If the ability of students to score well on standardized tests is the measure of an education, local public high schools have made notable progress for a second straight year, and middle and elementary schools extended their long-running record of high performance.
The Department of Education’s annual “academic performance index” scores for the past school year came out Thursday, August 31, and showed every school in the Menlo Park, Woodside, Portola Valley and Las Lomitas school districts scoring well above the statewide target of 800 on a scale of 200 to 1,000.
Woodside and Menlo-Atherton high schools, each of which serve about 2,000 students from a broad ethnic and economic demographic, have yet to meet the target, but are within sight of it. Woodside scored 736, advancing 16 points from last year, while M-A rose to 757 with its advance of 29 points.
Summit Preparatory (Charter) High School in Redwood City scored 851, a drop from 862. Summit enrolls about a quarter of its 375 students from the Almanac’s circulation area and echoes, on a smaller scale, the demographics at M-A and Woodside.
While the news is generally good by the state’s measure, two schools — M-A and Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park — did not meet federal standards of “adequate yearly progress” set by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Oak Knoll missed the test participation rate target with its special education students, while M-A did not meet the graduation rate criterion. A school must graduate at least 82.9 percent of eligible students, or raise the rate by at least 0.1 percentage point from the previous year or 0.2 points over a two-year average.
A school or district either makes adequate progress or does not, based on meeting four targets: progress of at least one point in standardized test scores in English language arts and math, a minimum of 95 percent of eligible children “participating” in the tests, a minimum percentage who make above-average scores — a number that rises about 10 percentage points a year — and an acceptable percentage of students graduating.
M-A is in its fifth consecutive year of not meeting the No Child standard of adequate yearly progress. In 2004-05, the school missed the target for above-average performance. Five students categorized as learning the English language needed an above-average score on the English test, while seven more needed better math scores.
Last fall, to avoid federal sanctions, the Sequoia Union High School District — which includes M-A and Woodside — debuted mandatory English and math remedial classes for students who perform poorly on state tests.
To see results for individual schools, go to the Department of Education Web site at cde.ca.gov, click on the link for “Accountability Progress Reporting (APR),” and follow the links to “school reports.”
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