What the Scores Tell Us

The academic achievement of Los Angeles County schools continued to lag significantly behind that of schools statewide--and behind most other counties with large urban centers, according to scores released Monday.

Of the 58 counties statewide, Los Angeles ranked 50th in overall results in the Stanford 9 test. About 39.8% of county students scored at or above the 50th percentile, which is considered the national average, compared with 49% statewide.

Counties scoring below Los Angeles were mostly rural. A number of more urban counties, such as San Francisco, San Diego, Alameda and Sacramento, scored at or above the 50th percentile.

The difference between the county and state was even greater in middle and high schools in all basic subjects: reading, mathematics, language and spelling.

The test score gap underlined the vexing problems educators face in boosting performance in areas with large numbers of English learners and low-income students. In Los Angeles County, about 36% of public school students speak limited English and 59% receive free or reduced priced lunches.

“Now we need to seek out the pockets of excellence,” said Eva Baker, co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. “We have to study them and copy them. Then we have to use that knowledge to turn Los Angeles around as quickly as possible.”

There also was plenty of good news for Los Angeles County schools.

Scores improved in all areas with the exception of 10th-grade science, which was unchanged. And while the county started from a lower baseline score, its growth roughly paralleled the state’s, said Robert Ryan, assessment consultant for the Los Angeles County Department of Education.

“Like the state,” Ryan said, “we saw greater improvements in grades 2 and 3, more modest movement in grades 4 through 8, and limited growth in grades 9 through 11.”

As always, the highest scores in the county were seen in the most affluent districts. San Marino Unified achieved the highest overall score, with 86.9% of its students ranked at or above the 50th percentile--a notable rise of 7 percentage points over the last two years. Next in line were La Canada Unified with 84.5% at or above the 50th percentile, Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified with 82.8%, and Las Virgines Unified with 79.8%.

Seven county districts--most of them serving fewer than 10,000 students--experienced double-digit gains over the last two years. Basset Unified in La Puente posted the biggest gain: 11.7 percentage points--with 29.8% of its 17,900 students hitting or surpassing the 50th percentile.

“I’m ecstatic, but we’re not finished yet,” said Basset Supt. Robert Nero. “We’re going to assess everything that took place this year and enhance everything we’re doing right.”

A Los Angeles Unified school, Crescent Heights Boulevard Elementary, achieved the biggest improvement of any school in the county: 26.7 percentage points. Two years ago, a mere 18.1% of its mostly low-income African American students were at or above the 50th percentile. This year, the figure jumped to 44.8%.

Principal Sharon Curry chalked it up to “hard work, teaching standards, a great team of teachers and focusing on our weak points.”

“We have smart kids, but they were having a hard time showing it,” said Curry, who joined the school in 1996. “This year, they did well because we stressed standards and zeroed in on areas they didn’t do so well on last year: fractions, spelling, listening.”

Overall, the Los Angeles Unified School District ranked in the bottom half of the county’s 80 districts. In all, 39.8% of its students scored at the 50th percentile or better, compared with 34.4% two years ago.

“I’m generally pleased with our overall growth; we did not decline in any subject area,” said Gordon Wohlers, the district’s head of planning, assessment and research. “We are doing better, and we need to keep moving in that direction.

“In reading, language and spelling, our growth was comparable or greater than the state’s in the majority of grade levels,” he said. “In math, that wasn’t the case. The state outpaced us.”

Los Angeles Board of Education member Caprice Young predicted that reform programs implemented in recent months will produce even greater gains next year.

“We’ve only started to roll out our new reading program, which will produce real improvements at the second-grade level in August 2001,” she said. “By August 2002, we see big gains throughout elementary school.”

As for middle and high school students, she said, “we have to build new schools for them as quickly as possible. Overcrowding is having a huge impact on their achievement.”

In a separate effort to boost academic performance, the district is reconsidering a complicated and controversial proposal developed a few years ago to extend the number of school days from 163 to 220 while shortening the school day.

The plan would also carve out more time for intervention courses for struggling students and increase class time for kindergartners.

“While the district has authority to alter schedules, we must bargain working conditions,” Wohlers said. “And the teachers union has objected to aspects of the plan that would force teachers to work 220 days a year.”