From the Desk of the Superintendent
Superintendent J. Brian Sarvis, Ed.D.
September 1, 2005
Santa Barbara School Districts Meet the Challenge of State and National Standards
Test scores in the Santa Barbara Elementary and High School Districts improved over last year’s California Academic Performance Index (API) by eight points and four points respectively. The Santa Barbara Elementary School District’s API rose to 746, which is very close to the state’s cut off point of 800 for schools that can be removed from having to demonstrate growth as they are considered to be excelling in all standards. The Santa Barbara High School District’s API was even higher at 760. These high API scores are based on the state’s STAR tests and our teachers and students can be proud of their accomplishments.
In terms of the federal standards, the elementary school wide proficiencies greatly exceed federal standards of 24.4% proficient for English language arts (ELA) and 26.5% proficient on math. Our scores were 41% and 49.1% respectively. Only the scores for our English learners and students with disabilities fell below federal standards with scores of 18.8% and 10.1% for ELA and 12.9% for the disabilities subgroup on Math. With the new federal guidelines, only a 6% gain for the English learners would have removed all categories from being below proficient as the disabilities subgroup would be recalculated as exceeding proficiencies standards.
For the high school district, we again exceeded federal standards of 23% and 23.7% for ELA and math with proficiencies of 57% and 47.2% respectively. In terms of subgroups, we just missed meeting these standards in math for socio-economically disadvantaged (22.5%) and English learners (21.8%). Again, the students with disabilities would have been recalculated as meeting the standards if these two subgroups had scored only a few points more.
In terms of individual schools, it appears that there will be no new schools in the either school district that will be entering the federal Program Improvement (PI) program. With the doubling of federal standards, it was anticipated that many schools might have a difficult time making proficiency standards, especially the English language assessment tests for our English learners in the districts. This year the federal standards recognized the difficulty of holding students with disabilities to the standards of all other students, but there were no comparable recognition of the problems for English learners to be held to the same standards as students who already know English. Therefore, five of the elementary schools did not pass proficiency in the English learner’s subgroup (Adams, Cleveland, Franklin, Harding, and McKinley). Two elementary schools, Peabody Charter and Washington, managed to exceed federal standards through a process called “safe harbor.” Safe harbor recognizes that schools that make significant growth on a subgroup should be considered as proficient if they meet a series of requirements.
For the secondary school district, all the high schools met all federal proficiency standards. For the junior high schools, both La Colina and Goleta Valley met all federal proficiency standards; Goleta Valley through the same safe harbor process as for the two elementary schools. La Cumbre and Santa Barbara junior high schools continued on in PI status, although there may be some data corrections that might hold La Cumbre to the second year of PI instead of advancing to the third year.
Overall, considering the doubling of percent proficiency standards, Santa Barbara schools showed great improvement in all categories, included the difficult categories of English learners for English language assessments and for students with disabilities. These results show that students and teachers are excelling in there efforts to improve performance on these education fundamentals.