Data obtained by LA School Report show how each LA Unified high school’s scores on the state standardized tests improved or declined over the past two years.

The district overall showed a 3 percentage point increase in math scores and a 6 percentage point increase in English language arts test scores. The improvements came along with increases statewide in the second year of the new assessments, which are aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Sylmar Charter High School ranked seventh among high schools in its improvements on math tests, despite a well-publicized lunchtime brawl that fell during testing. On the tests taken this spring, 27 percent of Sylmar students met or exceeded standards. The previous year, 12 percent of Sylmar students met or exceeded standards. Read how data analysis and a new collaborative effort led to success.

Here are the top 10 high schools that showed the highest improvements on the math tests. The data do not include independent charter schools.

• Venice High School improved by 29 percentage points for students who met or exceeded standards.
•  Middle College High School improved by 20 percentage points.
•  Downtown Business Magnet improved by 17 percentage points.
• Chatsworth Charter High School improved by 17 percentage points.
• Academy of Scientific Exploration at Cesar Chavez Learning Academies improved by 17 percentage points.
• Solis Learning Academy improved by 16 percentage points.
• Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets: Health and Sports Medicine improved by 15 percentage points.
• Sylmar Charter High School improved by 15 percentage points.
• Reseda High School improved by 15 percentage points.
• Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy improved by 15 percentage points.

At Venice High School and Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets: Health and Sports Medicine, the data showed that there was a large increase in the number of students who took the test this year compared to the previous year.

At Venice, 77 students took the math test in 2015 compared to 359 students this year. At WESM, 132 students took the math test in 2015 and 288 students took the test this year.

Venice High School Principal Oryla Wiedoeft said about 80 percent of students opted not to take the test last year, but the school had a much higher level of participation this year after an effort by administrators and teachers to get the students to see the value in taking the test and doing their best. 

Of the 112 high schools included in the data, 77 schools improved in math scores by at least 1 percentage point compared to 2015. Thirty-three schools showed no improvement or test scores declined; 2015 test results for two schools were not available.

Habor Teacher Preparation Academy was the top-performing school on the math test this year among all district high schools: 80 percent of the school’s 116 students who took the test met or exceeded standards.

EdSource and the California Teachers Association conducted the online survey and released the results today.

Fewer than a third of the teachers said their districts have clear definitions of college and career readiness, according to the survey results. The survey is the first of its kind to ask for teacher attitudes and preparedness about college and career readiness for their students, which is part of the goals of the new Common Core State Standards.

“The survey demonstrates that from the teachers’ perspective, test scores are far less important than students developing the critical thinking skills they will need to succeed in college and the workplace,” said EdSource executive director Louis Freedberg. “But it is worrisome that less than a third of teachers say their districts have clear definitions of college and career readiness, and half say that college and career readiness is not fully integrated into the preparation they are receiving to implement the Common Core.”

CTA president Eric Heins added, “The survey shows that teachers support high standards for all students and clearly see a need for additional support around career readiness and creating more opportunities for students who don’t go onto college so they have the skills for 21st Century jobs.”

Respondents included only union teachers, who routinely oppose statewide tests as the chief criteria for measuring students’ academic achievement.

Among the randomly-selected teachers, nearly three-fourths say they are either “very satisfied” or “fairly satisfied” with their jobs. The survey indicates that nearly nine out of ten teachers support the Common Core, although nearly half support it with reservations.

The teachers said they needed more programs that link high school instruction with career-technical courses.

The survey saw differences in teacher attitudes depending on the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students in the schools they teach. About 58 percent of teachers in schools where one-in-four of their students are eligible for free or reduced lunches believe that college and career readiness is a “very realistic” goal.  But just 20 percent of teachers in schools where three-out-of-four students qualify for federally subsidized meals have similar attitudes.

EdSource is a nonprofit, non-partisan reporting and research organization whose mission is to inform policymakers and the public on key education challenges. CTA is the state’s largest professional employee’s organization, representing 325,000 teachers, counselors, librarians and other certified non-supervisory personnel.

The poll was conducted with support from The James Irvine Foundation.

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Via Governor Jerry Brown’s twitter feed

The old California Standardized Tests are a thing of the past.

Governor Jerry Brown just signed Assembly Bill 484, which immediately suspends the old tests and funds a trial run this year of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be taken on computers and are aligned with the new Common Core curriculum.

“I’ve said from the beginning, California needs tests that measure how ready our students are for the challenges of a changing world,” State Superintendent Tom Torlakson said in a statement.

A number of groups, including Ed Voice, Educators 4 Excellence, Teach Plus, and Parent Revolution, had urged Brown to veto the new law on the grounds that it would leave school districts with a year of missing test data, which is often used to gauge the effectiveness of teachers, administrators and schools.

