The latest API test scores have been released and can be found at:

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/ap/apireports.asp

or

http://www.greatschools.net

I find these reports difficult to read, but I think that Hatch, Cunha and the High School failed to meet their required goals.  What does this mean?

Thoughts?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell released on March 27, 2007 new 2006 Base Academic Performance Index (API) reports and announced the release of school rankings based on comparisons to schools statewide and to schools of similar characteristics. Beginning with this API report, growth targets are now calculated separately for each student subgroup within a school and set at 5 percent growth toward an API of a minimum 800 out of a possible 1000.
CDE News Release:
In part, O’Connell said:
“I am deeply concerned that significant gaps exist between the API results for different subgroups of students ... “Holding all students to the same high standards ensures a culture of high expectations for everyone,” O’Connell said. “As a state, we have a moral, ethical, and economic obligation to address the needs of every group of students.”

The dichotomy of CUSD becomes more evident— Two schools, under one roof, divided by ethnic origin!

O’Connell said. “I have begun an intensive effort to find ways to close the gap that exists between successful students who are often white or Asian, and financially well off, and struggling students who are too often poor, Hispanic, African American, English learners, or with a disability.” State Table

Under the new level of accountability
CUSD didn’t do very well with only two regular schools progressing.

The real story: the achievement gap or chasm is not really closing! .

You can click on the school name to view growth/decline in subgroups.

Similar Schools Rank

CUSD  - as a sports example: a 10 is a home run; a 1 is forgot to show up.

To explain the new ‘similar schools’ rankings released this week; try:2006 Similar Schools Rank explanation
Note the: “added the following demographic characteristics in January 2006”
Most significant variables in order: parent education, ethnic origin, effectiveness of ELL (English Language Learning) program, mobility.
The direction of CUSD’s School demographics [a dated item]: Cunha Example.
Reference resource - Accountability Research Reports

The differences in the scores shown for Cabrillo show economic level and lack of a facility in English are stronger indicators than ethnic origin. A sampling of other schools around the state shows much the same thing. This is not to deny the importance of the educational status of parents nor of the quality of English language education for the group addressed. It’s a complex situation involving cultural origins and traditions. Sure, race and ethnicity are associated with particular cultural approaches (or lack thereof) to education, but pinning those approaches primarily to “ethnic origin” is the same as pinning them to inherent characteristics of racial groups in the eyes of some less critical thinkers.

Elsewhere Ken says whites are performing 50-100 points below expectations? How does he get that? Look at the scores for whites in all the elementary schools and Cunha. All well above the 800 benchmark. These scores suggest a respectable education is to be had through the 8th grade in the Cabrillo district if the student is prepared for it in terms of language and family economics. Well, at least to the degree these scores are measuring anything. What one does begin to wonder, looking at the scores, is what happens when the “whites” (whatever the heck that covers) get into HMB high school.

Looking at schools in the Bay area, the most important inclination I would get if I were a parent would be to send my kids to school in Cupertino if I thought these test scores were particularly important. Or get the kids into schools with heavily Asian populations and economically successful households.

Carl May

Carl May

Carl,
I’ll play the game, for the moment, simply noting that your rejoinder is composed entirely of your sweeping conclusions based on unsupported observation.

A simplified view of what I did; concluding that Latinos are treated differently than Whites BY CUSD: CUSD 2006

2006                  Students        CUSD API    STATE API
CUSD Enrolment         2,466             767         721
White                  1,268             854         801
Hispanic or Latino      984              638         656    
OTHER                   214 (8.67%)
(SED)                   824              616         654
English Learners (ELL)  827              611         637

Number of English Learners by Language:
Spanish ELL 97% of total ELL
Difference in SED and ELL subsets pretty much regresses to margin of error.

That leaves 182 Latinos who are not ELL nor SED yet bring up the average by only 27 points to 638.
Basic Math: 
Latinos (who are not ELL nor SED) API = ~757

IQ or potential is distributed roughly equal, without regard to ethnic origin.
There is an unexplained gap of 97 between Latino and Anglo API scores in CUSD!
Back to my conclusion: CUSD runs our Schools as “Two schools, under one roof, divided by ethnic origin!” 

