Test Results Back Old Lessons of Success

So you think the Oak Park Unified School District is hot stuff because it outscored all others in Ventura County on a new statewide exam of student proficiency?

Wait until you see the Lafayette Elementary School District at work.

The 3,400-student district, situated about 10 miles north of Oakland, is about the same size as the Oak Park district. They are both wealthy, nearly all-white suburban districts with few students who struggle to speak English.

And it shows on scores registered on the Stanford 9 exam, a historic effort to gauge the knowledge of California’s schoolchildren.

Both districts consistently scored above the 70th percentile on the basic skills test, given this spring to an estimated 4.2 million students statewide. That means the two districts scored better than at least 70% of students in those subjects in a national sample.

Or compare the Fillmore Unified School District, one of Ventura County’s poorest-performing districts, with Kerman Unified near Fresno. Both have about the same number of minority students, poor kids and students who know little or no English. And both scored consistently in the 20s and 30s on the percentile range in the standardized test.

The comparisons drive home long-held lessons on academic success, educators say, demonstrating that achievement is tied largely to age-old issues of poverty, language and parental support.

With this in mind, the first standardized test in California since 1994 offers a springboard to explore larger issues of learning and achievement, providing a glimpse at why some schools perform well, why others don’t, and what it will take to close the gap.

“We in education have not yet found the answer to helping all kids reach the same high standards,” said Charles Weis, Ventura County superintendent of schools.

“I say that not by way of excuse,” he said. “But there are a variety of factors that have interfered with traditional education over the years, and we have not developed the ability to overcome them.”

Parental Support in Oak Park, Lafayette

Going into the exam, intended to tell parents whether their children are keeping pace academically with their peers statewide, Oak Park and Lafayette already had plenty in common.

Less than 2% of the students in each district struggle with English and less than 1% qualify for welfare. Oak Park spent about $4,600 per pupil in the 1996-97 school year while Lafayette spent about $4,550.

Both districts end up funneling upward of 90% of their students to college. And both are in communities where most parents are highly educated and motivated to support school activities with generous helpings of time and money.

In the Lafayette district, for instance, parents banded together to establish an arts and science foundation for local youngsters after Proposition 13 dried up funding. Parents there now raise $500,000 a year to augment school programs.

“There are very high expectations on the part of parents in our community,” said Bob Giannini, Lafayette’s director of curriculum and instruction. “There is a tradition of academic excellence and that relates directly to the quality of programs we provide.”

Oak Park Supt. Marilyn Lippiatt said she enjoys a similar level of support in her eastern Ventura County district.

Nearly 100% of Oak Park parents show up at back-to-school night. More than 80 parents volunteer in the district’s three elementary schools. And parent groups help fund a variety of activities ranging from field trips to arts programs to an after-school Shakespeare Club at Oak Hills Elementary.

“It’s not just having high expectations, but having parents who are willing to commit a piece of themselves to make that expectation possible,” Lippiatt said. “Parents have been willing to commit their time, their energy, even their financial resources, to make that possible.”

Educators say commitment pays off in the way youngsters perform on a range of tests and other academic measures, including the much-anticipated Stanford 9.

In the Lafayette district, not a single score dipped below the 75th percentile on reading, language and math. That means youngsters on average scored better on those subjects than 75% of students in a nationwide sample.

Fifth-graders turned in the highest scores, ranking in the 85th percentile in reading and 82nd percentile in language and math.

By comparison, Oak Park students in those same grades ranked no lower than the 61st percentile. Seventh-graders posted top scores, ranking in the 85th percentile in language, 78th percentile in reading and 74th percentile in math.

Lippiatt bristles at such comparisons, saying districts should be more interested in determining their students’ strengths and weaknesses, reinforcing what is done well and shoring up what is not.

But she also knows that comparisons are inevitable and there is room for improvement in every district, even the top performers.

“I think we need to understand where we are in the bigger picture,” Lippiatt said. “We are all into learning, that’s what this is all about.”

Educators Cite a Two-Tiered System

It’s no surprise that districts overflowing with poor students who struggle to speak English turned in the lowest scores on the exam, educators say.

Moreover, it also should be no surprise that school districts across California, which ranks 37th in the nation in per-pupil spending, would lag behind the rest of the country in test performance.

What has evolved, some educators say, is a two-tiered system where school districts in wealthier communities generate the cash to provide extra resources for students while districts in poverty-plagued areas often barely scrape up the money to get by.

“We don’t want to have a system where we have different standards for different sets of kids,” said Doug Stone, a spokesman for the state Department of Education in Sacramento.

“Throwing money at the problem is definitely not the answer,” he said. “But if we expect our students to be high academic achievers, the least we can do is provide them with adequate resources.”