“At this critical juncture in our transition to Common Core, the public needs a thoughtful, rational middle approach that both gives teachers, students and parents space to adapt to new standards, and also maintains transparency for all our stakeholders,” Ama Nyamekye, executive director of Educators 4 Excellence, said in a statement. Unfortunately, AB 484 does not deliver on this important second task. By signing this bill, Governor Brown has created a black hole of information for students, parents and teachers.”

Superintendent John Deasy had also been deeply critical of the bill, on the grounds that it only funded either the math or English parts of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments. Deasy had been urging lawmakers to fund both tests.

Deasy now says that LAUSD will cover the costs of the test that the state doesn’t pay for and that he will try to find a way to use the Smarter Balanced testing data to gauge student performance.

*This adds statement from Educators 4 Excellence.

Previous posts: Coalition Calls on Gov. Brown to Veto Testing Bill, AB 484; CA Has a Plan for Using Test Scores — Even With No Tests (Updated); Superintendent Deasy Not Happy With Latest Testing Bill; California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data

“Most of the political experts say that parents think their children are tested too frequently, but our poll shows just the opposite,” poll director Dan Schnur said in a press release. “Large majorities of California parents, and even larger majorities of state voters, want to see students tested regularly and in a wide range of subjects.”

The poll also had important messages for teachers as voters said student performance on standardized tests should play a sizable role in evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness.

More than 80 percent of respondents believe at least some component of teacher evaluation should be based on student standardized test scores.

And when asked what would have the most positive impact on public schools, the top answer was “removing bad teachers from the classroom” (43 percent), followed by “more involvement from parents” (33 percent), and “more money for school districts and schools” (25 percent).

“In California, state law and local rules make it challenging for districts to reward their best teachers and remove their worst teachers,” said Dominic Brewer, a professor of urban policy the USC Rossier School. “Voters, however, clearly think both strategies would help improve schools. “

“There’s a basic ‘pro-teacher’ sentiment, that teachers should largely be in the driver’s seat and should get the tools, money and extra training they need,” Brewer said. “But there is a tough love message from voters: they value and trust teachers and want them to have more resources, but they also want real accountability for student outcomes.”

While teacher unions like UTLA have resisted efforts to tie teacher evaluation to classroom performance, 43 percent of voters said teachers should be judged equally on their students’ standardized test results, assessments of their classroom performance and evaluations by peers. Three in 10 said evaluations should include some student test results but should be weighted mostly toward classroom assessments and peer evaluations.

Only 10 percent of Californians said student performance on standardized tests should not be used to evaluate teachers, and 8 percent said teachers should be evaluated mostly on test results, with some assessment of their classroom performance and peer evaluations.

Californians are strongly supportive of teachers and want to give them additional tools to succeed but also want teachers held to higher standards.

More than half, 52 percent, of voters agreed that paying teachers more for exceeding performance standards would improve the quality of the state’s public schools, as opposed to 21 percent who said it would make things worse.

A plurality of voters, 42 percent, said they would choose to provide additional support and training to struggling teachers over making it easier to fire teachers who “repeatedly fail to perform at acceptable levels” (29 percent).

But most voters (48 percent) said teachers are largely to blame if a school fails, followed by parents (28 percent) and local school boards (25 percent).

Voters overwhelmingly agreed that power and responsibility for school performance should rest in the hands of local school boards and teachers, not at the state level.

Nearly half of voters, 49 percent, said the main responsibility for ensuring student success should rest with local educators; 28 percent said local school districts; and 23 percent said the state legislature.

But 63 percent of voters said they were “not aware” of Gov. Jerry Brown’s new Local Control Funding Formula that gives school districts more control over how they spend money and allocates more money to needy districts.

Most voters also didn’t know much about California’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards, as 71 percent of voters said they knew little or nothing about it.

Among the poll’s other findings:

• When asked about testing high school students, 55 percent of voters said California should test students in all subjects, as opposed to 34 percent who said the state should test students in math and English but let teachers evaluate their students in other subjects.
• When asked who should be most responsible for deciding whether a school is succeeding or failing, 40 percent of voters said local school boards should decide, 20 percent said parents, and 14 percent said the state government. Only 4 percent thought that the federal government should have this responsibility.
• While four times as many more voters believe Proposition 30 – a temporary sales tax and income tax increase to fund education – has helped public schools (20 percent) than hurt public schools (5 percent), more than half of voters (54 percent) said the measure has had no effect on public schools and 22 percent said they didn’t know if it has had an impact.
• There are at least some signs that voters are becoming slightly more optimistic about public education. When asked about the state’s public schools, 13 percent of voters said they were “getting better,” compared with 7 percent who agreed in last year’s PACE/USC Rossier Poll. Forty-nine percent said state schools had “gotten worse,” as compared to 57 percent in 2012.

