O.C. Students Rank Above Peers in State

Orange County students outperformed the majority of their California peers on this year’s new state standardized test but still lag slightly behind the nation in reading and spelling, according to long-awaited data released Tuesday. Their math and language scores, however, were generally above the national average.

Statewide, students in most grades are lagging the nation in reading, mathematics and other basic skills, the score data showed. But much of the gap is owed to the huge number of students required to take the all-English exams who are not fluent in the language.

Orange County’s overall scores also would be significantly higher if they did not include large numbers of students with limited English skills. Fully a quarter of all the students in the county who took the test are not fluent in English.

“My initial impression is what I’ve suspected all along: our schools are good, our students are good,” said Orange County schools Supt. John Dean.

And Orange County schools outscored the state even though a higher portion of its students lack English skills.

Consider the reading scores in Orange County: Fourth-graders ranked at the 46th percentile. Tenth-graders ranked at a low 37th percentile.

State averages showed a 40th percentile ranking for fourth-graders and a 32nd percentile ranking for 10th-graders. The national average, by definition, is the 50th percentile.

Orange County scores in mathematics were above the 50th percentile at most grade levels. Statewide figures, however, were in the 40th to the 50th percentile.

Percentile rankings use a 99-point scale to measure how one student--or in the case of the state, a composite of all students--did compared with others in a nationwide sample. Differences of one or two points are usually not statistically significant.

Of the 4.1 million students in grades two through 11 who took the Stanford 9 exams as part of the most ambitious testing program in California history, about 19% were classified as having limited-English skills. Separate scores released by the state showed that those students scored in the 8th to the 19th percentile in reading and in the teens and 20s on other subjects.

Orange County results showed slightly higher scores, ranging from the high teens in reading and high 20s in other subjects.

Orange County’s scores also showed that the percentage of students fluent in English was not the only factor affecting performance. The county’s students scored significantly higher than those of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, both of which are similarly large suburban counties but whose limited-English students represented less than 15% of the test-takers.

Some school officials said they are glad statewide scores have been fully released, yet they argue district-to-district comparisons have little bearing on their own curricula.

“I’m not really concerned about what other districts did,” said Huntington Beach Union testing expert Jerry White. “My only interest is in creating a good environment for my students to do well. I want to know how can we improve from year to year.”

The district scored slightly below the national average in reading, but at or above average in the other subjects tested.

The state has roughly 1.4 million students in kindergarten through 12th grade who have limited English skills--more than in any other state. The state required districts to give the exams to all students, regardless of English fluency, but in many districts, a high percentage of students with limited English were nonetheless excused from taking the tests. Testing officials also say that some students with limited English skills may have been misclassified in their records.

In Santa Ana Unified, for example, an estimated 56% of the test-takers are not fluent in English. That figure could be higher because 7,300 of the test forms were mistakenly classified in the “unknown” category of language fluency. Few of the district’s scores reached above the 30th percentile.

Scores in Los Angeles County were lower than both the national and statewide averages, seldom reaching above the 40th percentile.

The release of the scores culminated a weeks-long legal struggle between the state and a handful of school districts. The districts alleged that the requirement that students be tested in a language they do not understand well illegally discriminated against them.

A San Francisco judge last month issued an order blocking the release of the test scores. But Tuesday, a second judge allowed that order to expire.

Among the highlights of the scores released Tuesday:

* Reading scores dipped sharply in high school, following a pattern noted in previous analyses of the tests. Eighth-graders scored in the 44th percentile and ninth-graders in the 34th. State officials have so far been at a loss to explain the apparent lag in reading skills in the upper grades.

* In math, fourth-graders ranked fairly low--at the 39th percentile. But the state’s ninth-graders scored in the 50th percentile.

* In science, the state’s high school students scored around the 40th percentile. In social sciences, they did about the same except for a jump in performance by 11th-graders, who scored at the 54th percentile.

* In spelling, only students in grade six hit as high as the 40th percentile.