An observation: the bottom half of the State’s school are generally where most people on Coastsider wouldn’t like to drive through let alone put their children - yet CUSD Latinos scores are below those scores.

Is it disinterest in Latinos that explains CUSD lower results?

For those who are more analytical:
Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Tables for California’s 2005 School Characteristics Index (Appendix C)
Methodology Appendix B
[General Ref:)]
[API Data Files)]

For those who might want to see what their children’s scores might be,
[look up schools in the County that look like your neighbourhood::]
[Look up that school by your Demographic Characteristics to approximate potential:]

Now Carl, your turn:
Please supply from your “sampling of other schools around the state”: your sampling methodology, the school’s results URLs, how they relate to CUSD’s demographics and YOUR calculations supporting YOUR conclusions!

Ken, one glaring thing that I noticed on the page at the “CUSD 2006” link which you supplied is that the numbers for “Socioeconomically disadvantaged” and for “English Learners” are nearly identical.  The conclusion that I form from this is simply a reinforcement of my old claim that a critically important, if not the most important factor for economic success in this country is fluency in English.  Therefore I think that the primary focus for students who are not fluent in English should be a crash course to get them fluent in English.  I don’t really know, but I’m guessing that in general, CUSD doesn’t do this, and my impression from this distance is that if anything, they do the opposite, in violation of some California initiative from the 1990s.  Can you comment on this?  Thanks.

BTW, all four of my grandparents came here in the early 20th Century from eastern European countries.  None of them spoke English when they passed through Ellis Island.  As far as I know, all learned English in order to be successful.  (My father’s mother worked 12-14 hour days in the family laundry business and then went to night school to learn English She was certainly committed to learning English.)  We are doing a great disservice to society and to individuals by having driver’s license tests, ballots, etc etc in other languages.  Immigrants need to learn English.  Period.  BTW, my mother didn’t speak a word of English until she started public school.  Yet by the time I was born there was no hint of that from listening to her or reading her writing, in fact before I was born she worked for years as a legal secretary.

Leonard,
You got it - mastering English is the first step to education and education is the step to determining income potential.
        ELL = “Socioeconomically disadvantaged”

On the Coastside, ‘No English’ means farm labour, landscaping and day labour for men and for the women, working as maids in the hotels. This is not a negative statement on the work; but that these are the jobs that don’t provide adequate income. CUSD has guaranteed an adequate supply of cheap labour.

I have never really definitively concluded whether it is: incompetence, indifference or worse!

CUSD receives extra money for ELL instruction and apparently, by results, the money goes elsewhere:
[Number and Percent of Students Redesignated to FEP (with school data]

This miserable result is even worse, in that CUSD classifies as ELL apparently by parent name (if it sounds Latino to them)...if the parents complain in English, the kids are moved to the correct class and they reclassify the child as R-FEP to make it look like they are actually teaching. As a real irony, the longer the kids stays as ELL, the longer the money comes in, without results.

[upload: 10Aug06_District_Report_on_ELL: slide 24]

Your ‘guess’ is correct, CUSD has refused to look at anything which would approach, let alone match, a “crash course” criteria for English acquisition. They prefer “Sheltered English”, aka, ‘Segregated by Language’ with 80% of the ELL students. Then there is the “Spanish Immersion” called abandon the Latino before they acquire English at Cunha Middle School.  Last year, only 22 students were moved to “English Language Mainstream Class” by CUSD.

OTOH, parents of 6 kids had the chutzpah to use [CCR 11301(b)] which permits a parent or guardian of an English Learner to request, at any time during the school year, that a child be placed in English Language Mainstream Classroom and be provided with additional and appropriate services.

As to your question: ‘how can a school in California legally provide a program of instruction in a language other than English?’

CDE Answer: “Parents of English learners must sign yearly waivers of consent prior to placement of their child in a two-way immersion program.”

Do you think the CUSD waiver tells the mother there is less than a 50-50 shot that CUSD will ever teach her child English?
 

Ken