The PACE/USC Rossier Poll was conducted Aug. 27 to 30, 2013 by polling firms MFour Research and Tulchin Research and surveyed 1,001 registered California voters. The poll was conducted online and allowed respondents to complete the survey on a desktop or laptop computer, tablet or smartphone. The poll was conducted in English and Spanish. The margin of error for the overall sample was +/- 3.5 percentage points.

Rather different from the usual instruction: “Pick the best answer, A, B, C, or D.” Right?

That’s because California is getting “Smarter.”

Beginning in the 2014–2015 school year, 25 states are replacing their standardized tests with “Smarter Balanced” assessments, a product of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups developing tests aligned to the new Common Core State Standards now being taught in 45 states.

In California, the new tests will replace the traditional Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments, which were established by the legislature in 1997. The STAR tests passed into history on July 1 although the state has not yet decided what tests, if any, will be used for the current academic year.

“If you take a look at the Smarter Balanced prototype, you will see that almost all the items have a connection to the real world,” says Jaime Aquino, deputy superintendent of instruction for Los Angeles Unified. “It’s about application. It’s about measuring higher-order thinking. It’s not about multiple choice.”

Aquino says the new test is infinitely superior to the previous California standardized tests, which were entirely multiple choice, except for writing assessments in grades 4 and 7.  The Smarter Balanced tests are designed to probe critical thinking and analysis through a mix of multiple-choice, short answer and extended response questions.

Not all education experts are pleased with the change.

Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, a nonprofit that works to promote quality education and testing, says the new Common Core-aligned tests are longer and “substantially more difficult” than previous tests, calling the questions “esoteric, highly technical and unnecessary for someone to succeed in college or life” with a format he says is no different from the tests many states give now.

“Because of the political pressure to develop these tests quickly and cheaply, they largely failed to revise them,” says Schaeffer. “It’s more important to get it right than to get it fast. It’s easy to develop the perfect assessment system in theory, but you need to try it out in practice.”

FairTest is calling for a moratorium on the Common Core tests. Schaeffer cites the sharp drop in scores in New York and Kentucky, after those states administered tests aligned to the new standards, and FairTest is not alone in its objection.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said back in April that the tests should not be used to judge student or teacher performance, or used in any other high-stakes decisions, until the standards have been field-tested. Education organizations, including the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association, have made similar requests.

Schaeffer suggests it will take more than three years to try out the assessments and improve them.

“In the perfect world, tests would be treated like prescription drugs,” he says. “Before you can sell a prescription drug in this country, you have to prove to a neutral body that it is both safe and effective. And you do that through experiments and trials and you build to mass administration. You don’t say, ‘Wow! This looks like it’s going to be a cure for a rare cancer’ and start administering it right away.”

In LA Unified schools, the Smarter Balanced tests will be taken on iPads. Elsewhere, students may take them on whichever devices—iPads, laptops, desktops—schools have available, with Smarter Balanced providing pencil-and-paper tests until the 2017–2018 school year to give schools time to acquire the appropriate technology.

The new tests for math and language arts will be given over the last 12 weeks of the school year in grades 3 through 8 and 11. There will be a mix of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Some parts of the test will require students to have some tech savvy. They may be asked, for example, to drag and drop fractions or decimals onto the correct place of a number line.

Students will also have to tackle a “real-world” writing assignment called a performance task, like the example above or this one. To complete some of them, students may first have to read articles or watch an informational video, like this one.

The new tests are lengthy. The language arts and math tests combined will take seven hours in grades 3 through 5 and 8½ hours in grade 11. Schools decide over how many days to administer the test. Teachers have the option to give assessments throughout the school year to track their students’ progress. Deb Sigman, California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction, says these interim tests would be a helpful way to inform teaching and learning.

“We have included in our assessment bill that we think the [interim tests] are vitally important and we encourage that the state pays for them for all districts,” Sigman told LA School Report.

The biggest difference with the Smarter Balanced assessments, aside from the fact that ultimately they will all be given on computers, is that they will adjust to the student taking them. Questions become more difficult or easy depending on how a student answers previous questions. The benefit, according to the Smarter Balanced website, is that the tests are individualized and can more quickly pinpoint the skills students have mastered.

“Struggling students who can’t answer the more difficult questions can be given a set of questions that can really home in on what it is they know,” says Sigman. “We’re not giving kids questions that we know they can’t answer. So it’s a more precise measure.”

