34 SCHOOLS MAKE GOOD LESS THAN HALF OF 88 MEET STATE STANDARD.

Byline: Marci Wormser Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Thirty-four of 88 schools in the Antelope Valley scored at or above the state average in student achievement rankings released Thursday.

Edwards Air Force Base schools, along with schools in the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified and Westside Union school districts, posted the top Academic Performance Index scores.

The highest local score was 821 at Edwards' Irving L. Branch Elementary School, one of three valley schools to top the state's goal of 800. The others were at Edwards' Forbes Avenue Elementary and Westside Union's Sundown Elementary.

Eighteen schools in the Mojave, Antelope Valley Union High, Eastside, Keppel, Lancaster and Palmdale school districts scored in the bottom 20 percent of schools statewide. The previous year, only nine schools scored that low.

Created by a 1999 state law, the API is designed to show how California schools rate against each other. Each school received a single score - between 200 and 1,000 - based on the students' test scores.

Palmdale District Superintendent Nancy Smith said she was ``not pleased with the scores'' in her district, although many of the schools performed better than the previous year.

Twenty of the 24 elementary and middle schools in the Palmdale District that reported API scores performed below the state average. Two of the schools - Palm Tree and Tamarisk elementary - were identified as underperformers a year ago. Mesa Intermediate was identified as an underperforming school earlier this year after failing to meet academic performance growth targets for three years in a row.

Although all three schools still failed to meet their growth targets on the 2002 API test, Smith said she is optimistic that a joint intervention program the district and California Department of Education put together in January will help raise scores.

The agreement calls for steps that include increasing school days from the present 163 to as many as 180 a year, offering more training for teachers and offering extra help to students with problems in reading, math or the English language.

Because the district has taken part in the program, the schools will not face state academic sanctions, which could include transferring teachers and administrators to other schools or the state taking over the school, Smith said. The schools will have until spring 2004 to improve scores.

Smith said her district faces more challenges than some other districts in California. A high student transiency rate and a high number of students who are not proficient in English means lower scores, she said.

State officials have set 800 as the target they would like all schools to reach.

A second set of rankings shows how individual schools compare with all others throughout California. A school that receives a rank of 9, for example, scored in the top 10 percent of all California schools for the same grade levels.

Conversely, a rank of 1 means a school scored in the bottom 10 percent of schools in the state.

A third score rates the schools against others statewide with strong similarities - as in the wealth or poverty of its students' families, the amount of education of students' parents and the percentage of teachers who are fully credentialed.

Finally, each school is assigned a target score for the next API. Schools in the bottom 20 percent could face sanctions for failing to hit their targets over a three-year period.

Six local schools scored in the bottom 10 percent of schools in the state. The schools were Linda Verde Elementary School in Lancaster, Tamarisk, Tumbleweed and Yucca elementary schools in Palmdale, Mojave Elementary School and Red Rock Elementary School, north of Mojave.

Red Rock Elementary, which reported API scores of 22 pupils, had the lowest score in the valley with 396.

This year, Branch, Sundown and Forbes Avenue elementary schools and Desert Junior/Senior High schools posted scores of 9. Sundown is in west Palmdale and is part of the Westside Union School District. Branch, Forbes and Desert are on Edwards Air Force Base and are part of Muroc Joint Unified School District.

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API RESULTS

Source: California Department of Education