Schools Ready to Improve Scores
By Caroline An
PASADENA – The school year is just three days old, but Merian Stewart knows that Washington Middle School has to deliver this semester.
“The teachers are not happy that the scores went down this year,” Stewart, Washington’s interim principal, said of the school’s performance on the recent Academic Performance Index. “They are ready to do hard work.”
The API scores are the state’s main measure of student progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It ranks individual schools on a scale from 200 to 1,000. The state has defined 800 as the target score for all schools.
Two of Pasadena Unified’s middle schools – Eliot and Washington – posted declining numbers on results released last week. Washington Middle’s score was 599, a 31-point drop from last year; Eliot Middle dropped to 614 from 630.
Both are far from meeting the 800 API target.
Pasadena Unified School District Superintendent Edwin Diaz attributed Washington’s API decline to its English-learner subgroup – students struggling with English.
Latino and socio-economically disadvantaged subgroups of middle school students also did not meet target growth goals, Diaz said.
“The program in place didn’t get the growth the school hope for,” he said. “They are going to make modifications for the program this year.”
Washington Middle is a feeder school to nearby John Muir High School, which is under state monitoring after four years of declining API scores. That has prompted concerns about how well Washington’s students will be prepared when they enter Muir in coming years.
To quell those concerns Muir officials said they are working closely with their middle school colleagues.
“We are looking at data and working when them,” Muir Principal Sheryl Orange said. “There is a leap that happens – from elementary to middle to high schools – and we have to stabilize the performance.”
The latest data confirm a burgeoning concern in the PUSD that the middle school students are missing the mark. On state assessment tests, middle school performance has been an ongoing trouble area, prompting the school board earlier this summer to approve a reform plan at the three traditional middle schools.
Smaller classes, 90-minute math and English classes, and more frequent assessment tests are some of the initiatives aimed at helping struggling students.
For Washington Middle, the decline comes as the school embarks on another year of “Program Improvement” status for not meeting federal targets. If it continues in PI status, the school could face closure, or the replacement of its staff.
Stewart said the PI designation is worrisome, but faculty this year is focused on “instruction and teaching to the standards.”
“We know what we need to do to remove that,” she said.
Proactive measures have been and are underway. Several parts of the district’s middle school reform plan have been adopted. Also, the faculty has been working with a state-mandated provider, an outside consultant who visits the schools and works with teachers to determine better teaching strategies, among other priorities.
Additionally, class-size reduction has been in effect at the sixth-grade level, a move Stewart hopes to duplicate for seventh and eighth grades.
Stewart said last year was a rebuilding year in which faculty focused on finding the best teaching practices for students. A two- day professional development workshop honed in on project-based and group learning. The focus this school year is teaching the standards and using the 90-minute class times more effectively.
With the middle school reform in place, the stakes are high, Diaz said.
“We are committed to supporting the plan and I am expecting different results,” he said.
caroline.an@sgvn.com
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