Elementary school pupils make major Stanford 9 test gains

Scores for reading, language, math and spelling jumped as much as 7 percentile points between 1999 and 2000 for children in grades two through four, a gain district officials credited to their focus last year on improving literacy in elementary school.

The rise came as an immense relief to school district officials after last year's slight gains on a test that has become the linchpin of California's education reforms. While Los Angeles Unified's scores remain, for the most part, well below average for the nation, school board members seized on the results as proof that the immense, troubled district was finally making progress.

"When you begin to focus people on students' outcomes, you get results across the board," board President Genethia Hayes said. "These scores are marvelous to me."

Not all students, however, showed the same degree of progress. High school students made only slight improvements of 1 or 2 percentile points over last year's scores in most subjects. Science scores for grades 10 and 11 remained unchanged from last year, as did social studies scores for grade 10.

The jump in elementary scores and modest gains for high school students could reflect the district's priorities during the past year. Elementary pupils were the focus of much of the district's effort to end social promotion, the practice of letting students graduate to higher grade levels despite poor performance. Thousands attended summer classes and Saturday classes to boost their reading skills.

Board member Valerie Fields said Los Angeles Unified now needs to work on helping its high school students.

"I certainly approved of starting in the elementary grades, because we couldn't create another generation of kids who couldn't read and compute, but we certainly need to look at the other end," she said. "We cannot afford to lose any kids along the way."

Hayes cautioned that high school scores might prove more difficult to boost than those for elementary students.

"We aren't going to see those kinds of gains -- we just aren't," she said. "If you've got youngsters who have been way behind, and they're now in high school, you've got a lot of ground to catch up."

The district will not release scores for individual schools today. Those will be available July 17 when the state releases Stanford 9 results for all California school districts.

Other districts around the region are waiting to release their districtwide and individual schools results later this month, as well.

Although Los Angeles Unified's test results showed some improvement last year, scores for most grade levels and subjects rose by just a few percentile points from 1998. And such small gains are expected any time a school district starts offering a new test, said Ronald Dietel, spokesman for the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Generally, you can expect to see increases of around 2 or 3 percentile points for the first six or seven years," he said. "Teachers become much more familiar with what's on the test, as do schools and districts."

Los Angeles Unified students in most grade levels showed that amount of improvement on this spring's Stanford 9 test. But in elementary grades, the gains were more pronounced. In 1999, for example, students in grade three scored at the 30th percentile on the test's language portion. This spring, third-graders hit the 37th percentile. They registered the same gain in math, jumping from the 35th percentile to the 42nd percentile.

District critics noted that even with the improvement, the scores remain far below average on most subjects.

"That's not making decent gains," said Stephanie Carter, co-chairwoman of Finally Restoring Excellence in Education, which wants to split up the district and form two Valley school districts. "It doesn't mean it's an easy job, but it's years and years of failure."

Board members, however, saw in the scores evidence that the push to boost English skills had borne fruit and said they must now try to expand on their gains by reaching more students.

"It shows we do need to put more emphasis on the later grades," board member Caprice Young said. "But it also shows that when you put in the effort, there's a payoff."

	This article was originally published by the Daily News Los Angeles on July 5, 2000 © 2000 Daily News Los Angeles

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