My book, Our School, is about Downtown College Prep, a charter high school that recruits Mexican-American students with less than a C average in middle school and prepares them for four-year colleges. This year, DCP registered a huge gain on the state’s Academic Performance Index; DCP now ranks in the top third among high schools in San Jose, outscoring schools with middle-class white and Asian students. The school also beats the state average.
The San Jose Mercury News story focuses on the mixed message sent by the gap between California’s school-rating system — 80 percent of schools improved — and the federal system, which found 44 percent of schools failed to meet at least one benchmark.
The federal target schools must hit, called Adequate Yearly Progress, doubled this year, causing hundreds of schools — including many in Silicon Valley — to make impressive gains but still fall maddeningly short. Schools face escalating sanctions if they miss the target year after year.. . . Anne Darling Elementary School in downtown San Jose gained 83 points on API, rising to 656. Eighty percent of Anne Darling’s students are Latino and about 75 percent are learning English, which made the gains all the more impressive. But the school missed AYP: only 22.6 percent of students were proficient in English language arts, and the AYP target is 24.4 percent.
The Merc calls the federal standards “strict.” But the feds are calling for less than one-quarter of students to master reading and writing. Is that too much to ask?
California’s standards test is demanding, but the amount of progress schools have to show each year is very modest.
I agree completely. I’m just appalled every time Superintendent O’Connell talks about how unfair the federal AYP system is and how great API is. Well, I’d probably think an accountability system was great too if I could tweak it every year to make it say what I wanted, like CDE can do with the API. Most people don’t realize that CDE says you can’t compare API from year to year because they recalculate the base each year. If I was the one recalculating the base, I could make it come out however I wanted. Everyone interested in this issue should read this press release for a different perspective.
I can think of another scenario where both AYP and API would shortchange a school on the ELL score: a school that has a high number of transient/turnover kids. That is to say, a high percentage of the kids enter or leave the school during the year, and a high number leave between grades.
This happens to schools with high numbers of parents in rental housing units.
Some schools– principals and faculty — are inadequate. Some are handicapped from the get-go.
Elizabeth,
I agree that can be an issue. In my day job, I help schools look at performance data to help identify where they need to focus their energies. I can say that there are a lot of schools who think mobility is their problem. In many cases they’re wrong. The difference in the performance of the new kids is either the same, or in some cases, better than the kids who have been in the school.
The good news is that there are schools who are successful in working with EL students. We need to identify those schools, their practices and get the word out to the rest of our schools so they can incorporate those practices.
Another sad thing in all this is that the place where we have the greatest number of EL and poor students are exactly where our newest and least effective teachers go. No wonder so many new teachers leave the profession in the first few years. We need to identify “Teaching Hospitals” of education where experienced and effective teachers can initiate new teachers in the best practices and they can see success.