Gains on State Tests Slow Down

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.

Researchers and education leaders said it is natural for the pace of improvement to ease in testing. 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.

Commonwealth Elementary, a campus of predominantly low-income students near downtown Los Angeles, for example, shot up 99 points, or 18%, previously but rose 20 points, or just 3%, in the latest round.

“Kids can really just go so far” each year, said Greg Casino, 40, a Commonwealth teacher. “We’re already pushing the kids hard. We’re doing a lot of test preparation, and they can only do so much.”

At Tarzana Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, Principal Roberta MacAdam said it is no surprise that the first big gains of the accountability system would be replaced by more modest growth.

“You can only go so far and improve so much,” she said.

Tarzana, which sits in a quiet middle-class neighborhood, jumped 107 points two years ago, a 20% increase that brought its total score to 638. Last year, it rose 32 points, a 5% rise.

“If you have robots, you could raise [scores] by 100 points every year,” MacAdam said. “But these are kids. The growth will be slower now because we had so much of a gain.” Both Commonwealth and Tarzana for the last two years placed in the fifth of the 10 levels into which the state divides all campuses. Those groupings, with 1 as the lowest and 10 the highest, are based on their scores on the Stanford 9 basic skills exam.

The 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 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, which both can boast of having the majority of their schools in the seventh level and above.

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, based on results from the Stanford 9 exam given each spring. The goal is 800.

Schools are assigned annual “growth targets,” and those that reach or exceed them are eligible for financial rewards that can include hefty 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 really master the mechanics and pacing.

“Even the best places can’t keep growth going,” said Principal Joan Blair at Nestle Avenue Elementary, also in Tarzana. “We didn’t expect to make the jump we did the year before again.”

The school initially leaped 113 points, a 17% increase that produced a score of 762. Last year, it grew just three points, a rise of less than 1%. The school ranked in the seventh grouping, dropping one category from the previous round of testing.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re slowing down,” said Susan Lasken, who teaches fifth-grade gifted students at Nestle Avenue. “We’re not addressing the scores per se, we’re trying to educate the children.”

Some schools countered the trend: More than one quarter of the state’s campuses had bigger gains last year than the year before.

Corvallis Middle School in Norwalk is among them.

Corvallis’ accountability score actually dropped two years ago, from 510 to 497, or 2.5%. Last year, the school rose to 553, or 11% up. It remains in the category second from the bottom in the state rankings.

Assistant Principal Jon Lamb attributed the rebound to a sustained effort to analyze the results of their own regular tests and adapt teaching techniques accordingly.

Wednesday’s release of data included base scores that will be used to produce a new accountability scale next fall.

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