San Diego City Schools Progress Report
Early Gains in Student Achievement
By Scott Grimes, Research Director, San Diego Dialogue

Amid the discord and rancor that characterize the governance of San Diego City Schools, it is important not to lose sight of the goal of the District’s ambitious reform program – raising student achievement and closing the achievement gap. One way to restore civility to the public conversation on school reform in San Diego is to return to the evidence on whether students are making progress toward the District’s standards for academic achievement.

New evidence provides encouragement in this regard. This evidence is especially compelling because it stems not from the statewide Stanford-9 standardized test, but from local assessments that are directly tied to the District’s framework for instruction. Despite the attention it receives in the news media, the Stanford-9 is not a high-stakes test from the perspective of the student.

As students become increasingly savvy about the battery of tests they face each year, they may start to realize that the Stanford-9 means nothing to their academic future. The Stanford-9 test is a "fill-in-the-bubble" assessment that compares students to their peers, rather than to a fixed standard. Student results are ranked in relation to a nationally generated sample of other students. Unlike the SAT or Advanced Placement tests, the Stanford 9 has no impact on the student’s college placement or credit, so there are real questions about the degree to which students "try" on this test.

By contrast, the District’s own assessments play a direct role in determining whether and how students progress through the school system.

In the area of literacy, which has been the focus of the reform efforts, students in the early elementary grades are making significant progress towards attaining the District’s standards.

• During the past academic year substantial numbers of students in grades K-4 moved from "below grade level" to an "at or above grade level" standard of performance in literacy.

• The largest gains came in the first grade, which has been the recipient of the most intensive investments under the District’s Blueprint for Student Success. In 2000-2001 about 20% of these students moved from below grade level performance to at or above grade level in a single academic year.

• The District’s gains in literacy have been even more dramatic among its population of "English Learners," or Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. In each grade, the percentage of LEP students rising to grade level performance outpaced the total percentage of students. Again, the first grade showed the greatest gains out of all of the early elementary grades. At this grade the percentage of students judged to be "significantly below grade level" was cut in half.

• When the progress of the District’s students is compared between academic years, the promise of raising all students to high standards and narrowing the achievement gap starts to become real. For example, if the District can sustain its pace of the last two years among today’s third graders, it will raise all these students to "grade level or above" by the time they enter middle school.

This evidence stems from the District’s own, standards-aligned assessment in literacy. The news media tend to give extensive coverage to the state-mandated Stanford-9 test, but the District’s own literacy assessment is a more powerful tool for assessing the real progress of students against standards. Why?

• This assessment is administered "one-on-one" by the teacher to the student. It is not a fill-in-the-bubble test.

• The assessment measures students’ progress in literacy by testing their ability to read and comprehend a set of texts, which are benchmarked against the District’s literacy standards and framework.

• The assessment is administered multiple times during the course of the academic year, allowing a more finely grained examination of the student’s progress.

• This assessment is administered as early as kindergarten, while the Stanford-9 doesn’t begin until the second grade.

What is "Grade Level?"

It’s also important to note that standards for what constitutes "grade level" in literacy are increased during the school year as the assessment is administered a second, and then a third, time. In other words, a student is expected to be able to do more as the year progresses in order to be considered "at or above grade level."

Figure One shows the progress in literacy that was made by first graders in the District during the last academic year, based on their performance on the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA). As the graph displays, the percentage of first graders assessed at being at or above grade level grew from about 50% in the fall of 2000 to almost 70% by the spring of 2001. The number of students performing significantly below grade level was cut in half during this same time period.

Figure 1:


The performance of students in the first grade is particularly interesting, given that this grade level has received the most intensive interventions under the District’s Blueprint for Student Success. During the last academic year each grade level between kindergarten and the fourth grade made gains on the DRA; however the first grade made the most substantial improvement.

Figure Two shows another way of looking at the same type of data. This graph shows the progress of a cohort of students (today’s third graders) on the DRA over two years. In the spring of 2000, when these students were in the first grade, about 64% were at or above grade level. By the spring of 2001 an additional 11% of these students had moved above this threshold. New data will be available later this fall to show whether these students have sustained their gains into the start of the third grade.

Figure 2:


Addressing the Achievement Gap

While overall student achievement is important, the District and the San Diego community have focused particular attention on the achievement gap between affluent, predominantly white students and low-income students, many of whom are students of color. Special concerns have been raised regarding those students for whom English is a second language, including whether they can meet the District’s standards for English literacy. Figure Three shows the performance of Limited English Proficient (LEP) first grade students on the DRA over the past academic year. As shown in the graph, the percentage of LEP first graders performing at or above grade level in English literacy climbed from 22% to 43% over the course of the year. The percentage of students performing significantly below grade level was reduced from over 42% to about 21%. In other words, LEP first graders made greater gains than all first graders on this assessment in the 2000-2001 academic year.

Figure 3:


This pattern of LEP student performance is mirrored in each of the early elementary grade levels in the District. At each grade level, the percentage of LEP students rising to grade level outpaced the total percentage of students. Again, the first grade showed the greatest gains out of all of the early elementary grades.

Out of the Danger Zone

What do these data mean in terms of raw numbers? As one example, consider the students in Figure One who were judged to be significantly below grade level in the fall of 2000. Because first grade is a retention grade under the Blueprint for Student Success, all of these students were at risk of having to repeat the first grade based on their performance levels in literacy. However, by the end of the academic year half of these students had progressed out of this "danger zone." This means the District prevented more than 1,100 students from having to be retained because of the instruction they received while in the first grade.

As the reforms in the District unfold, it will be important to continue to gauge the progress of students by cohort as they move through the school system. In other words, we shouldn’t just look at how "this year’s fourth grade" performed in comparison to" last year’s fourth grade." We should also examine how today’s fourth graders are doing compared to last year, when they were in the third grade, and then compare those results to next year, when they are in the fifth grade. The Dialogue will continue to provide information on these types of indicators as they become available.