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Most public schools across Mountain View saw modest gains in test scores this year, with some making huge strides in student performance across the board and some losing ground, according to state data.
Notably, Monta Loma and Castro elementary schools saw progress erased, and there was a drop in performance among the most high needs students at the high school level. Achievement gaps in math widened as low-income and Latino students lost ground at the elementary and middle school level.
Each spring, students across the state take a Common Core-aligned standardized test marking progress in English language arts and math. These scores are a critical benchmark for schools measuring academic progress in a way that’s consistent from one school district to another.
For the Mountain View Whisman School District, overall testing data shows slow-but-steady progress in English language arts, with 70.7% of students meeting state standards compared to 67.9% last year. The gains were consistent across the board: English language learners, low-income students, students with disabilities and Latino students all had better scores in the core subject this year. Math results were virtually flat, declining by a fraction of a percent to 63.7%.
Broken down by school however, there were clear success stories and trouble spots. Theuerkauf Elementary School performed much better, with 65.4% of students meeting state standards in English and 55.6% in math — a 10% and 9% increase from the prior year, respectively. Theuerkauf’s test scores used to be on par with some of the lowest-performing schools in East San Jose in 2015, and today are comparable to average scores across Santa Clara County.
Landels Elementary School had a similar breakthrough year, with the number of students meeting state standards in English language arts rising by 10% to 78.1% compared to the 2017-18 school year. The number of students meeting the state standards for math also rose by 5% to 69% over the same period.
Math scores at Mistral Elementary School, home to the district’s dual immersion program, decreased slightly, but had a similar 9% jump in students meeting standards in English language arts.
Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph told the Voice that the results are a cause for celebration at the three schools and a testament to the hard work and dedication of the teachers. Going forward, he said the district’s priority is to review what worked at the school sites and ensure it wasn’t just a one-off, and that Theuerkauf, Landels and Mistral can replicate this year’s success.
From the outset, Rudolph said it appears the three schools were quick to use data and student assessments to make adjustments to instruction, all the way down to granular changes for individual student needs.
“All three sites really used data wisely across the board,” he said. “Either the principal brought in a new data practice or the teachers really embraced it as a school community, and how they use that information is really a defining factor to make sure they met their goals.”
The latest batch of data doesn’t bode well for Castro Elementary School, a school where a large majority of the students come from low-income families and speak English as a second language. Despite being a success story in recent years with test scores rising considerably, performance this year shows a slump. The percentage of Castro students meeting state standards in English language arts inched up by about 1% to 48.2%, while the percentage of students meeting math standards sank to 32.9% — a 6% drop from last year.
Monta Loma struggled as well, with the number of students meeting state standards in English dropping from 61.7% to 56.9% this year. Math performance also declined, with the number of students meeting standards in math decreasing from 51.1% to 46.9%.
Both schools were a cause for concern for the district’s trustees as the Oct. 10 school board meeting. Board president Tamara Wilson said the scores are “incredible” at many of the school sites but that she was disheartened to see the test results from Castro and Monta Loma across all subgroups and subjects.
“What are we missing?” she asked.
Rudolph said the district plans to provide extra support at both schools, including more opportunities for professional development for staff, and that the district may need to return to the board with an overarching plan for how to fix the losses in academic performance. For now, he said, the priority is still figuring out what went wrong.
“Part of what we’re doing is deconstructing what has taken place at both of those sites and focus on what may be missing,” he said.
The state tests were administered in the spring, prior to a major shift in the district’s school attendance boundaries, meaning that scores in future years may change as individual students change campuses. District data shows that the newly opened Vargas Elementary School students, if it enrolled the students it has today, would have had 79% of its students meet state standards in English language arts and 74% meeting standards in math — roughly equivalent to those at Bubb Elementary School.
Mountain View Whisman School District officials have long sought to close the persistent achievement gap between students along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, and the latest data shows a mixed bag on those efforts. More low-income and Latino students met standards in English language arts compared to last year, but generally performed worse in math.
High schools claw back last year’s losses
Test scores for the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District show progress in students meeting state standards in English language arts, which dipped last year and fluctuated from one year to the next.
Students in the high school district generally perform better than those in the Mountain View Whisman School District, with 82.6% of students meeting state standards in English language arts this year, up from 79.3% last year. Those gains were shared evenly across Mountain View and Los Altos high schools.
Math scores stagnated for the third year in a row, with the number of teens meeting standards in math virtually identical to last year at 68.8%.
