School district continues to face test scores challenge

Sonoma schools seem caught in a paradox: high standards, low test scores, tight budgets, expensive penalties. What do test scores say about the schools’ overall performance?
Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) results recently released by the California Department of Education place the Sonoma Unified School District in its third year of Program Improvement (PI) and three of its schools, Altimira Middle School, Adele Harrison Middle School and El Verano Elementary School in their fifth year of Program Improvement. Two other schools, Flowery Elementary and Sassarini Elementary are in their third year and first year PI, respectively. Only two schools, Sonoma Valley High School and Sonoma Charter School, have met their Academic Performance Index.
When Director of Curriculum Louann Carlomagno presented the STAR test results before the Sonoma Valley Unified School District trustees at their September meeting, she cautioned them to remember that the test results do not make up the whole picture. “I feel like you’re all so insightful in seeing that this is just one part of the whole,” she said. “It’s a much bigger picture, and this is just one piece of it. [But] it’s a piece we need to address because of the scrutiny of the federal government.” Part of the challenge, she said, is that the bar gets raised every year. “More and more schools are failing to make the grade because the requirements are going up significantly every year.”
“It irritates me that we aren’t putting in more arts and music and things that really will boost their academics,” said trustee Nicole Abate Ducarroz. “What about the social or emotional? I think it gives the wrong impression for people who are looking at schools by their test scores. I think it’s up to us to educate them as to this piece of it.” Trustee Helen Marsh said she thought people should visit the schools and see for themselves. “[There’s] such a disparity between what we read in the paper and what we see at the sites,” she said.
Trustee Dan Gustafson, in a separate interview, said that judging the schools’ performance by the test scores is “kind of like reducing a wine down to a number. We do it, but it’s limiting.” Of course, he said, as a parent, he wants his children to test well. “But you’re taking this tiny snapshot. If you progress with the same kids through the years, it’d be more interesting.” As for being on Program Improvement, “It’s really hard to get off of it once you’re on it,” he said. “As you see the ramifications of No Child Left Behind ramp up, you’re going to see a lot of people falling off [because] the standards get higher as you move along.” Gustafson likened the imposed ideal to the fictional Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.”
“The cynical way,” he said, “is just to teach to the test. And I think that’s what everybody fears. It’ll just be a sham. To heck with critical thinking, just learn these two types of math programs.”
Laura Wagner, administrator of Intervention Assistance in the Accountability and Improvement Division of the California Department of Education, said, “I think we have to be honest about the fact that when we were operating under the [1994] Improving America’s Schools Act, California was one of the forefront states, along with Massachusetts. We had all these groups developing standards in all the major content areas … that were very rigorous, then, along came No Child Left Behind, which took this standards movement and put parameters on it and said [that] all kids must meet these standards, by 2013-2014, and the states must write accountability plans that are approved by the feds that say how you’re going to do that.”
Wagner said the plan had some problems. “How realistic is it when states have really high standards, to say each and every child will be able to meet these really high standards by 2014? And you hold everyone in the system accountable, and impose corrective action, when in fact, you’re doing the best you can?”
Program Improvement is part of that corrective action. “If you don’t make [Annual Yearly Progress] AYP, the district advances in Program Improvement,” said Wagner. “When it gets to PI year three, NCLB calls that Corrective Action, which says that states will implement a system of corrective action for districts that have been in PI for three years.”
In PI years one and two, Wagner said, schools have to provide a choice for parents to transfer the students ­ – “if there’s a school where they can be transferred to” – and also tutoring. In year three, if the school does not get out of PI, it goes into corrective action, and this is not the responsibility of the state, it’s the responsibility of the district. And the district has to make sure there’s a new curriculum there, appoint an outside expert, restructure the school, or take other similar measures. They may have to replace school staff who are relevant to the failure – which Wagner acknowledged is hard to do – and institute and fully implement the new curriculum. In California, Wagner said, those options are limited. Other options would include appointing an outside expert to advise the school, expanding the school year or school day, or restructuring the internal organization of the school. “Those are the things the district is supposed to do,” said Wagner, “when a school gets into year three of PI.”
By the time the school gets to year five of Program Improvement, they are supposed to do a restructuring, Wagner explained. This can mean opening the school as a charter school, replacing staff relative to the failure, contracting with a private company to run the school or any other major restructuring.
Wagner said paying for this is the responsibility of the districts, but as budget have shrunk, this becomes more and more difficult. “As we’ve gone out and looked at schools,” she said, “typically, districts are not taking all these draconian measures.” According to Wagner, there are several thousand PI schools in California, and extreme measures may not be viable – or even advisable. Replacing the school staff, for example, may not be advisable because the staff may already be doing the best job possible. “And even trying to mount an effort to say who is responsible for these kids not making it is a huge effort that’s going to be extremely expensive,” she said. And as for turning the school over to a private entity, she said, “Who’s to say a private concern knows any better about how to run the district? So what we really encourage people to do is look at the systems at the district level for supporting the school and let’s look at the system at the school level for improvement.” A continuing problem is money. “I think the whole initiative is under-funded. It’s very, very difficult in the face of having no money.”
Despite budget constraints, the school district is currently following the guidelines set up by the state, said Carlomagno. “We send letters to parents, we offer tutoring. Within the schools, they look at their plans for student achievement and with the support of Springboard Schools, an outside agency, they adjust their action plan based on best practices, and implement their best practices at the site.”
Maite Iturri, principal of El Verano Elementary School, looks at the proverbial glass half full. “Like with anything,” she said, “there’s good and bad. PI has allowed us to focus on individual needs of students – and that’s through data collection and progress monitoring and adapting our instructions to meet the needs of those individual students.” Extra work costs money, and the district is strapped; how do they manage? “We’re very creative with our funding,” she said, laughing a little and then turning serious. “We have to identify what our priorities are.” Advancing in PI means a new challenge every year. “We’re in a stage now where we’ve changed the structure of some of the programs we run. That’s one of the corrective action we’ve taken.” Several years ago, they eliminated their bi-lingual programs. Now, all students are taught in English. They also have an academic coordinator, who collects data on individual students and provides that to teachers. The important thing, Iturri said, is that, “judging us based on what happens in two weeks in May is not a fair assessment of what goes on in our schools. I invite anyone to come here any time and see what goes on in our classrooms and see what fantastic, dedicated teachers we have, and what awesome students, and to be judged by a number is not a fair assessment of what goes on in our schools.”
Mick Chantler, work experience coordinator at Sonoma Valley High School, agreed. “The test scores are indicative of a real broad, rough estimate of how a school is doing, but [it] doesn’t tell you much about how an individual is doing. I can’t imagine an employer would pay much attention to what the district status is. They would pay more attention to the individual before them.”
Sonoma Valley Unified School District Superintendent Pamela Martens said that while the test scores are only part of the picture, they are an important part, and the district is working hard to improve them. “Like many school districts in California, the test scores are not what we want them to be. And we recognize that it is only one measure, but it’s important. If you just focus on the test scores, people don’t see the other marvelous things going on. On the other hand, we are now implementing – and they have in the past – even more measures to raise the academic achievement of the students.” This would mean more intervention strategies, additional materials and staff development, but that’s where the budget problem intrudes. “That’s what the big challenge is,” Martens said. “In the past I was able to add staff to reduce class sizes in some areas, but we’re going to have to look at the budget now in terms of what the state is doing.”
Wagner said the NCLB law, established in 2001, was due to be reauthorized by 2006,and that would have given an opportunity for discussion and adjustment according to reality, but “in view of politics, economy, mortgage melt-down,” she said, “it’s probably not going to be the first priority of the next president.”