The California Department of Education released on Wednesday its
yearly 2010-2011 Accountability Progress Reporting, showing a
decline in performance by Morgan Hill schools.
The California Department of Education released on Wednesday its yearly 2010-2011 Accountability Progress Reporting, showing a decline in performance by Morgan Hill schools.
Every school in the district with the exception of Nordstrom Elementary, Live Oak High School and the Charter School of Morgan Hill dropped their Academic Performance Index (API) scores.
Socorro Shiels, assistant superintendent of educational services for Morgan Hill Unified School District said a third party vendor made a mistake in coding this year’s scores, causing the ethnicity of some students to be recorded incorrectly.
However, individual student achievement results are accurate, as are local data received by teachers and principals.
The 2011 Accountability Progress Report (APR) for the state is made up of the growth API, 2010 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and a list of schools in Program Improvement (PI).
The California Department of Education told the district that the re-tallying of data will not occur until January for AYP, API and PI scores. This means current scores do not accurately reflect how subgroups of students have done, although overall achievement is expected to be close to scores released Wednesday, Shiels said.
“Our schools continue to work diligently to provide a quality education for each child that passes through our doors. To prevent any error like this affecting our system again, we are no longer using that company and we have a data verification protocol in place to double check student data during the actual testing window.”
Martin Murphy Middle School showed the biggest drop in API, with 28 less points from 2010’s 782 points. Schools are graded on a 200 to 1,000 point scale, with 800 being the state’s target score. The next decline came from Ann Sobrato High, which is now down 20 points to 777.
Schools above 800 scores for this year include Charter School of Morgan Hill, Los Paseos Elementary, Nordstrom and Paradise Valley/Machado Elementary. Schools that improved are Live Oak by 10 points to 776, and Nordstrom up six points to 877. Charter School went up 14 points to 901.
This puts MHUSD in its third year of Program Improvement for the 2011-2012 school year. Moving into the first year of PI is Barrett Elementary and Central High Continuation. El Toro goes into its third year of PI, Jackson and PA Walsh both into their fifth years, San Martin/Gwinn Elementary into its third year.
Data from 2009 to 2010 had shown increases in API points in every school except for Jackson and Central High Continuation.
