School Testing Gains Slowing, Analysis Shows

Improvement in statewide achievement scores has slowed as schools find progress harder to maintain in the third year of California’s school accountability program, an analysis of state data showed Wednesday.

Although the general movement remained upward statewide, two-thirds of all schools in California saw their scores decline or made smaller testing gains last year than in the previous year.

The pace of improvement also slowed significantly in Orange County, where almost 60% of more than 500 campuses fell short of their gains the year before.

Nonetheless, Orange County schools remained ahead of the pack in the accountability index. Overall, 335 local schools, or 64%, are performing better than the statewide average, according to rankings released Wednesday. The number of such schools in 2000 was 317.

Researchers and education leaders said it is natural for the pace of improvement in testing to ease. But they stressed that elementary schools serving disadvantaged students have gained the most from multibillion-dollar educational reforms--even if they find each next step up harder.

“In general our schools are doing OK. They understand they haven’t lost ground,” said Mardell Kolls, director of research and evaluation for the Santa Ana Unified School District, where many students come from poor families and nearly two-thirds are still learning English.

The district, like the rest of the county and the state, saw many of its schools unable to maintain the pace of two years ago. However, there were some notable exceptions. Carl Harvey Elementary topped its 68-point increase from two years ago with an additional 85 points last year for a total score of 615.

The school, where more than 90% of students are disadvantaged, has received private grants and its teachers are using new techniques to teach students who are not fluent in English, Kolls said. “We are using the school as a case study,” she said.

Despite the steady growth, the majority of Santa Ana schools still rank in the bottom half of the state. The state ranks schools by placing them into one of 10 levels by their API scores, with 1 as the lowest and 10 the highest.

Those rankings were released Wednesday, and an analysis by The Times showed continuing disparities between urban and more suburban campuses. A majority of schools in Los Angeles County, for example, placed in the bottom half of the 10 divisions. More than half of the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were in the bottom three groupings. The situation is the reverse in more suburban Orange and Ventura counties, where the majority of schools are in the seventh level and higher.

The rankings are the cornerstone of Gov. Gray Davis’ school accountability system, which is intended to measure academic improvement. Each of more than 7,000 schools receives a score ranging from 200 to 1,000.

The scores so far have been based on results from the Stanford 9 exam, but the rankings released Wednesday include results from the English Language Arts exams, which reflect California’s new standards for this subject. That addition may have hurt some schools.

“It had very much of an impact,” said Marisela Longacre, principal at Jackson Elementary School in Santa Ana, where nearly 80% of students are not fluent in English.

Despite steady increases in its API scores, the school dropped to the lowest percentile rank once the special English exam was added in.

“We really worked hard, and we were very disappointed,” Longacre said. “We scored higher than we ever did in the API.”

The rankings have no effect on the school’s eligibility for awards, but “was a blow to our morale,” she said. “But we are done feeling sorry for ourselves. It is time to move forward.”

Schools are assigned annual “growth targets,” and those that reach or exceed them are eligible for financial rewards that can include bonuses of up to $25,000 for individual teachers.

The California system also is designed to give schools in the bottom rungs an added boost by rewarding them with extra accountability points for test-score improvements. But low-performing schools that consistently fail to improve can see their administrators reassigned and face state takeover.

Davis on Wednesday touted the rising accountability scores in the Academic Performance Index as proof that his reforms are working.

“It is quite remarkable that tests are up three years in a row,” Davis told a news conference at John Bidwell Elementary School in Sacramento. “We believe we’ve exceeded expectations.”

Leading educators echoed Davis’ assessment.

“The gains are continuing and that’s a good thing,” said David Rogosa, a statistician at Stanford University who has analyzed the state’s accountability data. “The schools that need to make improvement are making improvement. It’s a very positive story.”

Still, Rogosa and other researchers speculated about the causes of the slower pace of improvement in the most recent round of scores. School accountability programs typically produce early inflated gains as schools concentrate on the tests and students and teachers first learn to master the mechanics and pacing.

“As you get higher, it obviously gets harder to grow,” said Austin Buffum, deputy superintendent of education at Capistrano Unified School District, whose schools rank among the highest in the state. “You can get a big jump initially if you do a lot of test preparation, but that may be a little deceiving. We took a more measured approach. We did some test preparation, but we really pushed standards teaching. What you want is constant and steady growth.”

The latest scores show that 40% of Capistrano schools improved their scores by even larger margins than they had the year before.

The state Department of Education’s accountability data for individual schools can be viewed at https://www.cde.ca.gov.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Dan Morain, Erika Hayasaki, David Pierson, Andrea Perera and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, and Times Director of Computer Analysis Richard O’Reilly and Data Analyst Sandra Poindexter.