This past spring, 52 LAUSD schools participated in pilot tests for the new assessments. Findings from the pilot tests are not yet available, but they will eventually be used to improve the assessments going forward.

Field tests will be conducted in the spring of 2014. In a letter to district superintendents and charter school administrators, Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction, wrote that he is requesting “as many schools as possible” participate in the field test, insisting that “this will be a wonderful opportunity for our students and teachers.”

Previous Posts: Aquino Sees Deeper Thinking but Falling Scores with Common Core, California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data

In Part One of a two-part interview, LA School Report contributor Vanessa Romo talks with Deasy about his relationship with teachers, the challenges of pioneering the new Common Core curriculum and the possibility that district-wide test scores might fall this year.

Q: Despite the upward trend of metrics that suggest the district is making progress – rising API scores, increasing graduation rates, and a significant reduction in suspension rates – the vast majority of respondents* to a teachers’ union survey found your performance either “below average” or “poor”, especially when it comes to morale and spending money. How do you answer your critics?

A: I can make no sense of it whatsoever. I have a fantastic relationship with the teachers of this district. Our teachers are doing a phenomenal job. I’ve been calling on the Board to give teachers and all employees a raise. I admire them, and I’m not confused about my mission, which is to lift youth out of poverty.

If you want to get technical about it, I don’t spend money. I make recommendations, and the [school] board decides. So since my recommendation is that 96 cents of every dollar go to schools, I don’t even know how to respond to that statement. I’m looking for partners to do this work with the teachers union leadership. I would love to have a partner to advance this work and recognize great teaching.

(*About 27 percent of the union’s 32,000 members participated in the survey.)

Q: In a speech at the teachers’ union leadership conference, UTLA President Warren Fletcher said you have conducted a “witch hunt” on teachers, and that Los Angeles “has become the teacher dismissal capital of California. While LAUSD employs about 10 percent of the state’s teachers, the district accounts for nearly 40 percent of California’s teacher dismissal cases.” Are you on a witch hunt?

A: Of course not. The board recommends to dismiss teachers when they harm children. Like when they sleep with a child or do drugs with a child or strike a child or steal money from the system; that’s when people get dismissed. I think those are morally obligatory reasons to have no one working with a child.

I don’t criticize the union, and I don’t criticize their leadership. I think the record is explicitly clear, I’ve never actually had a criticism out loud of Warren Fletcher.  But I certainly hope he wants to be a partner for the new $30 million in federal money to honor classroom practice that’s in Race to the Top. I hope they don’t leave that money on the table again.

Q: California’s Department of Education has yet to develop materials to support the new common core guidelines. In fact, state lawmakers suspended textbook adoptions until a year after students take the first mandated test under Common Core standards. How do you prepare students for a test without textbooks?

A: We can’t wait for the state. We actually have to provide for our teachers already and that’s what we’ve been rolling out this summer. There are curriculum materials for every single grade in the subject in the common core in every classroom developed by our teachers. We just launched digital texts for English language arts K-12 that was developed for LAUSD, and all of the training being done by our own teachers. We call them Common Core Fellows. We are absolutely prepared for the new school year.

Q: Leaders of the California Teachers Association and American Federation of Teachers have asked the U.S. Dept. of Education to temporarily suspend penalties on schools that score poorly on tests until teachers and students can “master this new approach.” Do you agree that a moratorium is necessary?

A: We’re making one of the biggest adjustments ever in education. People have been trying to make the case that teachers need time to train, and that’s absolutely true. I think the use of the test and accountability systems, [those] merit real pause as we learn to teach in a new way, and I’d like that to be two to three years.  But I don’t think we should have a moratorium on tests to let us know how students are doing.

Q: Do you have a strategy for managing the public-relations problem or morale problem that could arise when scores on the new tests look worse than those on the state’s current tests?

A: Test scores are going to change completely because it’s an entirely different system. You actually can’t compare California Standardized Tests to Smarter Balance. The scores themselves will be very, very different and what you’re doing is setting a new baseline. If you think that at one point you were at 80 percent, and now you’re 40 percent, so, therefore, it’s plummeting morale, it’s quite the opposite.

We were talking about this the whole week with Principal groups. People who care so much about this profession, their anxiety is up, and what we wanted to say is: Use the time to really focus on leading improvement of practice. Stop being so concerned about results until we actually learn how to do this.

Part Two of the interview appears tomorrow.

 Previous Posts: Defiant Deasy Says He’ll Push Targeted Spending Plan Anyway, Deasy Skirmish With Board Members a Long Time Coming, Board Members Ask Deasy To Explain Himself

In a news release, they identified two schools — Alexander Hamilton Senior High and Alliance Cindy and Bill Simon Technology Academy High – where the postings showed legible test questions or answers, raising the possibility of cheating.

