Our View: Report card time

Test scores for 2008 have been announced, and Sonoma schools are not getting top grades. These are the Academic Performance Index base reports, posted last week on the California Department of Education Web site; they give a composite score for student performance at each school.
There are various ways to look at data, and other interpretations are certainly possible. But when we look at the performance of students at our elementary schools over the last nine years, we see gentle improvement.
The solid curve is for all students at the district-run public schools, Grades 2–5. The dashed curve is for those students in that group who are identified as “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” That represents a growing majority of our student population, including a large proportion of students for whom Spanish is their primary language. SED students clearly perform less well on the standardized tests, though the gap has been closing.
Of particular interest is the heavy line at 800, which is the score often mentioned as a target; one of our schools, for instance, has been over 800 for the last four years. When data like this was presented at a school board meeting earlier this month, the staff’s observation was, to paraphrase, “We’ve made a lot of progress but we still have a way to go.” One of the audience members asked how long it would take to get there, doing more of what the district is doing already. Another audience member noted that the curves appear to have flattened – not actually trending upward at any significant rate, if at all – we might never meet the target at the present rate.
Two other bits of data help to round out the picture. One is the ranking of our schools compared with others in the state of similar size. Acknowledged to be a crude measure, it shows many Sonoma elementary schools ranking generally in the bottom third. The other is the number of students who achieve “proficiency” with the grade-level material in the curriculum, measured by the STAR testing. The data shows that, among fifth-graders moving on to middle school, fewer than 4 in 10 are “proficient” at math, at English or at science. That is, more than half of our students, as early as fifth grade, cannot do grade-level work.
So what to do? Fortunately, the school board is pushing reform on several fronts. Springboard Schools, a consultancy group that has been working with the district for several years, has studied what successful school districts around the state are doing and they can provide a blueprint for duplicating such success here. The board is also in the process of updating its strategic plan, which is an ideal vehicle for stating explicit, measurable goals for student achievement in order to assess the progress to be made in coming years.
With each passing year, another group of students moves through the school system, many failing, according to the data, to develop basic skills and acquire basic knowledge. Their educational needs are not being met and, in our view, the need for reform is urgent.