But Are They Learning?

In this time of fiscal and economic uncertainty, it is more important than ever to assess the output of our public institutions. In the case of public schools, reports about student performance and test scores too often get bogged down in conflicting data and an alphabet soup of acronyms. Here are a few rules for accurately interpreting information on the performance of students and public schools in San Diego.

Rule 1: When It Comes to Grades, Trust but Verify. Grades brought home by students on their report cards have been the traditional measurement of student performance for parents and other caregivers. Trust the grades, but verify them by examining student performance on standardized tests. Studies have found that grading practices can very widely from school to school—or teacher to teacher—so that “C–’’ work at one site might secure an “A” at another.

This should be a particular cause for concern at schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Too often students at these schools will consistently bring home “A’s” and “B’s” on their report cards, only to score dismally on standardized tests of academic knowledge and skills. Those who care about children at these schools should rigorously examine information from standardized tests, rather than relying only on grades to gauge success.

Rule 2: Don’t Just Compare One Child to Other Children. Over the past several years, enormous attention has been given to California’s state-mandated SAT9 test. This is a “norm-referenced” test, which means the performance of an individual student is compared to a national sample of children given the same test. The student’s results are then described as falling somewhere along a 1-to-100 percentile scale, based on the norm established by the sample. A given child might be said to fall into, for example, the “75th percentile,” meaning he or she scored better on the test than 74 percent of the students in the sample.

While it may be comforting to know children are scoring at a higher level than their peers (or disturbing to discover most children score higher than your child), this doesn’t really provide an absolute measure of the knowledge and skills being gained by the student. A student may seem to be doing better than his peers, but is he or she achieving at a high standard of performance? To answer this question, one needs to turn to standards-based assessments.

Rule 3: Closely Track the California Standards Test. As part of the state testing regimen administered each spring, students in grades 2 through 11 are asked to complete several sets of questions in English/language arts and mathematics (as well as in other subject areas in some grades) comprised by the California Standards Test. Many students may be unaware they are even taking a separate test, because it is offered as part of the same testing sequence that has included a norm-referenced assessment. But the advantage of the California Standards Test is that students’ results reflect their attainment of an absolute standard of performance.

When the results are made public and sent to the child’s home, student performance for the grade level is reported as being either 1) advanced, 2) proficient, 3) basic, 4) below basic or 5) far below basic. If the student achieves an “advanced” or “proficient” designation, he or she has met the standard for that subject area. A parent seeing this score can have much greater confidence that the child is acquiring the knowledge and skills he or she is supposed to attain, rather than simply seeing whether the child is scoring above some peers.

The California Standards Test also can be a powerful measure for assessing the overall performance of a school. If the majority of enrolled students at the school are meeting California’s standards for academic proficiency, based on this assessment, then a parent can have confidence that excellent teaching and learning are occurring at that school.

Rule 4: Track the Assessments Used by Your School District. Parents don’t have to rely only on the state tests to check the progress of their children. Many districts use and publish their own assessments to measure student progress. For example, in the area of literacy, the San Diego Unified School District has adopted a series of diagnostic assessments to track student progress in reading against the district’s standards. In the early elementary grades, these assessments are conducted several times over the course of an academic year, giving parents and community members multiple opportunities to check on the progress of students. Information on these assessments can be obtained from the child’s teacher or school or from the school district’s Web site.

Rule 5: Take Test Scores from High School Students with a Big Grain of Salt. Student performance on standardized tests can be a powerful measure of achievement. But the data only holds meaning if you are certain the child tried his or her very best on the assessment. At the high school level, this becomes problematic, because performance on the norm-referenced test, as well as the California Standards Test, actually has little relationship to a student’s post–high school plans. Many students figure out that these assessments hold no meaning for their future, so they don’t try as hard as they might when they are given the test. In fact, in focus groups, some high school students from San Diego reported filling in the test forms at random, or (in one memorable instance) using the bubbles on the test form to spell out an obscenity-laced message to the test-givers.

So while standardized test performance should receive careful attention at the elementary and middle-school levels, people should be careful before ascribing too much meaning to some of these tests for high school students. By contrast, careful attention should be paid to student performance on the new High School Exit Exam, which is becoming a prerequisite for graduation from high school, and to students’ progress toward meeting the course requirements for application to the University of California or California State University systems. This sequence of courses is a good way to assess whether a child will be eligible to apply to a rigorous four-year university.

For more information on standardized test results for schools in San Diego, visit the Web sites of the California Department of Education (www.cde.ca.gov) or the San Diego County Office of Education (www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us). n

Scott Grimes is director of research at San Diego Dialogue, a regional public policy center based at the University of California, San Diego.

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