Foshay Middle School Students Make Stanford 9 Strides

Middle school students attending Foshay Learning Center, one of the first schools to adopt the Urban Learning Centers school reform model, continued to improve on their Stanford 9 scores for the third year in a row, according to data released by the California Department of Education.

The highest gains were made by eighth-grade students in reading, whose scores since first taking the standardized test while in the sixth-grade in 1998 have risen nine percentile points from 20 to 29. In addition, those same students saw an increase of five percentile points in their math scores, from 22 to 27, during the same time period as well as a leap of 8 percentile points, from 24 to 32 in their language scores. While the national average for the Stanford 9 is the 50th percentile, and Foshay students are still well below that average, the gains are nevertheless significant, said Dr. Greta Pruitt, director of the Urban Learning Centers.

"We're talking about a significant change," Pruitt said. "Anything over five percentile points is big. That kind of improvement is not easy to show especially in a low socio-economic area where 70 to 80 percent of the students are limited English proficient."

Results for Foshay's high school students were mixed. From 1998 to 2000 reading and language scores for 11th-grade students, who first took the test as ninth-graders in 1998, rose six and three percentile points (29-37, 44-47) respectively. In math, those same students' scores fell three percentile points from 43-40, but remained near the district average of 42.

Stanford 9 scores reflect subjects tested at each grade level: reading, written expression, mathematics, spelling, for grades 2 through 8; reading, writing, mathematics, science, social science, for grades 9 through 11. The results reflect the scores of all English-speaking students and all students who come from other language backgrounds as well as the scores of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students.

Since 1994, Foshay Learning Center has been operating under the Urban Learning Centers model, a comprehensive design for school reform that initiates a continuous improvement process in three component areas of teaching and learning, governance and management and learning supports that strive to overcome student and family barriers to learning.

Results for all grades, schools and districts in all categories are available on the Internet at a state Web site at http://www.cde.ca.gov.

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