9th- and 11th-Graders Trip on Reading, Math : Education: Oxnard high school district officials partly blame the drop in scores on an increase in Spanish-speaking students.

Reading and math test scores plunged for ninth- and 11th-graders in Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Camarillo this fall, a drop that school officials blamed partly on a rise in the number of Spanish-speaking students.

Seniors and sophomores at the five schools in the Oxnard Union High School District improved their performance slightly on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills.

But the overall score in each high-school grade was below the national mean of 50%, indicating that, on average, the 11,500 students in the district are performing below grade level in both language arts and mathematics.

“Limited English speaking students can’t read the test as well,” said district board President Janet Lindgren. “It’s a big factor.”

Eleventh-graders did particularly poorly on the basic skills test.

The same group of students who as sophomores last year scored 41% on the reading part of the test and 44% on the math rated only 30% and 39%, respectively, this year.

School officials said they are at a loss to explain the 11th-grade test results, which declined at all five district high schools: Camarillo, Channel Islands, Hueneme, Oxnard and Rio Mesa.

“I think 11th-graders get a driver’s license and then they get a girlfriend,” school board member Nancy Koch said at Wednesday’s board meeting. “That’s why their scores go down.”

The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills is one of about six standardized tests that schools around the country use to measure whether students are performing at grade level in reading and arithmetic.

Although elementary schools frequently use such tests, many high schools instead measure students’ skills with career-aptitude quizzes or college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.

But the Oxnard Union High School District began three years ago to give the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills to all of its students every year.

By tracking how students’ scores change from year to year, Assistant Supt. Gary Davis said, the district can learn how well it does at helping students improve at reading and math.

“What we want to do over a period of time is see if there is growth over four years,” Davis said.

Judging from the results of this year’s tests, which were given in late September and October, Davis said the district faces a challenge in trying to improve the skills of incoming freshmen.

Compared to last year’s ninth-graders, the reading and math scores for this year’s freshman class declined at nearly every district high school.

Even at Camarillo High School, where freshmen far outperformed their peers at other schools, the average ninth-grade score in reading dropped from 61% to 54% and in math from 55% to 53%.

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The most dramatic declines were at Channel Islands High School, where the reading scores for this year’s freshmen fell eight points, from 28% to 20%, and the math rating plunged 11 notches, from 40% to 29%.

According to the district’s analysis of the test results, the average freshman at Channel Islands High School reads at a sixth-grade level and has math ability equivalent to what is expected of a seventh-grader.

In light of such poor performance among students entering the high schools, district officials said they can’t be expected to quickly bring students up to grade level.

“We as a district have to take the students that come to us and do the best we can with them,” Lindgren said.

But school officials emphasized that they are not pointing fingers at local elementary schools whose graduates go on to Oxnard district high schools.

Davis said he realizes that the primary grade schools in Oxnard, Camarillo and Port Hueneme all face their own challenges in educating students, in particular the difficulty of teaching children who have limited skills in English.

The largest of the elementary districts that feeds into the high school district is the Oxnard Elementary School District, whose students go on to Oxnard, Channel Islands and Hueneme high schools.

About 46% of all students in the Oxnard Elementary School District have only limited proficiency in English, and their numbers are steadily increasing, said Norman Brekke, the elementary district’s superintendent.

Students without a good grasp of English would have trouble understanding not only the reading part of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills but also the math portion because many of the arithmetic questions are word problems, said a spokesman for CTB McGraw-Hill, the Monterey company that publishes the tests.

In addition to the growing numbers of students with limited English skills, Brekke said he also blames the declining test scores on the large size of classes in the cash-strapped Oxnard Elementary School District.

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Kindergarten through third-grade classes have up to 30 students, while fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms are each packed with 35 children, he said.

“I have to believe that class size is a factor,” Brekke said. “With the kind of diversity that we have in our classrooms in Oxnard, with so many limited-English-proficient students, it’s next to impossible even for our most gifted teachers to provide the quality education that these youngsters deserve.”

Brekke said officials at the elementary school districts are working with the Oxnard high school district to identify for certain why ninth-grade test scores fell.

Sample Questions

READING Choose the sentence that does not belong in the paragraph.

1. A biochemist recently observed that laboratory frogs have an amazing ability to heal themselves even when living in contaminated water. 2. He isolated a substance in the frogs’ skin that acts like an antibiotic and destroys deadly bacteria. 3. Throughout the history of folk medicine, frogs have traditionally been used in remedies for illnesses. 4. This newly discovered substance may also work against viruses.

A. Sentence 1 C. Sentence 3

B. Sentence 2 D. Sentence 4

MATH Which of these statements about plane figures is not true?

A. All rectangles are parallelograms.

B. All quadrilaterals are parallelograms.

C. All squares are rhombuses.

D. All squares are rectangles.

Answer to reading question: C Answer to math question: B

Test Scores

Oxnard Union High School District officials have released student scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. The national average score is set at 50%.

Reading Math ’92 ’93 ’92 ’93 Grade 12 39 41 44 46 Grade 11 41 30 44 39 Grade 10 34 35 40 41

Source: Oxnard Union High School District