3 Large Districts Post Higher Test Scores

Despite significant language and income hurdles, students in three of Orange County’s larger school districts--Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Anaheim City--pulled up their scores on the state’s standardized test.

In Garden Grove, scores rose districtwide, landing at or just below the national median.

Nearly all Santa Ana districtwide scores--and every districtwide mark in Anaheim--still fell short of the national median, according to partial Stanford 9 results released Tuesday.

But in the Santa Ana Unified School District, students showed gains in almost every category tested, with the strongest improvement in mathematics. More modest upticks were evident in the Anaheim City School District, where scores mostly crept up a few percentile points or remained at last year’s levels.

Although overall test scores in Garden Grove improved by only a few percentile points, they did so almost across the board--in every category except 10th- and 11th-grade reading.

District spokesman Alan Trudell said officials were pleased with the consistent improvement.

“Any progress, no matter how modest or significant, is pleasing,” Trudell said. “But the real work lies ahead. It was a team effort to make those improvements, but now we have to dissect volumes of test score data and see how it needs to be applied.”

Some of the gains can be attributed to instructional changes begun in the last year. Elementary-grade teachers have spent 30% to 85% more of their time on reading, language arts and math skills.

One area of concern for the district, however, is high school reading, Trudell said.

As with several other school districts in the county, ninth-grade test scores were substantially below eighth-grade ones. In Garden Grove they drop by 13 percentile points between grades, a gap that baffles officials.

“This is a statewide phenomenon, and we don’t know yet why it’s happening,” Trudell said. “But if a student can read in eighth grade, they certainly can read in the high school grades too.”

Districtwide scores for the Savanna schools in Anaheim--also released Tuesday--increased in nearly every subject and every grade over last year. Second- and third-graders gained ground in every subject. And while some percentile scores last year lagged in the 30s, the districtwide average scores this year are all in the 40th percentile or above.

While the gains appear modest, they represent an impressive accomplishment in the Santa Ana and Anaheim City districts, which grapple with the urban woes of poverty, overcrowding, transiency and students who don’t speak English fluently. A majority of the students in those districts speak a language other than English at home.

Santa Ana officials credit the growth among their 44,000 test-takers to an all-out push--called “Project Above the Mean”--to bring perennially disappointing scores on various measuring sticks up to the national average within five years. This year, districtwide scores ranged from a low of the 16th percentile in 10th-grade reading to a high of the 54th percentile in first-grade language (the only districtwide score to beat the national average).

Launched more than a year ago, the Project ATM effort concentrates almost exclusively on reading, writing and mathematics, while relegating art, music, history and science to secondary status.

Santa Ana Supt. Al Mijares said beating the national average is an attainable goal.

“Lots of people say as long as you have a national percentile and national student distribution, you’ll always have kids below the mean; that’s where you’ll find the inner-city kids,” he said. “I understand that. . . . I just don’t want it to be our kids.”

In the Centralia School District, scores increased over the previous year in every subject at all but two grade levels. The district includes students up to the sixth grade.

Scores for the Buena Park-based district were above the national median in every subject but reading. Reading scores in grades two through five showed improvement from last year but still hovered just below the 50th percentile.

Centralia showed its strongest gains in math. Third-graders scored in the 64th percentile in math, which was 14 percentile points higher than their predecessors.

The only categories in which the district average did not improve were sixth-grade reading, which dropped by just one percentile point from last year, and fifth-grade language, which also dropped by only one point.

Sixth-graders at Los Coyotes Elementary captured the district’s highest score, an 85th percentile ranking in math. The same students also scored in the 79th percentiles in language and spelling.

The Stanford exam, given in grades two through 11, measures basic skills, such as reading, math, written expression, science and social science, depending on the grade level. (Santa Ana also tests first-graders.) Student scores are ranked against those from a national pool of test takers.

By definition, the 50th percentile is the national median, with half the pool scoring higher and half scoring lower.

In the Anaheim City school system, no districtwide averages reached the 50th percentile; most ranged in the bottom third.

Savanna students performed at or near the national average in nearly every subject. Only reading and spelling scores lingered predominantly in the 40s, with second-graders averaging in the 51st percentile and every other grade lower.

There were some exceptional improvements at individual schools.

Sixth-grade spelling scores shot up 24 percentile points to the 68th percentile at Cerritos Elementary School. And scores among second-graders at Cerritos and Hansen Elementary rose significantly from the previous year’s second-graders. The trend did not continue among Hansen’s third-graders, however. Their scores were lower than last year’s third-graders in every subject.

Full scores for the Anaheim City, Centralia, Garden Grove, Savanna and Santa Ana school districts will run in future editions of The Times.