Half of Gilroy’s school children have met the state bar for
proficiency in English and mathematics, a slight improvement from
last year, according to state testing data. Story updated as of
5:30 p.m.
Half of Gilroy’s school children have met the state bar for proficiency in English and mathematics, a slight improvement from last year, according to state testing data.
Annual testing results from the California Department of Education released this morning showed a small but steady increase in the number of district students performing at the advanced or proficient levels on state standardized tests. In total, 50 percent of Gilroy’s students were proficient or advanced in language arts, and 47 percent were proficient or advanced in language arts in mathematics.
“The data clearly demonstrates that we’re moving in the right direction,” Superintendent Deborah Flores said.
District students were in line with state averages, but lagged about 10 percentage points behind county averages in both subjects, according to the data. The scores, which are broken down into five categories – advanced, proficient, basic, below basic and far below basic – are calculated from standardized tests taken every spring to second through 11th graders and form the basis for school rankings.
“More and more students are moving into the proficient and advanced bands and that’s exactly what we want to see happen, but we want to accelerate it,” Flores said. “We’ve made a lot of progress but we still have a ways to go.”
Despite progress, the achievement gap – the yawning rift between the performance of African American and Hispanic students compared to that of their white, Asian and Filipino counterparts – perseveres, unchecked in many cases. For example, 30 percentage points separated Hispanic 11th graders from their white peers in language arts proficiency in 2008. That gap grew to 34 percentage points in 2009, according to state data. Although the percentage of Hispanic 11th graders performing at the proficient or advanced levels in English actually increased, white students’ progress accelerated more quickly.
“It is our number one priority to see that all subgroups are meeting the bar,” which the federal government set at 45 percent proficiency this year, Flores said. The performance of certain subgroups, like students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, English learners or require special education, require that a lot of ground be covered to make the federal goals, she said.
Data showed that a school’s overall performance often correlated with its ethnic makeup. In general, the higher a school’s Hispanic population, the lower the percentage of proficient and advanced students. The highest scoring elementary school – Luigi Aprea with 71 percent of students proficient or advanced in English and 73 percent in math – is 33 percent Hispanic. Conversely, Rod Kelley – the lowest performing elementary school with 41 percent of students proficient or advanced in English and 52 percent in math – educates one of the highest percentages of Hispanic students in the district at 72 percent.
“We must pay particular attention to the fact that a disproportionate share of students who fall below the proficient level are African American or Latino,” State Superintendent Jack O’Connell stated in a press release accompanying the data. “This achievement gap represents a loss of opportunity for students of color and remains a real threat to their and California’s future success.”
Wary of linking performance to ethnicity, Basha Millhollen, the school district’s assistant superintendent of educational services, said what’s more common is a connection between low performance and poverty or mastery of the English language.
“You can’t necessarily correlate a high Hispanic population to low achievement,” Millhollen said. “We’re more inclined to correlate English learners and low (socioeconomic status) with lower performance.”
Eliot Elementary, however, bucked the trend in mathematics. Although Eliot is 90 percent Hispanic – the highest percentage in the district – and largely socioeconomically disadvantaged, 70 percent of its students are proficient or advanced in math – second only to Luigi Aprea – state data shows.
“At Eliot, they’re pulling out all the stops with interventions here, interventions there and a lot of support,” Millhollen said. “Part of the dilemma, traditionally, is that children are put into a classroom and end up matching the pace of that classroom. In order to address low achievement, we need to have the classroom match the needs of the kid. That’s happening at Eliot. They’re the first one out of the chute to try new things.”
Although many schools boosted their math performance by several percentage points, scores that tend to start off strong in elementary school gradually tend to lag well behind English scores by the time children make it to high school, state data shows. Every elementary school scored higher on math than English, a trend that slowly reversed in high school. Even the T.J. Owens Gilroy Early College Academy, a school that consistently exhibits stellar scores, only showed 53 percent of students at proficient and advanced in math, even though 91 percent scored proficient or advanced in English.
“Math becomes more language-dense as it progresses,” Millhollen explained. Many of the test questions describe real-life situations and require students to interpret the data, she said.
Data on Mount Madonna Continuation High School, which has made significant gains in recent years, showed 10 percent of students scoring proficient or above in English and 5 percent in math, the lowest in the district. But with a highly mobile population, “Mount Madonna is impossible to compare to other schools,” Millhollen said. Also, high school students have little incentive to give their best to these tests, Millhollen said. Unlike the high school exit exam, the tests that led to the recently released data have no effect on the student. And as much as some educators would like to link students scores on the tests with credits, they can’t, Millhollen said.
“I don’t think this is the best tool to determine their progress,” she said. “But you’d be surprised what kids can do if they trust it’s worthwhile.”
Because scores on a battery of history and science questions carry a lighter weight in the complicated formula that spits out a school’s scores, teachers don’t cover these subjects as much, especially in the lower grades, Millhollen said. As a result, the district scored 36 percent and 42 percent on history and science measures, respectively.
“Math and language arts are the gatekeepers to other subject areas,” Millhollen said. “It’s not that (history and science) are second priority. They just tend to not gain as much traction as we’d like them to in K through 5.”
How the scores stack up
District English: 50.1
County English: 60.7
State English: 49.9
District Math: 47.2
County Math: 56.1
State Math: 45.8