As has been true from the beginning of the testing program, state officials disagreed about how to interpret the scores.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin released a statement saying that “it should come as no surprise that [limited English] student scores are generally lower than those of other students. California students who cannot read the test are clearly at a disadvantage with those who can.”

Gov. Pete Wilson, who had pushed hard for the renewal of statewide testing, had a more critical view.

“The scores continue to be disappointing,” Wilson said. “Not surprisingly, the [limited English students’] scores are down. . . . The scores are disappointing, they are below the national norm in most instances.”

Also, many school administrators have long warned that the first year’s data are slightly skewed because the testing material does not fully correspond to the state’s academic standards. For instance, U.S. history usually is taught in the 10th grade in California, but the ninth-grade Stanford 9 exam included questions on the subject.

“We’re teaching oranges and we’re testing apples,” Orange County Supt. Dean said.

The Stanford 9 tests were published and scored by Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement, based in Texas. The company estimates that 10 million students nationwide will take the tests. Eight other states use the Stanford 9 to measure student performance.

The national averages are calculated on the basis of a separate pool of students across the country who take the examination. By contrast with California, barely 1 in 20 in that national group were students with limited English skills.

The Stanford 9 was the first statewide test in four years, after the demise of the California Learning Assessment System, which was widely criticized for technical flaws and for posing questions that many parents felt were too subjective.

The ruling Tuesday that freed up the scores was issued by Judge David A. Garcia of San Francisco Superior Court, in a lawsuit pitting the state against the San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland school districts.

In his ruling, Garcia declined to renew an order blocking the release of the scores that had been issued by a Municipal Court judge June 25.

Garcia’s decision allowed the state to mobilize its plans to put full, grade-by-grade scores for each of California’s 1,000 districts and 8,000 schools on the Internet.

By early Tuesday evening, the scores were posted on the Department of Education Web site, https://www.cde.ca.gov.

Individual districts and counties had been free all along to release their own scores. Many already have, and many parents have also received reports in the mail about how their children did.

Garcia also ruled Tuesday that the state could not require school districts to place the test scores in the academic files of individual students, according to Allan Keown, deputy general counsel for the Department of Education.

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Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Tina Nguyen.

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California Schools’ Report Card

In California, 4.1 million public school students in grades 2 through 11 took the Stanford 9 standardized tests this year. All of them were tested in reading, writing and math. Students through grade 8 also took a spelling test and students in higher grades took exams in social studies and science.

* For each test, the chart shows the percentile rank achieved by students in each grade.

* The chart also has a category labeled % LEP. That shows the percentage of the students taking the reading test who were classified as “limited English proficient.” Categories with a higher percentage of such students will tend to have lower scores, in part because these students may have had difficulty understanding the questions, which were all in English.

Even among experts, there is no one view on what a percentile rank tells about performance. But a 50 means that, taken together, the students in that grade were right at the national average when measured against a sample of their peers across the country--even though some students may be doing quite well and others poorly.

A percentile rank of 25 or less suggests that many of the students are doing poorly when measured against the national sample. A rank of 75 or above shows that a high percentage of students are doing well.

Statewide

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% LEP Grade Read Math Lang. Spell tested 2 39 43 40 38 27 -- 3 36 42 39 38 26 -- 4 40 39 44 36 24 -- 5 40 41 44 38 22 -- 6 43 48 47 40 20 -- 7 41 45 49 42 18 -- 8 44 45 47 36 16 --

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Social % LEP Grade Read Math Lang. Science Science tested 9 34 50 47 43 42 14 10 32 43 36 44 38 12 11 37 46 43 44 54 11

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Orange County

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% LEP Grade Read Math Lang. Spell tested 2 45 51 48 44 35 -- 3 42 50 45 43 33 -- 4 46 48 51 44 30 -- 5 46 50 52 44 27 -- 6 51 59 55 49 25 -- 7 48 55 57 48 24 -- 8 50 55 54 41 23 --

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Social % LEP Grade Read Math Lang. Science Science tested 9 38 57 53 48 47 18 10 37 52 43 50 44 17 11 43 56 50 51 61 15

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