County Tops Southland in Reading on State Tests

Ventura County schools posted some of the highest scores in Southern California on a historic test of basic skills, topping every other Southland county in reading and edging close to Orange County in science, while lagging further behind in math.

Paced by schools in Camarillo and the Conejo Valley, average scores posted on the Stanford 9 exam ranked Ventura County 19th overall out of the state’s 58 counties in reading, 20th in math and 26th in science.

The bulk of the counties topping the list in those subjects are home to small, rural school districts with relatively few students who struggle to speak English, educators said.

In reading, Orange County ranked 27th, San Diego County 28th and Los Angeles County 54th. And in math, Orange County ranked 9th, San Diego 19th and L.A. 46th. Ventura County students scored below San Luis Obispo County in reading, science and math, but beat out neighboring Santa Barbara County in those subjects.

“I am pleased with the scores as a starting point for future improvement,” Ventura County schools Supt. Charles Weis said of the exam, an unprecedented effort to measure the academic performance of public schoolchildren statewide.

“Our goal is to continually improve all students’ achievement, and [the test] is one more tool to assist us,” he added. “Districts are taking these test results seriously, and I am convinced they will strive to help each student reach higher standards of achievement.”

The Stanford 9, the first standardized tests in California since 1994, was given this spring to an estimated 4.2 million students in grades 2 through 11, including about 96,000 students in Ventura County.

The exam measures skills in reading, math, language and spelling for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. For grades 9 through 11, the test also measures knowledge of science and history.

After a prolonged legal battle, the scores were released late Tuesday by the state Department of Education, allowing for the first-ever, school-by-school and district-by-district comparisons.

The results show about half of Ventura County students in grades 2 through 8 scoring at or above the national average on the basic skills test.

And compared to their peers throughout California, local youngsters rose into the top half of test-takers statewide.

Scores posted by eighth-graders, for example, ranked Ventura County 23rd in the state in reading and math. Fourth-graders were at about the same level, ranking 25th in reading and 21st in math.

Ventura County’s 10th-graders ranked 22nd in reading, 24th in math and 23rd in science.

But high school students didn’t fare as well when compared to a national sample. Fewer than half the local 10th-graders, for example, scored above the national average in all test subjects, except for science.

Ventura Unified School District Supt. Joseph Spirito said he’s curious to learn why there was such a lag in scores between high school students and youngsters in the lower grades.

In the Ventura district, for example, reading scores were near or above the 50th percentile for students in grades 2 through 8. That means those students scored better than at least 50% of the students in a national sample.

But for Ventura’s high school students, 10th-graders scored in the 39th percentile while ninth- and 11th-graders barely crept above the 40th percentile.

Spirito said it’s likely there are subjects in the upper grades that appear on the test but are not being taught in the district.

“There may have been a discrepancy in what we require our students to know and what’s on the test,” Spirito said. “Now that we’ve gone through this once, we need to make sure it’s part of the curriculum so we can improve on that.”

The basic skills exam was meant to tell parents whether their children were keeping pace academically with their peers statewide.

It also was meant to tell taxpayers whether they are getting their money’s worth as they pour more than $1 billion a year into reducing the size of classes to no more than 20 students in the primary grades.

Finally, the test was meant to build accountability into schools and school districts, providing the largest attempt in the state’s history to gauge what’s right and what’s wrong with California classrooms.

Ventura County school officials last month unveiled scores for every local district, showing students in Oak Park, Camarillo and the Conejo Valley emerging as the top performers countywide.

Individual student scores should have already arrived in homes across Ventura County, but a county-by-county breakdown wasn’t available until late Tuesday.

The Pleasant Valley Elementary School District in Camarillo had some of the top performers. Fourth-grade students at Bedford, Los Primeros and Santa Rosa on the average scored in the 60th, 70th and 80th percentiles on the basic skills test.

Even the district’s lowest performing schools, such as El Descanso and El Rancho, scored between the 40th and 50th percentiles.

Pleasant Valley Associate Supt. Howard Hamilton explained that those schools are where the district has installed special programs to help students with limited English skills.

“We are very pleased with the scores,” Hamilton said. “This gives us a baseline now to try and improve upon.”

The test scores were scheduled to be posted on the Internet late last month, but that was delayed by a legal battle in Northern California.

A San Francisco judge last month ordered state officials not to release results after school officials in Berkeley and Oakland objected to the state’s requirement that all students take the exams in English regardless of whether they could speak the language.

A second judge on Tuesday allowed that order to expire. Of the Ventura County students who took the exam, nearly 14,000 were classified as having limited-English skills.

Educators around the state had long worried that scores would be low because those students were required to take the test even though it was only given in English.

But William Brand, superintendent of the Santa Paula Union High School District, where about 17% of the students are not proficient in English, said even the lower-scoring districts need to do all they can to boost scores.

Students in the high school district didn’t score above the 50th percentile in any subject. But Brand was encouraged that ninth-graders posted the highest scores across the board, given a new program established last year to funnel those students into college-prep classes.

“I think it shows if you bring students into an environment that is academically challenging they’re going to learn something,” he said. “The message is loud and clear in our district that students can learn, we just need to provide opportunity and instruction.”

* READ AND REAP: County educators emphasize reading skills. B1

* TEST SCORES: B4-B5