San Diego City Schools Progress Report
City High Schools Not Yet Making the Grade
by Scott Grimes, Research Director, San Diego Dialogue

At this point in the reforms put forth by the District, it is evident that high school students have a long way to go to improve their academic performance. To gauge the performance of high schools, it may be more instructive to examine student performance on the District’s own standards-aligned assessments than on state or national tests. Many of these assessments have only recently been introduced to the District’s high schools and they have received almost no attention in the news media. But their consequence for students is quite clear.

Figure Four shows the performance of the District’s 9th and 10th grade students from last spring on a locally-adopted literacy assessment, the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test (SDRT). This assessment is administered to all students from grades four to eleven to assess their progress in literacy. Here we show data for only those 9th and 10th graders in the District who are fluent in English. The point of excluding Limited English Proficient students from this graph is to demonstrate that low literacy levels inthe District are not merely a “English as a Second Language” problem. In fact, over 36% of the fluent English students at these grade levels are not meeting the District’s standards for literacy.

Figure 4:



It’s worth returning to the question of student motivation when taking this assessment (see "Early Gains in Student Achievement"). Unlike the Stanford-9, the SDRT has clear consequences for students. Students performing below grade level on this assessment are placed in extended, multi-period literacy courses, as an intervention designed to increase their performance against standards in this subject area. This limits the students’ ability to take elective courses, which they may find more enjoyable or may appeal more directly to their personal interests. As a result, students have every incentive to try to do their best on this assessment.

Figure Five shows a similar measure of performance against standards in the area of mathematics. Algebra is an 8th-grade standard in San Diego City Schools. In other words, by the end of eighth grade a student should be proficient in algebra and ready to move on to another subject area within mathematics, such as geometry.However, as shown in Figure Five, most students entering high school are not meeting this standard in mathematics. 65% of the eighth grade students in the spring of 2001 failed to demonstrate proficiency in algebra based on their performance on the District’s “Geometry Readiness” assessment. As a result, all of these students were placed in another algebra-oriented course in the ninth grade, in order to try again to meet the District’s standard in this area of mathematics.

Figure 5:



Encouraging Dropouts?

These data underscore the substantial challenge that lies ahead in extending standards-based, system-wide school reform to the high school level in San Diego. While promising gains may be occurring in the elementary grades, much more work is necessary to raise all students to standards by the time they exit high school. It’s important to note also that the District continues to have a substantial dropout rate from its high schools. The cumulative four-year dropout rate has hovered between 13 percent and 14 percent for the last several years. Raising standards without providing extra instructional support at the high school is unlikely to help all students succeed. Instead, it could merely encourage more students to leave high school prior to graduation.

For those who do graduate from high school, substantial gaps remain in terms of their readiness to enter a four-year college and pursue a rigorous college education. Figure Six displays the percentage of graduates at the District’s high schools who complete necessary requirements to apply for entry into the UC or CSU systems of higher education. The various high schools have been broken into four roughly equal quartiles by the level of poverty at the school. As shown in the graph, students from the wealthiest high schools in San Diego are more likely to complete the UC/CSU eligibility requirements than students at the highest poverty high schools.

Figure 6:



In the coming months and years the San Diego community will need to engage in an intense conversation about the purpose of high school and the meaning of a high school education. Currently San Diego City Schools has a system-wide UC/CSU eligibility rate of about 39%. This means that well over half of all high school graduates in the city are ineligible to attend a rigorous four-year college. Should high schools seek to prepare all students to attend a four-year university? If so, what are the costs and consequences of trying to meet such an ambitious goal? In a time when the labor market is placing greater and greater premiums on higher education, what are the costs for our region if we don’t try to raise these eligibility rates?

These questions are worthy of serious consideration by policy-makers, civic leadership and the public. The ultimate prize of the District’s reform effort will not be political praise, new grant funds or national exposure. The only measure for assessing the ultimate impact of the reforms should be student achievement.