A.V. SCHOOLS NOT MEETING BAR MORE THAN 60% FALL BELOW FEDERAL STANDARDS.

Byline: KAREN MAESHIRO Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- More than 60 percent of Antelope Valley public schools failed to meet federal test score standards this year, according to results released Thursday.

At 70 of 112 local public schools, students' Academic Performance Index test scores either did not meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress goals, or the gains didn't include all subgroups of students, such as ethnic minorities, low-income and disabled students.

``It's not for lack of trying. We show consistent improvement and growth, but unfortunately, as we make progress, the bar continues to be raised,'' said Michele Bowers, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment in the Lancaster School District, where API scores at 12 of 19 schools improved but only three were deemed to have met their AYP targets.

In the Antelope Valley Union High School District, Desert Winds, Knight and Quartz Hill high schools were the only ones to meet all of its Adequate Yearly Progress components.

``API is more of a growth model. There is a goal that the state likes schools to get to. If you show growth, you've met the target,'' Antelope Valley Union High School District Assistant Superintendent Michael Vierra said. ``With AYP, the expectations for each of the subgroups is getting very difficult.''

Antelope Valley High School and Wilsona Elementary School are two schools that were sanctioned by the state in March for not improving test scores.

The two schools each improved their API scores by two points, which puts them one year away from getting out from under state monitoring.

State education officials released the 2006 Accountability Progress Report on Thursday for every California public school and district to show how well they are meeting state and federal accountability requirements.

The report contained state Academic Performance Index scores for each school and showed which schools reached their federal AYP goals, required under the federal 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

Sixty-five percent of schools statewide met their AYP targets, up from 62 percent last year. The federal goal is to have 100 percent of children proficient in math and English by the year 2014, which state education officials complain will be very difficult to do.

To meet AYP targets this year, 24.4 percent of elementary and middle school students had to be proficient in English and 26.5 percent in math. At high schools, the proficiency rates are 22.3 percent in English and 20.9 in math.

Schools that receive federal Title I aid -- because of their large proportions of students from low-income families -- and do not make AYP for two consecutive years are designated ``program improvement'' schools and are subject to a range of requirements and mandates.

In the Antelope Valley, 11 more schools were newly designated as failing to meet AYP, bringing the total number of program improvement schools to 58.

The 11 schools are Highland, Lancaster and Parris high schools in the Antelope Valley Unified School District; Tierra Bonita North Elementary School in the Eastside Union School District; Antelope, Daisy Gibson, and Pearblossom schools in the Keppel Union School District; Endeavour Middle and Monte Vista schools in the Lancaster School District; Mesquite School in the Palmdale School District; and Boron Junior-Senior High School in the Muroc Joint Unified School District.

Acton-Agua Dulce, Hughes-Elizabeth Lakes Union, Westside Union and Southern Kern Unified school districts have no Title I schools in program improvement.

Antelope Valley Union High School District officials said they will ask state education officials to re-examine Lancaster High's API scores, which went down 56 points. High school officials said they found discrepancies in state data, which made them question whether the overall score was accurate. Statewide, 639 schools were newly identified for program improvement. A total of 104 schools improved enough to leave the program, leaving a total of 2,215 schools in program improvement.

The consequences of not making AYP apply only to schools receiving federal Title 1 aid.

The number of Antelope Valley schools that met state-set goals for improving their API scores decreased from the prior year. Twenty-eight schools for which results were available met their API growth targets by increasing scores both schoolwide and among socioeconomic and ethnic subgroups of students, compared to 40 last year.

Fifty-five schools also improved their scores, but didn't meet state goals because the gains were not high enough or did not include all the student subgroups.

At 40 other schools, API scores remained the same or declined.

API scores were not issued for four local schools: Vasquez High School in the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District, Red Rock Elementary School in the Mojave Unified School District, Anaverde Hills School in the Westside Union School District, and Challenger Middle School in the Wilsona School District.

Vasquez and Anaverde Hills failed to test enough students who were not exempt from testing for at least one test content area; Challenger reported a testing irregularity; and Red Rock had too few valid test scores.

Wilsona Superintendent Ned McNabb said the Challenger testing irregularity stemmed from a teacher giving practice tests that were too similar to the actual tests.

In the Palmdale School District, eight of 27 schools made AYP, while 12 schools met state goals on the API.

``I think we are making good progress. Everybody is working hard to make student achievement the number one priority,'' said Raul Maldonado, Palmdale's director of assessment.

In the Westside Union School District, where scores are typically high, all schools' API scores went down except for Esperanza School. Still, three of the district's schools scored above the state performance target of 800.

``It's a decidedly different trend in the district than we have seen in the past,'' Westside Superintendent Regina Rossall said.

Rossall said she didn't think the falling scores were the result of the district implementing larger class sizes in grades kindergarten through third grade because of budget cuts.

``By and large second- and third-grade scores held up pretty good. That's not readily apparent as the cause,'' Rossall said.

``It could be the result of a couple of things. Our campuses are very crowded, and we have had a ton of growth. In the last two years, we have been getting a lot of new kids coming into the district.''

The state's average API score has grown to 720, an 11-point gain from the previous year.

Fifty-two percent of the schools statewide met all of their API growth targets this year, a decline from last year's 68 percent.

The API is a numeric index that ranges from a low of 200 to a high of 1000. A school's annual growth target is set at 5 percent of the difference between the school's base API and the statewide performance target of 800. By law, numerically significant student subgroups within a school must also make improvement for a school to meet its API targets.

These subgroups include ethnic subgroups, socioeconomically disadvantaged students and, for the first time in 2006, English learners and students with disabilities.

As expected, introducing these two new student subgroups into the 2006 API results reduced the percentage of schools meeting their API growth targets, accounting for about one quarter of the decline between 2005 and 2006, state officials said.

The federal requirement for meeting API is a score of 590 or a one-point increase over the prior year's score.

``We saw the majority of our schools went up and ... we can see significant growth over the past three years,'' Bowers said. ``It gives us the opportunity to see what is working at schools and making sure we are doing districtwide implementation of those same programs at other schools.''

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ACCOUNTABILITY PROGRESS REPORT