It has been a long time since California residents got any good news about their public schools. But statewide scores on a standardized test are headed up in almost all grades.

Why? You’d be hard-pressed to think of a school reform -other than school choice – that hasn’t been launched there over the past few years. Class-size reduction, back-to- basics math and reading, English immersion. Just name the reform, and you can find a backer crediting it for higher test scores.

California schools do have far to go. On tests that measured students’ skills relative to a set standard, rather than to other students, scores were dismal. The gap between poor students and others is shockingly wide.

And some experts caution that higher test scores may mean nothing at all. It’s the second year students have had to take this test, so they could be doing better just because they’re better prepared for it.

Plus, a lot of the information needed to judge any single reform isn’t out yet. Foul-ups by the company that gives the test have delayed the full release of results three times.

Some promising early results, whatever their cause, may get schools to stick with reforms now in place. For the state’s 5.5 million students, that could make the difference between opportunity knocking – or opportunity slipping away. And the test results will soon be used for more than measuring academics.

California’s new accountability program will start using test scores to identify low-performing schools that will have to improve – or face sanctions.

”While these results are headed in the right direction, it is clear that California schools still have a long road to travel,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.

Statewide, more students are scoring at or above the national average than last year – in nearly every grade and nearly every subject tested, as the chart shows. In most grades and subjects, though, a majority of students are still below average.

Students may just be getting used to the test, some experts say. Teachers are more prepared for it, and know better how to get students ready.

Scores from California’s students with limited English skills – about one in four of all students – are mixed in with those from fluent students, also confounding the overall results. Statewide results separated by English skill won’t be available for at least a week.

This past school year was also the first that tested students based on a set of rigorous academic standards in math and language arts. The rest of the test battery gauged student performance relative to students nationwide.

On the standards-based tests, students did poorly, generally answering half the questions right.

Just 10 high schools in the state -out of more than 1,200 – saw their 11th-graders get an average score higher than 50% on the math test, according to the group Mathematically Correct, a group that backs the state’s standards.

Many teachers and the California Math Council charge that the test did not test what was being taught in the classroom.

”If that’s right,” said Bill Evers, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who helped write the standards, ”then we had better get busy.”

Evers has little sympathy for claims that teachers didn’t know what standards they were supposed to teach to. The standards were made public nearly a year and a half before the test, he points out. State-funded materials linked to the standards were only available recently, though.

And Evers argues that this year’s test was meant to give a baseline, nothing more. From here, the state will be able to gauge how scores will likely improve as long as the state sticks with the standards.

The results of the tests in algebra and geometry given to students taking only those courses suggest what many critics have been saying for years: Math equals fuzziness in the Golden State.

A movement pushed by math educators to make math relevant to everyday experience, and to focus on helping students discover math principles rather than techniques for tackling problems, seems to have watered down even the more advanced math classes.

”I think part of what we’re seeing is that many schools have been teaching a course called ‘algebra’ that is only about half of what algebra should be,” said Mike McKeown, co-founder of Mathematically Correct. ”Many schools and books have watered down the curriculum.”

Backers of phonics and English immersion also point to a few limited, but hopeful, signs showing the promise of those reforms.

For example, in the Sacramento City School District, reading scores have shot up for two straight years. District officials credit their new phonics curriculum and the teacher training in phonics paid for with a $ 3 million grant from the Los Altos-based Packard Foundation.

Average first-grade reading scores there jumped to the 62nd percentile, up from the 54th last year – and the 35th two years ago. The number of low-performing schools dropped from 16 to four.

Reading and language scores in the largely bilingual Oceanside School District have also been widely touted by reformers. But its new superintendent made a point of launching new programs for these students in line with Proposition 227 – the law that requires English immersion, rather than traditional bilingual education.

The result? Preliminary results show big gains in reading and language scores, especially in early grades. First-graders with limited English skills scored at the 23rd percentile in reading this year, quite low – but nearly double last year’s ranking. Other students in elementary grades also posted double-digit gains.

Insiders also expect strong improvement to come from the Santa Barbara School District, a large one that moved to an English immersion program even before the state required it.

”If the full scores ever come out, and this trend holds up, we think the bilingual programs will start to fall under their own weight,” said Sherri Annis, spokeswoman for English for the Children, the group that initiated Proposition 227.

Annis is worried, though, about a bill moving through the Legislature that would exempt all students with limited English skills from the state tests. That would make it impossible to judge whether these students ever learned English.

Sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Carole Migden, it has passed the state Assembly and is working its way through the Senate. Annis expects it to pass, but says it’s unclear whether Gov. Gray Davis would sign it.

Statewide, test scores rose most in the early grades – and were worst in high school. That has led some to credit the state’s multibillion-dollar class-size reduction program for the gains.

”What parents and teachers have said all along is now being proved: If you lower class sizes, you will get better results in public schools,” said Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Association.

A recent state-sponsored study tried to identify the benefits of the class-size program, one of the most expensive statewide reforms ever undertaken. The program gave schools funds to cut class sizes in grades one through three, to a maximum of 20 students.

Researchers found mixed results. Students in smaller classes, on the whole, did slightly better, raising their test scores from the 50th percentile to the 53rd.

The researchers couldn’t say for sure that smaller classes made the difference. Too many other reforms were going on at the same time.

And the program did not affect all districts equally. Urban school districts were hard-pressed to find quality teachers, as their own experienced teachers were lured away by suburban districts. That fact, said researcher Brian Stecher, ”should be a matter of great concern for the state.”

So class-size reduction may not reduce the gap between California’s rich and poor students. Throughout the state, on average students from middle-class and wealthy families scored twice as high as the state’s poorer students.



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