I read the lead story in Tuesday’s Dispatch,
”
STAR Test: positive push
”
with interest and a degree of bewilderment.
I read the lead story in Tuesday’s Dispatch, “STAR Test: positive push” with interest and a degree of bewilderment. Statements such as “The district grew 6 percent this year in the area of ELA, while the state grew 5 percent” seemed to imply that GUSD’s English Language Arts STAR test scores had gone up 6 percent, and so forth. But were we outperforming the state as a whole? Or trailing them, but catching up? And how were we doing compared to the rest of Santa Clara County?
So I tried to pull up the district’s power point presentation, but it took so long to download – minutes and minutes, forsooth – that I lost patience and visited http://star.cde.ca.gov to compare GUSD’s test scores with Santa Clara County’s and the state’s. Victory.
What I gather from The Dispatch story and the CDE statistics is some bad news and more good news.
Good news: GUSD’s standardized STAR test scores have improved since last year. California’s have improved also, but ours improved more. Consequently we have closed the gap and are now within spitting distance of the state average for ELA scores.
Bad news: We trail the state by about 10 points in our math scores, and we trail Santa Clara County, taken as a whole, by 10 to 20 points in ELA and 20 to 30 points in math.
Not that Santa Clara County’s math scores are anything to brag about. Their math scores, like ours, like the state’s, show a steady decline from second grade to 11th grade. This steady erosion of proficiency has consequences in high school: 52 percent of Santa Clara County’s ninth graders take Algebra I. Of those, 45 percent score either Below or Far Below proficient.
Gilroy’s math performance is worse. Our second grade to 11th grade decline is almost twice as precipitous as SCC’s. Of our ninth graders who take Algebra I, 72 percent score Below or Far Below Basic.
The good news is that we are improving. Even better news is that we are not complacent about our improvement. Instead, district officials are deeply concerned: about further improvement in general and our math scores in particular.
For example, Superintendent Edwin Diaz is quoted as saying, “The most disturbing trend that we find is that there is a significant drop off from fourth through eleventh grade. Obviously math is a problem in the high schools and in the middle schools … We have a lot of work to do …” Defining the problem is the first step toward solving it.
The next step is brainstorming, and GUSD officials are hard at work on that. They are throwing around ideas such as staff development, focus on student achievement, data teams, accountability plan and collaboration.
But the best news of all comes from the new Gilroy High Principal James Maxwell. As associate principal of Castro Valley High School, he is credited with developing a program which helped students improve their test scores and solidify their math skills. As one component of the program, he required students who earned less than a C-minus in Algebra I to repeat the course for credit.
Brilliant. Obvious, but brilliant. A student who has not mastered at least 70 percent of Algebra I is ill-prepared to pass Algebra II. ‘Twere a far, far better thing for such a student to repeat Algebra I and solidify his skills than to rush into a course where he will be building a cathedral on a foundation of sand.
If Mr. Maxwell implements his program, if the idea catches on, if elementary teachers concentrate on making sure that their students can add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, if middle school teachers separate the students who have acquired those skills and allow them to begin algebra in eighth grade, while those who are still shaky have additional time to nail those skills down, our scores could soar like homesick angels.
Scores are not the end, however. Scores are mere symptoms, signs. They indicate whether we are succeeding or failing in our mission to educate the children entrusted to us. The real victory will come when all GUSD students are thoroughly equipped, at least academically, for every good work.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a
homeschooling mother of three and former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in The Dispatch every week.