Still, money is not everything. Some educators say the most important thing is the level of parental support students receive at home and on campus. Parents who keep tabs on their children, who help with homework or volunteer in the classroom, are more likely to produce better students, educators say.

Some school officials call it academic expectation, a simple belief students will do their best if that’s what is expected.

“There’s a tradition and expectation that we put on families and families put on their kids that causes these students to do a little bit better,” said Jerry Gross, superintendent of the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Test scores in the Thousand Oaks district were mostly in the 60th and 70th percentiles.

“Our motto is, ‘High expectation leads to high achievement,’ ” Gross said. “It may sound kind of hokey, but it permeates everything we do.”

If only it were that easy everywhere. Increasingly, educators say schools are having to grapple with a range of factors that interfere with education.

For instance, more than one-third of the students in the Fillmore district speak little or no English. About 80% are minority, and about 12% qualify for federal welfare relief.

Students in that district turned in some of the lowest scores on the Stanford 9 in Ventura County. But when compared with a district of similar size and demographics, Fillmore actually fared well.

The Kerman Unified School District, about 15 miles west of Fresno, has about the same number of minorities, poor youngsters and students who struggle with English.

But when limited-English-speaking students were filtered out of the testing pool, the 3,500-student Fillmore district scored better nearly across the board in reading and math than students in the Central Valley school district.

None of the scores for either district rise above the 50th percentile. And while educators in both districts say they are far from satisfied with the results, they provide a good benchmark from which to work to improve curriculum.

What won’t change, however, are underlying problems that short-circuit learning. The state isn’t offering more money to shore up standards or boost programs. And there’s no easy way to get parents more involved in their children’s education.

Perhaps what is needed, educators say, is a different approach to learning, one that leans heavily on better teacher training on the front end and more individualized instruction at the back end.

“Despite all the rhetoric that money is not the answer, it at least allows us to work toward a thoughtful solution for what the answer is,” said Frank Saxton, director of curriculum for the Kerman district.

Ventura County Supt. Weis said perhaps the best thing about the new standardized test is that it pushes districts to examine academic strengths and weaknesses, providing common ground for starting to solve long-standing educational problems.

“Absolutely no one is hiding from this,” Weis said. “No one is saying this is the best our kids can do. I think the vast majority of people are going to use these scores to improve schools and figure out what we can do to help our kids.”

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Common Ground

Educators say one potentially valuable way of analyzing scores from the Stanford 9 exam is to compare districts of similar size and demographics.

The Oak Park Unified School District has about 3,100 students, 9% of whom are minorities and 1.3% of whom struggle to speak English. The Lafayette Elementary School District in Contra Costa County has about 3,400 students, 13% of whom are minorities and 1.6% of whom speak little English.

The Fillmore Unified School District has about 3,500 students, 79% of whom are minorities and 36% of whom speak little or no English. The Kerman Unified School District near Fresno has about 3,400 students; 74% are minority and 37% are limited-English speakers.

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Stanford Achievement Test

The scores below, derived from a much-anticipated statewide test of academic achievement, reflect the national percentile ranks for Ventura County’s highest-performing and lowest-performing school districts compared to districts of similar size and demographics in the state. The scores are an indication of how the districts’ scores compare to other scores from a national sample. A score of 50 is considered average and at grade level.

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Lafayette Elementary Oak Park Unified* (Contra Costa County) (Ventura County) Reading Grade level Score Score 2nd 79 71 3rd 82 72 4th 84 75 5th 85 74 6th 84 72 7th 79 78 8th 77 74 Math Grade level Score Score 2nd 75 71 3rd 75 61 4th 76 65 5th 82 69 6th 84 80 7th 84 74 8th 82 72 Language Grade level Score Score 2nd 82 76 3rd 79 75 4th 78 77 5th 82 82 6th 79 76 7th 83 85 8th 81 80

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* Oak Park also tested 9th-, 10th- and 11th-graders, while the Lafayette district only goes through the eighth grade.

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Kerman Unified Fillmore Unified (Fresno County) (Ventura County) Reading Grade level Score Score 2nd 23 22 3rd 17 24 4th 22 24 5th 28 25 6th 28 32 7th 33 26 8th 33 31 9th 21 17 10th 15 22 11th 21 25 Math Grade level Score Score 2nd 20 28 3rd 25 27 4th 21 21 5th 23 23 6th 34 30 7th 36 26 8th 32 29 9th 32 29 10th 24 24 11th 27 26 Language Grade level Score Score 2nd 22 24 3rd 22 24 4th 25 29 5th 30 31 6th 30 39 7th 38 31 8th 30 29 9th 33 29 10th 19 22 11th 28 30

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Sources: Oak Park, Lafayette, Fillmore and Kerman school districts