Overall, state officials ilisted 242 schools where social media posts came during testing, including 16 with visible test items. In large measure, they said, the posts involved students posing with the covers of test booklets or with materials that were not legible and in no case were test results affected.

In 2012, the state found social media postings in 216 schools during testing, with posts from 12 schools that included legible test questions or answers.

“We take the validity and reliability of our assessments very seriously, and our schools do too, which is why we redoubled our efforts to monitor these postings and alerted school districts when they occurred,” said Deputy Superintendent Deb Sigman, who oversees assessments and accountability issues for the state Department of Education. “These postings look to be attempts by students to gain attention among their friends, not an effort to gain an advantage on a test.

Though the implications for accountability have not yet been determined, in general, if a security breach affects less than 5 percent of the number of students tested, the school is ineligible for academic awards. If the breach affects more than 5 percent of the number of students tested, the school’s API—the state’s measure of accountability—could be invalidated.

Previous posts: California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data; Slim Gains, Slight Drop in English for LA Unified in CA Test Scores; California’s 2013 Testing Results to be Released Thursday

But the greater uncertainty could lie ahead.

The plan is for all students to be tested on a new curriculum — the Common Core State Standards — in 2015. Those tests will be administered on computers. But what about 2014? The State Assembly hasn’t quite made a decision on that front, but 2014 could be a lost year in terms of meaningful testing data.

Assembly Bill 484, which has been approved by the Assembly and is currently being debated in a state Senate committee, would eliminate all of the California Standardized Tests that high school students would have taken over the 2013-2014 academic year — tests in subjects like history, algebra, chemistry and physics. Some students will take the new Common Core tests, and students in grades 3 through 8 would still take the CSTs for Title 1 purposes.

“The tests will be irrelevant,” said John Mockler, an education consultant who served briefly as interim California Education Secretary and was one of the architects of Proposition 30. “Some kids are going to take these new Common Core tests, some kids are going to take the old STAR test. Either one of those or both will be invalid, because they test different things. They can’t be used for accountability purposes.”

If AB 484 doesn’t pass, most students would take the CSTs for one final year.

Either way, California testing will face, in 2015, the same sort of rocky results that New York is facing this year, when transition to the Common Core caused their scores to plummet.

Previous posts: Slim Gains, Slight Drop in English for LA Unified in CA Test Scores; California’s 2013 Testing Results to be Released Thursday; LAUSD Shows Improvement In State Tests

“We’ve outpaced the state in the last five years and continue to, in the face of severe budget cuts,” said Superintendent John Deasy.

The district scores, however, still lag behind the statewide scores.

All students in grades 2 through 11 take the California Standardized Tests (or CST) in a number of subjects. Their scores are placed into one of five categories: “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” “below basic” and “far below basic.” The statewide goal is that every student score either “proficient” or “advanced.”

The overall scores also reflect results of three other tests taken by various grades in various subjects, but the largest number of students takes the CSTs.

Test scores had been rising steadily over the last few years, but results this year suggest that the trend may be leveling off, with scores essentially unchanged from last year.

As the above chart shows, the percentage of students in LAUSD deemed proficient or advanced rose, albeit by less than a percentage point, in a number of subjects: math, history and science. The one subject that showed declines was English-language arts, where the percentage of students scoring above “basic” fell by a third of a percent, to 54.1 “proficient” and “advanced,” from 54.4 percent.

English scores dropped among students in elementary school, while they actually rose among students in 7th through 11th grades.

“Statistically, it’s difficult for me to understand why there’s been a slight drop,”
said Deasy, speaking of the English scores as a whole. “We can’t make sense of the state trend either.”

State scores fell this year, after rising every year since 2004

Statewide, test scores fell in both math and English. In a press release State Superintendent Tom Torlakson said did not directly address the slight drop in state scores, although he did suggest that “schools across the state continued to deal with the effects of years of budget cuts and financial uncertainties throughout the 2012-13 school year.”

Deasy pointed out that other important metrics of student achievement in LAUSD showed improvements this year.

“Our graduation rate is about to come out, and that went up again,” he said. “Our AP test score went up, and the number of students taking them went up. Suspensions were down.”

When asked why test scores showed little to no progress even as other numbers improved, he replied, “It’s counter-intuitive. Usually they’re aligned. But to hold flat means we held onto our previous gains.”

Indeed, the district’s gains in just the last five years have been impressive. Since 2008, the percentage of students scoring above “basic” in English has risen by more than 13 points. In the subject area of history, it has improved by 15 points; in math, by more than 10 points.

