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Efforts to improve the academic performance of Mountain View’s neediest students largely fell flat this year, according to state test results released last week. English learners and students of low-income families in particular struggled to keep up with their peers, in some cases erasing hard-won progress to close the achievement gap in 2016.
Overall scores on the state’s 2016-17 Smarter Balanced Assessment, or SBAC test, paint a rosy picture for local school districts. More students met state standards for English language arts and math in both the Mountain View Whisman School District and the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District, contrary to stagnant performance across the state. Just shy of 82 percent of high school students met or exceeded state standards for English language arts — a huge increase from 69 percent the prior year.
But the gains were hardly shared by everyone. In the Mountain View Whisman district, for example, fewer than one in seven students — or 13.7 percent — still learning English were able to meet state standards for English language arts, down from 17 percent during the 2015-16 school year. The losses were significantly worse at Huff, Landels, Stevenson and Theuerkauf elementary schools, where the percentage of English learners able to meet the state standards dropped by half in just one year. Performance in math also dipped slightly among English learners, with the largest decrease at Crittenden Middle School.
The problem is even more acute for Mountain View-Los Altos, where performance among junior-year English learners sank to new lows in both subject areas. The number of English learners who met the state standards for math plummeted from 17 percent in 2016 to just 3.4 percent in 2017 — the lowest of any high school district and unified school district in the county. At Los Altos High School, no English learners passed the test.
Only 7.8 percent of English learners met state standards for English language arts, down from 12 percent, showing a less stark but consistent trend that the district’s under-performing students failed to improve — let alone hold steady — in academic performance.
It’s too early to say what caused the precipitous drop in performance, and there’s going to be an intense focus in the coming months to figure out why English learners struggled to meet state standards this year, said Brigitte Sarraf, the high school district’s director of assessment and evaluation.
The only reasonable explanation at the moment, she said, is that English learners are a relatively small cohort to begin with — only 58 English learners took the test — and the least stable population in terms of turnover each year. The district knows very little about who they are, where they come from and how long they’ve been in the district. Students not proficient in English may have recently come from another country with an entirely different level of academic rigor, making them ill-prepared for the SBAC test.
“It’s a group for which we have zero control over,” she said.
The achievement gap has been a key concern for both school districts since the state launched its first Common Core-aligned exams in 2015, and for good reason. The test revealed that the “gap” in student performance along ethnic and economic lines — as well as English fluency — is larger in Mountain View than the rest of the county and the state. Last year, a massive data project by Stanford researchers more or less validated what district officials already knew: That wealthy Bay Area cities like Mountain View are home to some of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.
In 2015, Mountain View Whisman officials sought to put a dent in the problem by committing $1.5 million in so-called “turnaround” funding at the district’s lowest-performing schools. At Castro Elementary School, where 83 percent of the student population is Latino and two-thirds qualify for free and reduced-price meals, that money translated into after-school support, summer programs and intervention staff to provide remedial help for the students who are struggling to perform at grade level.
District staff largely credit Castro’s Response to Instruction (RTI) program, which created an extra enrichment period designed to boost literacy for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, for the big improvements each year. The program was piloted at Castro, and this year was expanded to all elementary schools.
Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph said the drop in test scores this year don’t wash away some of the major progress made by the district since the first Common Core test in 2015, particularly among low-income students, and that the district’s rollout of RTI could be a fairly large game changer next year.
“We are working extremely hard to close the achievement gap,” Rudolph said.
For the second year in a row, Castro Elementary has outpaced the rest of the district in helping needy students, indicating that the extra resources appear to be helping. The number of English learners meeting state standards at the school rose from 8 percent to 18 percent in English language arts since 2015, and from 13 percent to 23.2 percent in math. Among students from low-income families at Castro, 40.3 percent met state standards for English language arts — up from 21 percent in 2015 — and 35.2 percent met the standards for math, up from 20 percent.
There were some bright spots for the high school district as well, particularly in narrowing the achievement gap along ethnic lines. Fifty-five percent of Latino students met the state standards for English language arts, up from 40 percent last year, and 34.5 percent met the standards for math, up from 27 percent. Students from low-income families also made massive improvements in English language arts, with 50.8 percent meeting state standards compared with 35 percent the prior year.
Mountain View-Los Altos has made it a top priority in recent years to increase the number of Latino and underrepresented minority students enrolled in Advanced Placement and honors classes, including hiring an outside consultant to identify students who were enrolled in college preparatory classes and had the willingness and aptitude to take on more rigorous coursework. In 2015, the Santa Clara County Office of Education praised Mountain View High School for fully reflecting the school’s student diversity in its toughest classes.
In a press release, Mountain View-Los Altos officials called the recent test scores among Latino students “remarkable.”
Overall scores
This year’s overall test scores prompted a sigh of relief for the Mountain View-Los Altos district, which more than rebounded from an inexplicable decrease in performance in both English language arts and math last year. At a special study session on the 2016 test scores, Sarraf described the SBAC test results as an anomaly, running contrary to the district’s stellar track record on Advanced Placement (AP) exams and the SAT.
