Three Morgan Hill schools need improvement
Morgan Hill – Thursday’s release by the California Department of Education of Academic Performance Index (API) scores and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report reveal three Morgan Hill Unified School District schools need improvement.
Burnett Elementary, Jackson Elementary and P.A. Walsh Elementary, whose scores showed no academic gains this year, are now listed as “program improvement” schools under federal “No Child Left Behind” requirements.
During the first year of a school’s listing as not making enough progress, the school district must offer school choice and pay for transporting students who choose to attend the school.
The school must also revise its academic plans and use 10 percent of its Title 1 funds for staff development.
The conditions continue up to five years, each year adding another stipulation, if the school has not improved by then.
Morgan Hill Federation of Teachers President Donna Foster said Thursday she had briefly gone over the scores and needed more time to analyze the results before she could address specifics about why the three schools failed to make gains.
Certain things stand out, however, she added.
“There could be a lot of reasons,” she said. “You can have small subgroups not meeting their math scores; you can be showing significant constant growth and improvement as a school, but if you don’t hit that certain specific percentage then you are thrown into program improvement.”
The API is a numeric index that ranges from a low of 200 to a high of 1000. The 2005 results established the current baseline and academic growth targets for each school’s academic performance. A school’s annual growth target is set at 5 percent of the difference between the school’s base API and the statewide performance target of 800.
Four district schools – the Charter School of Morgan Hill, Los Paseos Elementary, Nordstrom Elementary and Paradise Valley Elementary – have gone over the statewide target of 800; and four of them are within 50 points of the 800 target – Barrett Elementary, El Toro Elementary, Jackson Elementary and Britton Middle School.
“Through the outstanding efforts of our staff, students and families the majority of our schools increased their individual scores with 10 of 14 schools making significant gains this year in reaching their school growth targets,” Nishino said. “The students, staff and community of these schools are certainly to be commended for this outstanding growth.
However, we know that our work is never done until all students are proficient on all state standards. During September, site and district personnel will work together to review specific information on the performance of student subgroups, which is critical for appropriate analysis and curriculum and program alignment.”
By law, numerically significant student subgroups within a school must also make improvement for a school to meet its API targets.
These subgroups include ethnic subgroups, socio-economically disadvantaged students and, for the first time in 2006, English-language learners and students with disabilities. As officials predicted, introducing these two new student subgroups into the 2006 API results reduced the percentage of schools meeting their API growth targets, accounting for about one quarter of the decline between 2005 and 2006. In addition, the API scores were affected by a general across-the-board slowdown in rate of improvement on the California Standards Test, according to State Superintendent of Instruction Jack O’Connell.
There needs to be some way to take the performance of English learners into account, Foster said.
“It takes five to seven years for English-language learner students to fully acquire the kind of English skills that help them perform at the same level as the English speaking students,” she said. “That isn’t anywhere allowed for or accounted for.”
MHUSD Superintendent Alan Nishino said he expects scores to get better as students get more proficient.
“Schools in the Morgan Hill Unified School District have an estimated 1,250 English learners whose primary language is other than English,” Nishino said. “These students comprise 22 percent of the students who must take the STAR Program tests and the CAHSEE in English, and these results also are included in API and AYP calculations. As our English learners become more proficient in English, they will improve their performance on these tests. This, in turn, will help raise the academic performance of the schools where they attend.”
Foster said it’s important to look beyond the scores.
Both API and AYP are based on statewide assessment results, which were released earlier this month. These assessments include the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program and California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE).
“API and AYP are simply different ways of looking at the same test results,” O’Connell said. “API looks at how much schools and student subgroups improved from last year, while AYP focuses on whether or not a school and subgroups met minimum objectives in terms of the percentage of students who scored at or above the proficient level.”
Understanding the scores as a parent can be confusing, and using the scores to create a plan to raise them is often a challenge for educators, O’Connell said.
“Both systems have led to a much needed focus on improving the achievement of all students,” he said. “Yet maintaining two distinct accountability systems is clearly confusing and often counterproductive, so I will continue my push toward moving to a single, seamless accountability system that holds all schools accountable for high standards and that also gives schools credit for improvement and moving all students toward proficiency.”
Marilyn Dubil covers education and law enforcement for The Times. Reach her at (408) 779-4106 ext. 202 or at md****@mo*************.com.
