HALF SCHOOLS MEET GOALS RESULTS FROM A.V. AREA TRAILING THOSE FOR STATE OVERALL.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

LANCASTER - About half of Antelope Valley schools met state-set goals for improving their Academic Performance Index scores, state results released Thursday show.

Forty of the 85 schools for which results were available met their API growth targets by increasing scores both schoolwide and among socioeconomic and ethnic subgroups of students.

Twenty-two additional schools also improved their scores, but did not meet state goals because the gains were not high enough or did not include all the student subgroups.

At 21 other schools, API scores remained the same or declined.

No results were available for 10 schools in the Muroc Joint Unified School District and the Southern Kern Unified School District because they were changing their data. The scores will be available in January.

More than 1,600 schools statewide did not receive 2004-05 API growth scores for a variety of reasons, including data corrections, excessive parent waivers, testing irregularities and, because of very small school enrollment, lack of at least 11 valid scores.

In the Westside Union School District, all 10 schools met schoolwide targets, but five were considered not to have met state goals because gains among subgroups of students were not big enough.

Westside Superintendent Regina Rossall said the number of English-language learners in the district has doubled in the last year.

``So those are kids who are new to our system,'' Rossall said. ``I think that you see us needing to adjust our instructional program, which we are doing, because of that shift from kids mostly speaking English to having a number of kids who don't speak English as their primary language.''

The student population with a primary language other than English has grown from 150 to 600 in two years at Westside, Rossall said.

In the Palmdale School District, 12 of 25 schools met state targets, the same number as last year.

``I think we continue to make good progress based on providing good staff development and making sure schools address state standards,'' said Raul Maldonado, Palmdale's director of biliteracy programs and assessment.

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.

In addition, each ``numerically significant'' group of ethnic or socioeconomically-disadvantaged students must go up least 80 percent as much as the overall school's growth target.

Beginning with the 2005 API Base report to be released in March 2006, two new subgroups will be added: English learners and students with disabilities.

With this addition, the subgroups in state and federal academic accountability systems will be aligned.

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 student test scores.

The API rankings are used to determine whether schools are meeting federal guidelines contained in President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

Statewide, 68 percent of California's public schools met all of their state-required academic growth targets for the 2004-05 school year, a 20-point gain over 2003-04, indicating significant improvement by schools and by minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

An even greater proportion of schools, 83 percent, showed increases in overall academic growth compared with last year's 64 percent.

In addition, the percentage of schools at or above the statewide performance target of 800 is at an all-time high of 28 percent.

``These results show our schools are improving in nearly every subject and grade level,'' state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell said in a written statement.

``I am particularly pleased to see progress made by all students and in each subgroup of students. While we clearly still have a long way to go, this shows our schools' focus on California's standards-based curriculum is paying dividends in improved student achievement.''

As in previous years, elementary schools are showing the highest overall performance, with a median API of 752, followed by middle schools with a median API of 716, and high schools with a median API of 696.

High schools, however, posted the highest gain of 36 points from 2004 in median API performance.

The percentage of schools meeting their subgroup growth targets increased from last year by 17.1 percent for the socioeconomically disadvantaged subgroup, 15.9 percent for the Hispanic subgroup, 14.2 percent for the white subgroup, 11.2 percent for the African American subgroup, and 5.8 percent for the Asian subgroup.

The percentage of schools meeting their schoolwide growth targets increased from last year by 17 percent, from 64.2 percent in 2004 to 81.2 percent in 2005.

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API RESULTS

Source: California Departmetn of Education