School district’s test

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a five-part series on how the local school district is dealing with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Sometimes Amalia Castañon asks her students to write about their dreams.

A few want to grow rich, or be doctors and lawyers, or work in law enforcement. Castañon has a dream for her students as well. In May, they will begin taking standardized tests in English, and she hopes that through writing practice, they will develop the skills needed to pass.

But if Wilson Elementary School maintains its pace from the last few years, three out of four students will not.

Castañon, a teaching assistant who works in Wilson’s packed after-school program, spends much of her time dealing with vocabulary, spelling and other essentials of the California Standards Tests. The government requires that 24.4% of students score high enough in English and 26.5% in math, and Wilson’s fate ultimately depends on their scores. Still, Castañon has other issues to worry about. Some of her students recently arrived in town and speak little English at home, and she wants them to feel comfortable with a pen.

“I don’t really grade their grammar or anything like that,” she said. “All I want them to do is write.”

Wilson, which has 190 students in its after-school program, is one of three campuses in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District facing sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act. Staff members like Castañon devote dozens of hours every week to helping students learn the state standards in English and math.

In seven years, by federal law, every student must be able to pass the same tests.

On Tuesday, the Newport-Mesa district board plans to vote to make changes at Wilson, Pomona Elementary School and TeWinkle Middle School. The schools are on year three of the Program Improvement list — a system created under No Child Left Behind to help struggling schools — after their test scores repeatedly fell short.

The hearing panel that visited the schools last fall has put out a number of suggestions for how to improve them. Whatever the schools end up doing, their fate lies on the spreadsheet. The state has required that roughly one quarter of all students score as proficient in English and math, and the standards are getting higher next year.

“It’s become a science,” said Susan Astarita, the school district’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We have to look at our work as doctors look at their work.”

Newport-Mesa’s schools, like others around the state, still bear little resemblance to clinics. Even the campuses that lag furthest behind in English and math find room for music, art and playground time; TeWinkle student leaders are taking a two-day trip to San Francisco to visit Stanford University and tour newspaper offices.

A school’s official success, however, comes down to its performance on the California Standards Tests, which were adopted in 1999 to check how well students have mastered the state standards. When the tests roll around in April and May, students must be ready to add, subtract, multiply, spell, analyze stories and fulfill dozens of other state requirements.

That can be a tough task at schools like Pomona or Wilson, where the majority of students are English-learners and more than 90% receive free or reduced-price lunches. With standards rising, though, Newport-Mesa is priming itself for the challenge.

At TeWinkle last spring, faculty members introduced the 20:15 Club, in which at-risk students get 20 minutes of tutoring at lunchtime, then 15 minutes to eat. The school recently began pulling students’ test results from last year to pinpoint areas where they need help.

Wilson, which barely missed state standards last year — 24.1% of English-learner students scored as proficient in English, just below the required 24.4% — extended its kindergarten day shortly after entering Program Improvement and developed pacing plans for teachers. Pomona started the school year by setting up weekly grade-level meetings among teachers, who compare students’ work and craft two-week lesson plans for English and math.

“We’re working as hard as we can to meet each benchmark,” Pomona Principal Janis King said.