While black and Hispanic students in particular have shown impressive gains over the years, their test scores are still lower than those of white students, at both a district and statewide level.

“The long-standing achievement gap among student groups remains a matter of great concern and considerable challenge,” said Torlakson.

This was the last year that most students will take the CSTs as LAUSD begins to transition to the Common Core curriculum, a new set of federal standards. By 2015, all students will — supposedly — be taking standardized tests on computers.

“As valuable as (the testing) has been, we’re getting ready to raise the bar in California’s schools,” said Torlakson. “This coming year, many students will have their first chance to try tests that measure their preparation for college and the world of work. That’s a huge challenge for every part of our education system—but one we have to tackle to give every student the opportunity to prepare for a bright future.”

Previous posts: California Student Test Scores Coming Later This Morning, California’s 2013 Testing Results to be Released Thursday; LAUSD Shows Improvement In State Tests

Charter Schools See Largest Boom Since Their Inception 20 Years Ago
Charter schools across the United States are proliferating and expanding at a record pace, with the trend particularly pronounced in California and Los Angeles County. LA Daily News

California Schools Asked to Put Moratorium on Controversial Bonds
State’s treasurer and schools chief ask districts to avoid capital appreciation bonds until governor and lawmakers can weigh proposals to restrict their use. LA Times

L.A. County’s Teen Court Aims to Put Kids Back on Right Path
Van Nuys High hosts one of 18 Teen Court programs operating in Los Angeles County, where students hear the cases of first-time juvenile offenders accused of nonviolent misdemeanors like petty theft, tagging and drug possession. LA Daily News

Green Dot Charter Group to Reorganize Locke High
In a move to address the slumping academic performance of incoming ninth-grade students, charter school operator Green Dot Public School is proposing to reorganize Locke High School in Watts. LA Times
See also: LA School Report

Older School Systems Will Support New Computer-Adaptive Testing
There has been growing concern among officials in California – as well as other cash-strapped states – that the existing array of computers being used in districts may not have the hardware or operating systems to properly administer sophisticated tests. SI&A Cabinet Report

Legislative Leaders Assert Role in Shaping School Finance Plan
Gov. Jerry Brown hasn’t yet presented the substance of his plan to reform K-12 school finance, but already he’s in a disagreement with the Legislature over its form. EdSource

Crush of Education Laws Await Renewal in Congress
The new, still-divided Congress that took office this month faces a lengthy list of education policy legislation that is either overdue for renewal or will be soon, in a political landscape that remains consumed with fiscal issues. EdWeek

It’s not that Deasy opposes all changes to the current testing and accountability system. LAUSD is one of eight districts seeking a waiver from No Child Left Behind from Washington.  Previous posts:  Deasy Opposes Reduced Testing

To Lock Classroom Doors or Not?
After the Newtown and Taft shootings, educators in L.A. debate whether teacher transparency or school security is paramount. LA Times

With Facilities All Over Los Angeles County, School Districts Protest Stormwater Parcel Tax
Los Angeles County officials want to cut pollutants by capturing runoff close to where it falls. They’d pay for it with a property tax. Schools are big time property owners in every neighborhood – and they have protested the proposal. KPCC

Parents Protest Pending Closure of La Mirada School
A group of parents and employees took to the streets Friday night to protest the proposed closure of Dulles Elementary School. Long Beach Press-Telegram

Feedback: Here’s What You Think About the State’s Changes to Standardized Tests
Many of you said students are not receiving a balanced education because teachers devote too much time classroom time teaching to the test. KPCC

Longer School Year: Will It Help or Hurt U.S. Students?
Did your kids moan that winter break was way too short as you got them ready for the first day back in school? They might get their wish of more holiday time off under proposals catching on around the country to lengthen the school year. Huff Po

California Drops to 49th in School Spending in Annual Ed Week Report
California tumbled two more spots, to 49th in the nation in per-pupil spending, in Education Week’s latest annual Quality Counts report, released last week. EdSource

Plan Ordered to Save Mechanics School at Van Nuys Airport
The Los Angeles City Council on Friday ordered local officials to develop a detailed plan to save a popular aircraft mechanics school at Van Nuys Airport. LA Times

School Shooting Victim Expected to Recover
Officials try to determine a motive, with the Kern County sheriff saying the assailant believed that the two students he targeted had bullied him. LA Times

Southern California Schools to Benefit From Gov. Jerry Brown’s Budget
California’s public schools are the big winners in Gov. Jerry Brown’s “breakthrough” budget plan, with education leaders saying they hope to have the money to restore many of the public services gutted by years of recession. LA Daily News, KPCC