After two months of heavy research, district officials still had no clear explanation for the drop in test scores, raising concerns that students may not be taking the test seriously. Because the test is taken in the junior year of high school, many teens may be more focused on tests like the SAT, ACT and AP exams that affect their odds of getting into a choice college.
Sarraf said the district made a concerted effort to better prepare students for the SBAC test, including classroom assessments that more closely mirror what would be on the state-standardized test as well as all-digital exams on computers rather than paper and pencil tests.
Sarraf said that the overall test results show a more honest picture of student performance in the district. “This is the first year where the results on the SBAC test are to be taken seriously; they truly mirror what our student performance looks like on all other indicators,” she said. “That’s certainly not what we could say last year — last year something majorly went wrong, and it wasn’t what we expected.”
Why would the Voice focus its headline on a group of 58 students out of roughly 1,000 11th graders for the high schools? By definition English Learners (likely still actively enrolled in the English Learners program) would have difficulty meeting an 11th grade standard on tests given in English. Not an excuse, and I’m sure the high schools want to improve, but focusing the story on this group is strange.
Buried lower is the high schools’ improvement amongst Latino students (increase from 40% to 55% passing) and low income families (increase from 35% to 51% passing), which was sizeable. Those are much larger demographic groups, and the ones more typically used in “Achievement Gap” analysis.
I’m struck by the comment that the English learner population is the most volatile and there is little information on who they are and where they come from. This implies that reporting that their scores “fell” is an error. The tests from one year to the next are likely two different populations. The reporting suggests that somehow things have worsened. Nothing got worse; it just was different from one year to the next. And last year is probably not the right reference point for this year.
I’d suggest that we revisit our model of when and how education actually happens. We keep pouring resources into the classroom, as if education was something teachers “did to” students during the school day. Education today is more complex, and more diffused. The role of family, peers, and community are substantial. The role of technology has shifted the whole definition of the ‘teacher’; any student has more information accessible from their phone than any teacher could possibly master…if they have a phone, and if they know how to use it.
I’m also dismayed that we continue to think of education solely as mastery of content. If we were to measure commitment to learning, curiosity about learning new topics, or mastery of how to learn, we might discover that we’re been putting our focus in the wrong place. And where is it written that every kid should be proficient by the 11th grade? Would it be such a crime if they learned at their best rate, in their best style? I’m not surprised that students “may not be taking the testing seriously”. It’s rigid and punitive. And that’s no way to be treating our kids.
The headline was definitely sensationalizing and it took until the 7th paragraph before the “only reasonable explanation” that the English learners with low scores comprise only 58 students of unknown background or longevity in the system. That’s a huge explanation, and completely negated the whole first half of the story for me!
So, maybe RTI works in Castro, but what happened at Huff, Landels, Stevenson and Theuerkauf? Thought those schools were on the rise? If those schools were strong before RTI, is what happened last year a reflection of teaching or programming issues? Yikes. This year they now have RTI, but how do they track that to test gains? I’m confused.
In fact, when “English learners” learn enough English, they are moved out of that category. So it is ridiculous to point to low English scores in this constantly shifting group as evidence of a problem. The fact that there are so few kids in the category despite all the international students in Mountain View should be held up as evidence that the schools are doing a great job.
What happened to RTI? Good question. Castro was only one of 4 elementary schools that I voted to spend $$ on trying RTI “pilot programs” (in the past definition of pilot as not all students and not all schools :). The MVWSD is lax, as usual, in performing statistical tests on it’s academic pilot programs, There is no Student’s T Test statistic on if RTI made a statistically significant difference in the FOUR SCHOOLS. You really should not cherry pick ‘good outcomes’ for public policy discussions/decisions (Sorry Dr. Rudolph – it is not apparent that you have research PhD experience from this episode of your leadership).
Last year there was not RTI at H, L, S (was at TH). It is now a $1 1/2 million per year program at all schools – but is is definitely ‘all students’ and not Targeted at the LCFF “Target” students that are the GAP students that MVWSD is now nationally infamous for underserving. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to waste. I’m mad at Ellen Wheeler, longest serving Trustee – for not realizing that this is not Fake News / Fake Academic Data. The GAP is real, huge, and that’s the unfortunate TRUTH in the data (year after year).
SN is a retired Trustee of the MVWSD
(Oct 19th MVWSD report on English Language Learners) I’m sure Voice will report on this in their next edition. I was pleasantly impressed with the step-up in data munching. It was also interesting to see current ELL and Reclassification tied to ‘possible’ new K-3 programs and NUMERICAL comparisons made to those programs /at local districts / in schools with comparable demographics. There is also some mindset change – data in % achievement for comparisons – but actual # of students for Focus On The TARGET Students. In particular, those at the center of the TARGET, Long Term (more than 6 years) who haven’t yet been Reclassified as academically fluent in English.
It makes a compelling story of data driven/hardheaded comparison Benchmarking/ curriculum policy change that I’m sure Kevin will make into a good read.
I hope there is an achievement GAP between rich kids who speak English and poor kids who don’t. Don’t close the gap. Raise them all up. Easier said than done.
there will always be an achievement gap. Like there will always be a variations in height. The goal is to strive to provide every child with the resources and environment to achieve the level they are capable of.