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It is time for the API scores to be computed - you know, the Awfully Poor Indicators.
Actually called the Academic Performance Index, the API purports to display, for all the world to see, just how well or how poorly any given school is doing in the matter of educating kids.
This misleading name refers to the results of the SAT-9 tests, which form the basis for the rankings assigned to schools. The state is interested in finding out which schools are in the top 10 percent and which are in the bottom 10 percent. The implication is clear: lower-scoring schools are "failing" schools; and failing schools are, of course, staffed with failing teachers who simply are not doing their jobs.
Dig under the rhetoric and there's some reality. The SAT-9 test is a stacked deck that trips up poor kids and those with limited English skills. In brutal fact, the test measures more of a child's socioeconomic background than his or her academic progress, according to Dr. W. James Popham, professor emeritus at UCLA. It helps to have an authority validate what every teacher knows - that this test does not do what it is supposed to do, and using it to rank a school as a success or a failure is rank nonsense.
The test is not aligned with anything - curriculum, textbooks or standards. The SAT-9 simply isn't a measure of what goes on in California's schools. It is a hit-or-miss matter, a pure gamble, as to whether anything on the test will measure kids on what they have actually been taught. As if that weren't bad enough, the test was apparently constructed by theorists who know very little about the kids themselves, as indicated by the fact that second-graders are expected to manage a 110-minute reading test containing seven stories and 14 pages. Moreover, 1.2 million kids who can't speak English are forced to take the test in English, a guarantee that they will score low enough to bring down the experts' wrath on the teachers. Adding to the folly, 600,000 special education kids with identified learning handicaps must take the test without any special accommodations to make their scores mean something.
CTA has pinned down all these problems with an analysis by an independent research firm, an analysis which, not surprisingly, told us what every teacher in California could have told us anyway. Schools ranking in the lowest 25 percent were concentrated in the rural areas of the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys and the urban centers of Southern California and the Bay Area. No surprises there at all.
Here are the scores for the school year 2000-01:
Eighty-eight percent of the children attending schools in the API's bottom 10 percent were socioeconomically disadvantaged, compared to 7 percent of the students in the top 10 percent of California schools.
Fifty-one percent of the students attending schools in the API's bottom ranking were English language learners, compared to 4 percent of the students in the top ranking.
Fifty-one percent of the schools in the bottom ranking were year-round schools, compared to 2 percent of the schools in the top ranking.
Emergency permit teachers made up 25 percent of the teaching force in the lowest ranking schools, compared to 6 percent in the top ranking schools.
These statistics clearly show what happens when the same test is applied indiscriminately to have and have-not schools - the test loudly proclaims the socioeconomic status of the students, but tells us nothing worth knowing about what they have been taught or what they have learned. We know that children coming from non-English-speaking homes or living in poverty have learning issues which are simply beyond the control of teachers, no matter how dedicated and how skilled. If only there were a direct correlation between a teacher's efforts and the SAT-9 results, we'd have a statistical miracle. All the kids would score at the top!
The governor's and President Bush's threat to punish "failing" schools can only aggravate the problem. It will discourage teachers and students alike, and those teachers who can will distance themselves from the whole mess, even if that means leaving the profession. Punishment certainly won't make anyone eager to work in a "failing" school.
To summarize what we know, standardized test scores like SAT-9 break down along socioeconomic lines. The poor and most disadvantaged students (in California, that's something like two million kids) simply do worse on the test than do their more affluent peers. To a worrisome degree the results of such tests are pre-determined, despite the hard work of their teachers and the good intentions of the youngsters themselves. Demanding that the scores go up while holding teachers accountable when they don't is a dishonest way of dealing with the "bottom" 25 percent of our schools. Nor is the threat of a state takeover helpful - after the failures to raise test scores in Richmond and Compton, we already know that doesn't help.
Our lowest-performing students need help, not punishment. Blaming teachers and ignoring the kids' problems will accomplish nothing good. It's just a cop-out by the politicians who don't want to see what is really there - a lot of underprivileged kids, a lot of hardworking but frustrated teachers, and a lot of blame instead of help from those in power.
Make no mistake about it. Our kids and teachers need a hand up, not a kick in the pants, and CTA is fighting to make sure they get the help they need.
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