Focus Schools Outpace the District

As part of San Diego Dialogue’s continuing examination of student achievement in San Diego City Schools, we have been focusing attention on the performance of District students on locally adopted assessments of student progress. In order to gain a greater understanding of the status and direction of student achievement, it seems important to consider multiple measures of students’ knowledge and skill sets. Rather than focusing exclusively on the state-mandated Stanford-9 test, we choose to examine how the District’s students are performing on all of the assessments administered by their teachers.

In considering these assessments, we are especially interested in the performance of students who have been the recipient of additional supports or interventions under the District’s reform program. For example, we want to see how students are performing at those elementary schools that were originally designated as “Focus Schools” under the District’s Blueprint for Student Success. Each of these schools is a high poverty school site with a majority non-white student enrollment.

Recently we looked at the performance of the eight original “Focus Schools” on the District’s own literacy assessment for the early primary grades, the Developmental Reading Assessment (or DRA).1 The results provide encouragement regarding the gains being realized at these traditionally low-performing schools:

As shown in Chart E, during 2000-2001 the percentage of first graders at the Focus Schools assessed at being “at or above grade level” in reading grew from 20.4% to 44.7%. The percentage of first grade students classified as “significantly below grade level” dropped from 48.5% to 21.3%.

In the second grade, 16% of the students at the Focus Schools moved from “below grade level” or “significantly below grade level” to “at or above grade level.” The percentage of students scoring “significantly below grade level” dropped from 56.5% to 31.8%.

In the third grade, the percentage of students “at or above grade level” at the Focus Schools grew from 27.8% to 41.6%. The percentage of students scoring “significantly below grade level” fell by 20 percentage points.

Taken as a whole, the Focus Schools had more impressive gains in student performance on the DRA than the entire District. For example, during the 2000-2001 academic year 19% of all District first grade students moved from “below grade level” to “at or above grade level.” However, as shown in Chart F, the Focus Schools had 24% of their students moved above this threshold. Across the entire District, the number of students scoring “significantly below grade level” fell by 10%. In the Focus Schools, this number fell by 27.2%.

These data deserve continued study in the months and years ahead. In particular, by next summer we should have comparable data for the current academic year, which will provide the ability to conduct more extensive, multi-year analysis of student progress on this assessment.