With Scores as the Payoff, Teaching Tactics Change

At Bandini Elementary School in Commerce, teachers regularly give multiple choice quizzes that look just like the Stanford 9. Instructors pore over test results instead of shoving them into desk drawers as they once did. And the lowest-scoring students get daily tutoring.

Miles away, at Orange Grove Middle School in Hacienda Heights, teachers use many of the same strategies. And they are paying off, if these two schools’ astonishing leaps on the state’s new Academic Performance Index are any indication.

For better or worse, the Stanford 9 and the state’s new era of accountability are driving big changes in the ways California schoolchildren are being taught.

With huge cash rewards and stiff punishments hanging in the balance, officials are rethinking the way they teach as they adapt to the pressures that accompany high-stakes school reform.

“We are working a lot harder, no question. It’s exhausting for my staff,” said Anna Chavez, Bandini’s principal.

Bandini and Orange Grove are among hundreds of schools that far exceeded their goals in the first statewide gauge of academic improvement. All told, 71% of California’s public schools met growth targets set by the state. A slightly smaller proportion--67%--cleared all necessary hurdles to qualify for a share of $677 million in rewards.

Increasingly, schools are using the Stanford 9 to identify weaknesses and tailor lessons to their students’ needs. Some schools, like Bandini, even use materials intended to make students familiar with the exam’s format and content.

But most educators say the changes go beyond superficial test prep. To do well on the Stanford 9, students must have a good command of material that the state has deemed essential for them to learn.

Bandini and Orange Grove are emblematic of schools up and down California that have found success by embracing these tactics.

Bandini was the top gainer in Los Angeles County on the API released Wednesday. It soared 156 points, to 596 on a scale that ranges from 200 to 1,000. That far surpassed the school’s growth target of just 18 points, set by the state Department of Education.

The school was among the lowest performers in the state in January, when the API was unveiled.

“The scores were beyond our wildest dreams,” said Luz Hernandez, who coordinates the school’s academic programs.

Bandini’s gain is remarkable for a campus where more than half of the 557 students are not yet fluent in English and almost every child comes from a low-income home. Ninety-eight percent of the students are Latino, and their neighborhood is surrounded by bleak industrial tracts and rail yards.

With the aid of a consultant, Bandini’s teachers last year developed reading quizzes that looked like the Stanford 9 but still tested important academic skills. The quizzes were given every eight weeks to provide updates on student progress.

Teachers also analyzed students’ test scores, identifying weaknesses such as reading comprehension, and targeted students below the 25th percentile for additional tutoring in small groups.

They studied Stanford 9 forms to see where students had to answer the most questions, and devoted more time to those topics.

Third-grade teacher Diana Gonzalez prepared her students by turning the reading comprehension part of the exam into a fun exercise.

In practice sessions, she told her students to pretend they were detectives uncovering clues in reading passages. They would underline key words or phrases in the passages before filling in their answers.

“I think it relieved a lot of stress,” Gonzalez said. “In the weeks leading up to the test, they were ready. They said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

Nine-year-old David Castellanos said the strategies were fun and made a big difference in his score.

“It was like playing a game,” he said of the preparation.

Orange Grove also has made a concession to the Stanford 9. Teachers have reformatted many of their tests to make them resemble the standardized exam. But, Principal Daniel J. Hale said, “it doesn’t replace or narrow down the curriculum. It just supports it.”

After teachers analyzed last spring’s data and found weaknesses in students’ knowledge of synonyms, “synonym boards” popped up in every classroom, no matter the subject.

In Sally Wildrick’s eighth-grade language arts class, students assembled a poster of red-paper ladybugs, each sporting a variation on the theme “scold”: lecture, censure, upbraid, admonish, chide, blame, condemn, reproach, berate.

“Teams look at the data and select three areas where a large number of students fall below the 50th percentile,” Hale said. “They set that as the focus of the year’s instruction.”

Hale rejected any notion that the school is turning into a test-prep factory. Orange Grove has beefed up its training to bring teachers up to speed on the state’s new academic standards. And teachers say they encourage students to be creative problem-solvers as well as skilled takers of multiple-choice tests.

“Our expectations are very high,” he said. “The expectations are not modified because of a student’s background or circumstances.”

Orange Grove is among the most diverse campuses in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, in which each of 33 schools met its schoolwide API targets (although one did not test enough students to qualify for rewards). Sixty-five percent of Orange Grove’s 590 students are Latino and 14% are Asian American. Thirty-nine percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the leading federal indicator of poverty among schoolchildren.

Poor and well-to-do students mingle on Orange Grove’s large tarmac and grassy athletic fields.

“Our kids sleep on dirt floors down on Balboa Boulevard . . . and they sleep in million-dollar homes in the Hacienda Heights hills,” Hale said.

Orange Grove is a middle school, where academic improvements are often hard to come by. Yet Orange Grove handily beat its growth target of 8 points, achieving an 84-point rise to 718. The statewide performance target for all schools is 800.

Although Orange Grove’s results qualify him for a modest cash reward, science teacher Ted Huffman dislikes the idea of attaching monetary rewards to teaching.

Also, he warned, “Teaching to the test is dangerous. You don’t get any process, and process is everything.”