With More Money to Spend, Brown Launches K-12 Funding Reform
Gov. Jerry Brown yesterday proposed an unfamiliar budget for public education in the state – one with actual increases. EdSource

In CA, Standardized Teacher Evaluations Trip Over Wealth Gap
As California tries to come up with a more robust way of evaluating teachers, the biggest hurdle could be something educators don’t have any control over: the state’s increasing socioeconomic disparities. La Opinion/New American Media

L.A.’s Economy Depends on Higher Education
Education attainment — or lack thereof — is poised to singlehandedly decide our economic future. LA Daily News Op-Ed

Early Childhood Funding Stays Flat in Governor’s Budget
After years of funding cuts to early childhood programs, Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget would keep funding levels nearly the same as last year. EdSource

College Admission May Get Easier as Ranks of High School Graduates Drop
High school graduates will face less competition for college admission in the next decade due to a demographic decline in their ranks, according to a report on education enrollment trends released Wednesday. LA Times

Brown Contemplates Withdrawing From School Construction Funding
With one hand, Gov. Jerry Brown gave school facility managers the proposed benefit of $450 million generated by the closing of tax loopholes from the passage of Proposition 39 in November. But with the other hand, the governor raised the specter of the state leaving altogether its traditional role as a funding partner in school construction projects overall. SI&A Cabinet Report

Suspension, Expulsion Data Cast Harsh Light on Some Schools
An Education Week analysis of data collected by the U.S. Department of Education illustrates the wide variation in how schools use out-of-school suspension and expulsion to discipline students. It also calls into question the validity of the data for some schools. EdWeek

New Silver Lake Principal Will Be Closely Watched by Parents
A new principal has taken charge of Ivanhoe Elementary, the high-achieving Silver Lake school whose lofty test scores are the pride of the neighborhood. The Eastsider

Schools are Having a Hard Time Just Educating Students; It’s the Wrong Time for Unfunded Mandates
California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson took a look at the current shambles of the state’s once-shining educational system and thought: What we need is … better tests. LA Daily News Editorial

How Will New Testing Standards Change Teaching and Learning? (Poll)
California schools superintendent Tom Torlakson unveiled a plan yesterday to completely overhaul the tests K-12 students take every spring as the state moves toward adopting a new curriculum, called the Common Core, by 2015. What do you think? KPCC

LAPD Officer Arrests Armed Gang Member Outside Pico-Union Elementary School
An effort to increase security at local schools paid off at one elementary just one day after it began. ABC LA

EdWatch 2013: School Safety Issues Emerge
California legislators have responded to the Connecticut shooting of school children by proposing three new gun or ammunition control laws, but so far only one bill that specifically deals with school safety. EdSource

Groundbreaking Agreement Continues to Ignore Parent Voice
It is clear that the United Teachers of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unifed School District don’t see eye to eye on many things, especially around the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Families in Schools Editorial

Second Phase of L.A. Arts Fundraising Plan Begins
‘Art Matters’ campaign has brought in more than $750,000 in the last three months for arts in the public schools. LA Times

Student Test Scores Can Identify Effective Teachers, Study Finds
Student standardized test scores can accurately identify effective teachers, especially when combined with classroom observations and pupil surveys, according to a major national study released Tuesday. LA Times
See also: Ed Week, WSJ, Washington Post 

Democrats Refuse to Endorse a Candidate in Los Angeles Mayor’s Race
Democrats also refused to endorse Los Angeles Unified School District Board Member Monica Garcia as she defends her seat against five challengers. KPCC

Parent Demand Leads Mojave Desert Elementary to Convert to Charter School
A Mojave Desert school district has unanimously approved the new operator of the nation’s first school to be converted to a charter by parent demand. KPCC

Activists Want Guidelines for L.A. School Police
Call for “parameters” as city police, post-Newtown, sent to check in on Los Angeles grammar schools. Center for Public Integrity

Second Phase of L.A. Arts Fundraising Plan Begins
‘Art Matters’ campaign has brought in more than $750,000 in the last three months for arts in the public schools. LA Times

Cassandra McGrath’s Stories to Make You Cry
There’s no silver linings playbook when more than half of your students transfer, drop out, join gangs or get pregnant before their 16th birthdays. The LAUSD system is not a Michelle Pfeiffer movie with a Coolio soundtrack. LA Weekly

Politics Doesn’t Make for Great Public Safety Policy
After a long winter’s break, students arriving to schools across Los Angeles this morning were greeted by police officers – a feel-good change in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. LA Daily News Editorial

As you can see, LAUSD’s API score showed significant improvement, climbing 16 points to reach 745, but was still below California’s statewide goal for an 800 API score. When it came to the district’s AYP score, which is a broader federal measure of how a school district is progressing, LAUSD did not meet AYP target goals for student performance or graduation rates. LAUSD did, however, meet participation rates in math and English/language arts.

