More district 10th grade students are passing the math portion
of a state exam required to graduate but are being tripped up by
the English language arts portion, state data show.
Gilroy – More district 10th grade students are passing the math portion of a state exam required to graduate but are being tripped up by the English language arts portion, state data show.
The percentage of Gilroy Unified School District students passing the 2007 California High School Exit Exam on the first try lags behind state and county averages, according to state Department of Education numbers. The gap was fueled by a decline in English language arts scores and persisted despite continued improvement on the math section.
Students have six chances to pass the exam – a state graduation requirement – during their sophomore, junior and senior years. Data released Friday concerned sophomores taking the exam for the first time.
District staff and administrators were pleased with student math growth and said poor English language arts results do not portend a downward slide.
“Classes vary from year to year and you cannot look at one year as a trend,” Gilroy High School principal James Maxwell said. “Overall, everything has looked up except just the sophomore class in reading.”
Of the 643 district 10th graders that took the test in February, 75 percent passed the math portion – four percentage points higher than in 2006.
“I don’t think (teachers) predicted that much of a growth,” Maxwell said.
Last year was the third straight year of increased math scores, with the district’s passing rate rising from 9 percentage points below state average to just one percentage point below average.
District staff and trustees credit the improvement to a district push to improve math instruction at the middle schools.
“We’ve been trying to do more support in terms of the math,” trustee Jaime Rosso said. “This might be the first dividend.”
While 10th graders have shown steady progress in math, they performed seven percentage points worse than last year in English. The decline to a 73-percent passing rate – the same as the first year it was required to graduate in 2004 – eliminated the seven percentage-point growth of the previous two years. During this same three-year period, statewide passing rate grew two percentage points.
The decline was not the result of teaching methods but a class particularly weak in reading portions of standardized tests, Maxwell said.
“It’s consistent with how they did on (other state exams),” he said. “My teachers are saying, ‘If we had not got to them early, they would have scored a lot lower.’ ”
Superintendent Deborah Flores said staff would analyze data and talk to high school staff to understand the performance decline.
“Maybe there’s some other extenuating circumstances, but we did see some drops,” she said. “We’re going to want to in great detail figure out why.”
Big performance rifts along ethnic lines continue to haunt the district. Whites outperformed Hispanic peers by 27 and 26 percentage points on the English and math sections, respectively. This mirrors results of the California Standards Test, released earlier this month.
“I believe that all groups should be improving and we definitely want to close the achievement gap,” Flores said.
Passing rates of English learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged students suggest the widening gap was not driven by their performance.
In the next two weeks, district staff will analyze test data to uncover patterns of “weak areas,” Flores said. If students scored low on parts of an exam, the district can alter curricula to prevent future 10th graders from having the same deficiencies.
As for the more than 175 students – now juniors – who did not pass the exam, the district requires remedial classes to prepare them for the fall test administration. The district will analyze state data so teachers can instruct students in particular areas they had trouble with on the exam, Flores said.
“There’s no reason why we can’t look at every single student’s results,” she said. “If you target the skill deficiencies in your remedial strategies, you can address them and be successful. We’d like to see 100 percent of our students pass this exam.”