In an Oct. 15 statement, the district called the test scores “steady” and “strong,” hanging onto high level performance and gains from prior years. Internal tracking by the district shows that the students who were tested in their junior year — the only year high school students take the test — performed better or the same as they did in eighth grade, said Margarita Navarro, associate superintendent of educational services.
“I think it’s a testament to what we’re doing at the school sites,” Navarro said. “The majority of students did maintain a (passing) score, and that’s good news.”
Some of the biggest gains were among Latino students, which has been a priority for the district. The number of Latino students meeting state standards in English language arts increased by nearly 7% this year to 56.3% which, while higher, still falls well below Asian (90.5%) and white (93.53%) students in the district.
Students with disabilities in the high school district struggled to keep up with their peers, according to the testing data. About 37.4% of students with disabilities met state standards in English language arts, down from 41.5% last year, while 13.8% met state standards in math, down from 26% — the lowest performance since 2016.
Among the 36 English learners who were tested in the high school district this year, only one met state standards for English language arts. None of them met the standards for math.
Navarro said school administrators will go through the data and analyze what can be done to improve scores, but noted that it’s difficult to account for big fluctuations in scores among students with disabilities and English learners. The cohorts are fairly small, and students with disparate needs and backgrounds are often lumped into one category.
“It’s always really hard to compare one year to another,” she said.
There go Rudolph and Wilson spinning nonsense and trying to take credit for just about anything and thereby justify the fat cat raises given before test results were put out.
These aren’t gains to be proud of when you are leaving the most vulnerable behind. Besides, the cause of any increase are more due to a changing, more affluent student body with educated parents involve and promoting school work and study at home than anything else while more and more socio disadvantaged students are leaving the district. In other words, the poor performing student population is shrinking. That’s the only reason the scores are going up so slightly on average. And it apparently has nothing to do with his new crony principals who were supposedly brought in to raise the scores of the very students whose scores are still sinking.
Or maybe it’s just now time to play last principal standing gets the boot and fire former board member Gloria Higgins, the Principal of Monta Loma (talk about cronyism) and the now longest serving principal in the district, Terry Lambert, at Castro.
Either way, with these results it’s way past time to fire Rudolph and his cronies and recall the board. Until that happens, don’t expect much folks.
These scores are NOT a cause for celebration, Mr. Superintendent. They are embarrassing. Those in education power have their heads you-know-where. How is our kids’ education so sub-par in this area of great wealth, intelligence (?) and resources?? It’s absolutely shameful and inexcusable. Those with decision-making power need to stop self-serving, and really start SERVING STUDENTS!
When we talk about students falling behind, we should examine loss of instructional time. The MVWSD Educational Services Department has become hyperfocused on assessment to the detriment of instructional minutes. English Languag Learners in particular loss the most amount of instructional minutes due to assessments.
Below is the assessment calendar for middle schools for 2019-20. These are assessments that the district chooses to give students. These are not required by the state.
The school board should be asking Cathy Baur and Tara Vikjord the following questions. How much instructional time is lost due to each test? What information is derived from each assessment? What could be eliminated? What do teachers see as valuable?
• August: All students took the i-Ready Math and Reading Assessments (District required assessments). Students lost at a minimum three days of instruction in Language Arts and Math. Student who did not finish the assessments in two days were then pulled out of class to finish. These students lost one or two additional periods of instruction to finish. Many students were pulled from classes to finish.
• October: English Language Learners will take the Literably test (District assessment). They will lose 2-4 periods of instruction in their English Language Development classes. This assessment provides almost the same data as the i-Ready assessment they took in August.
• November: All students will take their first Writing Benchmark (District Assessment). At a minimum, students will lose 2-3 periods of Language Arts instruction.
• December: i-Ready Math and Reading assessments will be administered again with lose of multiple days of instruction in core classes. Any student who does not finish will be pulled out of classes to finish.
• Februaryr: English Language Learners will take the Literably test (District assessment) again. They will lose 2-4 periods of instruction in their English Language Development classes.
• March: All students will take their second Writing Benchmark (District Assessment). At a minimum, students will lose 2-3 periods of Language Arts instruction..
• April/May: i-Ready Math and Reading assessments will be administered again with lose of multiple days of instruction in core classes. Any student who does not finish will be pulled out of classes to finish.
Holy cow! How can Castro School keep doing so poorly? How much lower can they go? They are going in the opposite direction in spite of all the money being thrown at everything and with all the personnel changes going on? I agree that at some point one has to wonder if the people running the schools, and even the teachers, just aren’t any good at what they are doing or have just given up.