LAUSD was not alone in its struggle to meet AYP goals, and both AYP and API are incomplete measures of school effectiveness.

Previous posts: No NCLB Waiver — No “Freeze”, Testing Problems at 2 LAUSD Schools

This is all good news.  But scores for Algebra, which is usually taught in high school, looked pretty dismal by comparison even though they were showing improvement.  Why are high school students so bad at math, and what if anything can LAUSD do about this? I put that question to Mark Ellis, a Professor of Secondary Education at Cal State Fullerton who specializes in mathematics, and he gave me some interesting answers.

LAUSD’s English scores showed real improvement (see a full breakdown of scores here). But as you can see from the following chart only 15% of 9th graders scored proficient or advanced in Algebra I, and that number drops to 9% in 10th and 11th grade.

Compare that with scores on the English-Language Arts part of the test, where 39% of 9th graders are proficient or advanced, a number that holds steady in 10th and improves to 41% in 11th.

The raw differences are pretty stark, even though they have improved over the last few years, and their improvement has largely tracked improvement in other subjects. Here is a chart of 9th grade mean CST scores in three different subjects:

“In this country, we lag behind in high school math,” he says. “Kids do reasonably compared with other countries when they’re young, and the gap gets wider as they get older. Once the kids get into more abstract math like geometry and algebra, they’ve not done so well.”

As to why, Ellis gives three explanations:

1. Cultural Beliefs: “Many people in the U.S. believe that mathematics is tied to ability – some people have it and some don’t.  In other countries, it’s the effort that matters more.  The result is, it’s a lot easier for people here to give up on math.”

2. How Math is Taught:  “In other countries, math is learned as a set of conceptual structures.  Mathematics is a very logically structured set of ideas, and it should be learned that way. Yet in the U.S., we learn it as set of skills to be memorized and mimicked.” Ellis says that students can get by with memorization and superficially understanding of math for a while– until about middle school. Once they get to Algebra and Geometry, their lack of understanding of the logic behind math catches up to kids, and their performance plummets. They see Algebra as this meaningless exercise in abstraction, and not as a continuation of a set of logical rules.

3. Assessments:  “No Child Left Behind forced states to create these assessment systems  that tend to be about low-level knowledge. That has led to the narrowing of the curriculum, rather than the approach of critical thinking.”

Ellis, however, hopes that adoption of the Common Core Standards by the LAUSD and other school districts will start to build momentum toward learning math in a new and (according to Ellis) better way.

Superintendent John Deasy has set some fairly lofty goals for the district– in four years, no student will be allowed to graduate without passing the “A through G courses” which include Algebra and Geometry. Despite modest improvements, it looks as if those high school math scores will be the biggest roadblock to Deasy’s goal.

The piece quotes a pleased Superintendent John Deasy:

We’ve put a great deal of emphasis in this district on English-language arts, we’ve put a great deal of emphasis on reclassifying our English-learners (in language fluency) and we’ve put a great deal of emphasis in terms of algebra… When the district puts strong emphasis on something, and provides support and clear expectations, we are really delivering.

Deasy singled out schools with alternative models, such as Pilot Schools and Partnership for LA schools as having made even stronger gains: “[I]n many cases, gains are occurring faster in schools that have had different structures and sets of supports than `traditional’ schools.”

KPCC’s Tami Abdollah notes: “LAUSD math gains were flat or smaller than English improvements for the district in elementary and secondary education, respectively. In second grade, math scores dropped by 3  percentage points to 57 percent proficient or better.” (See: California test scores: LA Unified, state schools gain in English, math)

You can find a summary of LAUSD’s STAR Test results here, and a complete grade-by-grade breakdown here.

Steinberg’s school accountability rewrite set for passage SI&A: Legislation approved Thursday would remake the state’s accountability system for public schools by reducing the role of standardized testing and incorporate new college-and career-readiness measurements.

Crisis Counseling, Parent Meeting at School Where Driver Crashed Into Students NBC: 14 people, most of them children, were injured when a 100-year-old backed his Cadillac into a group near the South Los Angeles school.Teacher removed from classroom at Haskell Elementary in Granada Hills Daily News: Administrators contacted the Los Angeles Police Department and reassigned the unidentified teacher to a district office after receiving a complaint of child abuse, an LAUSD spokesman said.

Measure to improve student success at California Community Colleges clears hurdle KPCC: California legislators voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure Thursday that aims to streamline the path to student graduation, certification and transfers in the California Community Colleges.