State’s Students Score Key Gains on Stanford 9 Test

California public school students improved their performance on the third annual Stanford 9 exam, with second- and third-graders racking up the most impressive gains, the state Education Department reported Monday.

A majority of students statewide achieved the national average in two key subject areas: language skills and math, where students posted the biggest gains and best scores overall.

Reading scores showed improvement but remained below the national average at most grade levels, despite intensive instructional efforts in recent years. The language test measures knowledge of punctuation, grammar and usage while reading assesses comprehension and vocabulary.

The weakest showing on the exam was in high schools, where scores across the board rose little or not at all.

That shortcoming aside, “there is genuine improvement in our schools,” Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction, said at a news conference in Sacramento.

She credited multiple reform efforts designed to raise achievement, including class-size reduction in lower grades, a renewed emphasis on teacher training, clearer academic standards, more library books, and remedial programs after school, on weekends and during summers.

Eastin acknowledged that the state faces significant challenges in lifting achievement in middle and high schools, where public school class sizes are among the largest in the nation.

Teachers, parents and policymakers are intensely interested in the Stanford 9 scores because the results carry wide-ranging consequences. As the cornerstone of the state’s accountability movement, they will influence teacher pay, student scholarships and housing prices.

The data are available on the California Department of Education’s Web site at https://www.cde.ca.gov. Missing from the data are breakdowns by category, such as ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status and limited English language skills. The state said it plans to report in mid-August how various subgroups fared on the test.

Affluent Areas Have Highest Scores

Predictably, the highest test scores popped up in affluent enclaves, particularly in Northern California. The top-performing district was tiny Los Altos Elementary in Santa Clara County, where 94% of 3,700 students scored at or above the national average. Rancho Santa Fe Elementary in San Diego County was the second-best district, with 93.2% of students scoring at least at the national average.

Los Angeles County laid claim to the top-performing school, Whitney High, a highly selective magnet school in Cerritos. That school, with 98% of students at or above the national average, also was the top scorer in the state’s 1999 Academic Performance Index, which is based for now solely on Stanford 9 scores.

Solid signs of academic improvement cheered policymakers and educators in California, where students’ abysmal academic performance has come under fire in recent years.

“We have challenged our schools, and our schools are rising to the challenge,” said Gov. Gray Davis, speaking at Niemes Elementary, a school of about 650 students in Artesia that showed some of the highest gains in the state.

Researchers said the overall gains appeared to represent real improvement, given that the best performance was concentrated in lower grades, where the state has focused most of its reform efforts.

“This suggests there is more going on here than just familiarity with the tests,” said Brian Stecher, a senior social scientist at Rand Corp., a Santa Monica think tank. “That in some respects is very heartening.”

“Growth over two years is something that’s very desirable,” said Eva Baker, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing.

The challenge for the state now, she added, is to seek out schools where good things are happening in classrooms and attempt to roll out effective practices to under-performing campuses.

Still, test critics contended that the state’s increasing reliance on Stanford 9 scores to hold students and teachers accountable for achievement increases the likelihood that some instructors will “teach to the test” or even cheat.

Asked about concern that pressure to achieve on this one test could detract from educational quality, Eastin said:

“I worry when I hear, as I heard from a teacher, that her principal said, ‘No more field trips. We’re just going to stay here and get ready for the test.’ That’s not good.”

Researchers agreed with Eastin that reforms appear to have aided the state’s drive to raise scores, but they cautioned that the chaotic pace of reform makes it tricky to pinpoint what is having the most influence.

In recent years, reforms have included the shrinking of class sizes in lower grades as well as in ninth and 10th grades in some subjects, a prohibition on most bilingual education programs, new state standards for reading and math, a new high-stakes accountability system, elimination of the system under which many students were promoted regardless of academic readiness, and early reading initiatives.

Stecher noted that it would be impossible to separate out the effects of those multipronged reform efforts. As a result, he added, the state may never know which factors do the most good--or which might actually hinder educational quality.

The data released Monday were statewide scores for grades, schools and districts. Many districts, including several in Los Angeles and Orange counties, have been rolling out results for the last several weeks. Districts, meanwhile, are in the process of mailing individual student reports to parents.

The Stanford 9 exam, which is given each spring to students in grades two through 11, is published by Harcourt Educational Measurement of San Antonio. Students in grades two through eight are tested in reading, spelling, mathematics and language skills, such as grammar and punctuation. Students in grades nine through 11 are tested in reading, language skills, math, history-social science and science.

Students’ results are rated against those of a national sample. Eastin noted that the sample bears little resemblance to California’s student population. Only about 2% of the sample are students who do not yet speak or read English fluently. In California, that number is 25%; an additional 13% of California students who are deemed to have fluency with English speak a different language at home.

The 2000 test was taken by 4.3 million students in the state, 94% of those eligible.

For the second year, the Stanford 9 also included items designed to test students’ mastery of California’s rigorous new academic standards in math and English. Next year, the state hopes to add questions on science and history at the high school level. Eventually, Eastin said, the core Stanford 9 test will recede in importance as the standards-based test becomes reliable and counts for more.

Scores Determine How Money Is Distributed

Results on the multiple-choice exam have assumed huge importance in the last year. Originally intended simply as a way to compare California students, schools and districts against their peers nationwide, the scores now will determine how the state divvies up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of incentives recently mandated by legislators.

High-performing students stand to win scholarships; principals, teachers, even janitors at schools that meet prescribed growth targets could reap bonuses ranging from $1,600 to as much as $25,000 each. Schools that fail to improve, by contrast, face intervention by the state.

For the third year in a row, reading scores fell sharply in the ninth grade in California and other states where the Stanford 9 is used, leading state education officials to question the validity of that grade’s test.

Eastin said California and other states have written letters of protest to Harcourt.

“We are being stonewalled,” she said. “They do not have an explanation for why reading across the country goes down in the ninth grade. Our kids don’t suddenly get dumb.”

High school students’ scores were stagnant in science and social science. Eastin said there is a mismatch between what is being taught in California classrooms and the content of those high school exams.

One test critic described as “spin” Eastin’s comments about mismatches. “It’s amazing that scores are meaningful only when you like the results,” quipped Robert Schaeffer, public education director for Fair Test, a nonprofit group.

Except for some technical problems that delayed the results for the Long Beach Unified School District, the state and Harcourt appear to have avoided the systemwide flaws that delayed the posting of results in the two previous years.

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Contributing to this story were Times education writer Duke Helfand, Times researcher Maloy Moore and Times interns Tim Fields in Sacramento and Manuel Gamiz Jr. in Artesia. Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and data analyst Sandra Poindexter also contributed.

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Better Grades

The percentage point change in the number of students scoring at or above the national average:

Calif.

Reading: 3.7

Math: 8.8

L.A. Unified

Reading: 3.2

Math: 6.6

L.A. County

Reading: 3.4

Math: 7.5

Orange County

Reading: 3.4

Math: 7.9

Ventura County

Reading: 3.7

Math: 18.1

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Changes by Grade

The changes in grade level scores in Stanford 9 results statewide, with the scores showing the percentage of students scoring at or above the 50th percentile.