I wanted to respond specifically to comments about Castro Elementary. It is a very challenging population of students, with many new-comers from non-English speaking countries arriving each year, throughout the year. They are placed into the grade their age indicates, not according to their level of education, nor their fluency with English.
The overwhelming majority come from low income households, and many have experienced trauma, which adversely affects learning. Many live in housing situations which are far from ideal, with so many people in the residences it can be a big challenge for young students to get enough sleep. Parental work hours also effect their students sleep and life-enriching opportunities.
Further, many of the students which arrive there have not even been attending school regularly in their native countries, so there is a language barrier on top of an education barrier.
Throw in the trauma, sleep challenges, housing insecurity, lack of opportunities because of parental work hours and cost, and sometimes just plain hereditary learning challenges, and it’s a wonder the students are doing as well as they are.
The teachers at Castro are extremely dedicated and work very hard in an exceptionally challenging learning environment.
I’d invite any naysayer to put their time where their mouth is, and go over and volunteer to help. With boots on the ground you’d understand much better just how challenging the environment is. That invitation extends to MVWSD board members and administrators as well.
It is a small and fluctuating group of students, so there should be expected changes in test results every year. Kudos to Terri Lambert for fighting so hard for the kids and bolstering the morale of her teachers so well in the face of great odds against them.
The problem around student outcomes predates Rudolph.
Shuffling around principals won’t do anything but give sites excuses of adjusting to new administrators and team building processes that take schools even longer to get traction without solving the systemic problem at hand. Arguing instructional minutes vs. assessments (i.e. regular collection of data that is used to inform instruction) seems too small a contributing factor with regard to student outcome concerns, but ‘Loss of Instructional Time’ was on to something.
We should consider the cronyism of staff in the D.O. who aren’t the ones involved with facilities or HR issues, but are responsible for educational outcomes, who have been there a long time, and haven’t been able to affect district-wide performance or the underserved student communities in any meaningful way. Would BMV even have had an opportunity to present their “solution” if the district had a stronger story to tell about student outcomes and the achievement gap? No.
So, after so many years of lackluster growth or backsliding, and challenges from outside the district, shouldn’t someone in the district should be *full-time-laser-focused* on student outcomes regardless of facilities, student locations, HR issues, …?? Regardless of whether you call that person “Chief Academic Officer” or Assistant Superintendent of Ed. Services, that person *should* be Cathy Baur. The board seems rather complacent with her students’ outcomes, putting *minimal* pressure on Rudolph to require more of her. Shouldn’t she be held accountable for the district performance? Of course they should: “Academic” is in her title.
Rudolph should be held accountable for his staffing choices, especially if they are proving ineffectual or require such patience in performance that the world’s glaciers will have melted before students are served properly. The data should be enough to wake the board up from the hypnotic stupor they are in and remind him: they are there for today’s MVWSD kids first, not tomorrow’s kids. We need a proven, effective “Chief” educator. Why accept exactly the opposite? If Rudolph doesn’t have such accomplished visionary leadership in Ed. Services to back him up, swap that “C.A.O.” out with someone who can provide it for him.
We should pressure the board to find someone else to do it if Rudolph refuses. Of course, board members are welcome to explain why they are satisfied with the continuous stream of mediocre to disappointing news from students and teachers under Ms. Baur’s care. With everything else going on, we’re all ready for some comedic relief.
Maybe we’re even ready for some new faces on the board that have their primary, unwavering focus be student success across all demographics through core instruction time students get with prepared and supported teachers, instead of being indirectly interested through facilities improvements, shuffling kids and adults, indifferent HR benefits programs, misguided affluential parents, or a magic STEM program.
No new principals until you get a new C.A.O. worthy of the title.
Every year when they release the new numbers there is a lot of triumphalism about this group at this school doing so much better and a bunch of hand wringing about that group at that school falling behind. Those with long memories may notice that often a group that does well one year does poorly the next and vice versa. In fact, careful readers might notice that in this article several instances of this are alluded to: “Despite being a success story in recent years with test scores rising considerably, performance this year shows a slump,” “High schools claw back last year’s losses.” It is called regression to the mean. When you have noisy data, sometimes you get a good result just by chance. The next year when you get a normal result, it looks bad by comparison. To get meaningful results you need to be averaging across years and/or schools and/or categories of students. I hope that the school district is not changing policy every year based on this group at this school doing better or worse than they did last year, and I hope that parents will not push them to do so.