6% Asian (mainly Chinese), 20.9% Latino, 17% black and 0.7% Native American.

Los Angeles Unified, with almost 700,000 students, is 11% white, 14% black, 68% Latino, 6.7% Asian and 0.3% Native American.

Luis Fraga, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University who has studied the San Francisco schools, said the demographic stability suggests that the test score gains are the result of reforms in curriculum and instruction.

“This is a pattern of slow growth and progress that has been in existence for at least five years,” he noted. “The gains are present for students of all different racial groups. That is unusual as a nationwide pattern. And there seem to be gains for both students in the upper quartile as well as the lower quartile. That is also impressive.”

Kent Mitchell, president of United Educators of San Francisco, the local teachers union, agreed that the training programs have contributed to the rising scores. But he gave more weight to the reduction of class sizes and the district’s focus on students at the lowest ranks of achievement.

He also begrudgingly gave some of the credit to the radical overhauls of schools under a controversial program called reconstitution.

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Since 1993, the faculty and administration of 10 San Francisco schools have been replaced in a last-resort strategy to reverse severe academic decline. About 600 of the district’s 4,000 teachers and 300 teaching assistants have been reassigned under reconstitution. Most of the schools reported improved scores this year, although some still face a long climb to the national average.

The painful process of overhaul stemmed from San Francisco Unified’s consent decree, a court-monitored blueprint for desegregation and academic improvement drafted in 1983. The decree sets out specific goals and strategies, including reconstitution, which was strongly opposed by the teachers union.

“The simple answer is that [overhauled schools] have been showing some improvement,” Mitchell acknowledged recently, “although I’m not sure it’s the reconstitution [that has made a difference] as much as the concentrated effort to make their programs better than . . . before they were reconstituted.”

Though San Francisco is one of a dwindling number of cities still operating under court-monitored desegregation plans, some education experts see that as an advantage, putting the power of the court behind the reforms. It’s “the glue that other [districts] don’t have,” in the words of Casserly of the Council of Great City Schools in Washington, D.C.

Stanford’s Fraga said the San Francisco district also is unique in its dual emphasis on racial and ethnic integration--the decree mandates that no group exceed 45% of any school’s enrollment--and on raising achievement. Most desegregation plans, Fraga said, lost sight of the ultimate objective of improving student learning.

Others said the impact of a determined superintendent should not be underestimated. Rojas’ public vow to raise black and Latino scores to the national average in two years is unusual for an urban school chief, for instance. Some observers hope he won’t regret having made it, but “it has given people a standard by which to judge his leadership,” Fraga said.

Delaine Eastin, California’s superintendent of public instruction, sees the effort to improve accountability as instrumental in the district’s upward climb. In San Francisco, she said, “the mantra has been standards, assessment and accountability. Bill Rojas is a reformer.”

Other experts said San Francisco’s effort to hold educators accountable for student achievement is one factor that sets it apart from Los Angeles Unified.

San Francisco’s stable leadership has also worked to its advantage, Casserly and others said. The average tenure for an urban school superintendent is two to three years. Los Angeles Unified is on its fourth superintendent in seven years.

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An Impressive Run

After San Francisco schools Supt. Bill Rojas instituted reforms, the district’s students scored above national averages

MATH. Mean scores ’97

READING. Mean scores ’97

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Lessons for L.A.

The reforms included:

Smaller classes

All-day kindergarten

More teacher training

More community support

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Note: Scores from Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, grades 2-11. Comparable scores for Los Angeles Unified are unavailable because of different testing procedures.