VALLEY SCHOOLS:  Improving, but still below standards.

By JONATHAN DALE, Staff Writer 
March 27, 2007
Printed courtesy of Imperial Valley Press, El Centro, CA

  School administrators throughout the Imperial Valley will find out how well their students need to do on this year’s standardized tests when the 2006 Academic Performance Index base report is released later this morning.

  “The most important part of the release of the API bases is it gives the schools their targets for the following year,” Imperial County Office of Education school support coordinator Leo Monroy said. “The tests they take this May will show up next August in their growth report, and this gives them their tar­get they should be shooting for,” he said.

  Using California Standardized Testing and Reporting and California High School Exit Exam results from last year, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell will speak at a news confer­ence today releasing the 2006 API base and statewide rank­ing for each of California’s schools.

  Set into place at the begin­ning of the decade, the API was formed with the purpose of improving the academic performances of students throughout the state by creat­ing a point-value system that would “rate” a school’s per­formance on annual stan dardized tests.

  A score of 800 out of a possible 1,000 is considered a proficient rating.
  “If you look at the similar schools ranking, they’re actu­ally pretty high,” Monroy said. “However, we’re always try­ing to shoot for the best that they can be. “We continue to improve, but it’s never enough until we get to that 800 or higher,” he said.

  While nearly every local school district successfully improved upon the 2005 API base report, many individual schools actually fell behind by dozens of points, including much of the El Centro Elementary School District, which as a whole improved its API standing despite see­ing six of its 11 schools post negative growth scores.

“Obviously you can’t look at one year as an indicator of our overall progress,” ECESD Superintendent Michael Klentschy said. “It’s a change over time.
  “What we hope to see as the El Centro Elementary School District is a pathway of continuing progress,” he said.

  The part of O’Connell’s announcement today that Klentschy said he is looking forward to the most is the two statewide rankings, one of which pits schools against each other regardless of socio-economic differences, while the other matches sim­ilar schools against each other.

  “That is a very important measure to us because we would like to see how the stu­dents with varying back­ground do in comparison to students with similar attrib­utes,” Klentschy said.

  “We’re looking at trend lines, and we expect to see continuing progress as a dis­trict,” he said. “It’s our desire that all children are success­ful. 

Local API Growth Overview

  >> Staff Writer Jonathan Dale can be reached at 337-3440 or at jdale@ivpres­sonline.com