By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess

In unheralded corners of California, Latino and African-American students are busting the averages, producing higher scores and larger numbers of college-ready graduates. This is happening in places like Val Verde Unified and Desert Sands Unified in Riverside County and Sanger Unified in Fresno County.

They were among districts with outstanding grades in “A Report Card on District Achievement: How Low-income, African-American, and Latino Students Fare in California School Districts,” a comprehensive report by Education Trust-West, ranking 146 unified districts – those with at least 5,000 students tested – based on four academic performance measures.***

Ed Trust-West Executive Director Arun Ramanathan is hoping that profiling the three districts in the report – “the myth busters” – and producing individual district report cards will be “conversation starters” to spur districts to look hard at achievement gaps and to learn from the success of others. “Interesting things are happening in the Inland Empire, which is also where migration is happening.”

There’s nothing new about the data; but pulling it together in individual report cards, ranking districts like a class of fifth graders, grabs attention. So does the focus on districts, rather than individual schools needing improvement. As the report’s authors, Lindsey Stuart and Carrie Hahnel, observed, “Many of the levers of change at the school level are controlled by district leaders, who make critical decisions regarding staffing and resources that can either tie the hands of promising school leaders, or free those same leaders to achieve remarkable results.”

The four measures are:

Performance: how well a district’s low-income, Latino, and African American students did on state tests, as reflected in API scores. Getting an A would require meeting the statewide goal of 800 (none did for low-income students, but Alhambra Unified in Los Angeles County got 799; three districts – Clovis, Temecula Valley, and Redondo Beach – got A’s for minority students).

Improvement: how much API scores increased over the previous five years. An A required an increase of 100 points (considerably above the statewide average of 59 points). High-poverty district leaders were Sanger (114 points), Val Verde (111 points), and Desert Sands (103); two Riverside County districts, Lake Elsinore (141 points) and Coachella (115 points), joined Sanger and Val Verde with A’s for minority student gains.

Achievement gap: the difference in API scores between minority and white students in a district. To get an A, the difference had to be less than 30 points. Baldwin Park Unified, with only a 2 percent white population, is the only district to get an A, but Lake Elsinore in Riverside County stands out for having both high achievement (791 API for Latino students) and a relatively small gap of 42 points. It cut the gap by half over the past five years.

College readiness: this measures the percentage of minority and low-income students who met the A-G course requirements for admission to a four-year state university. This is an imperfect measure because it’s self-reported by districts and prone to errors. It also doesn’t factor in career readiness. An A required attainment by more than 45 percent of minority students – a modest goal achieved by only 4 percent of districts, most of them with low percentages of poor students, led by Santa Monica (71 percent) and Claremont Unified (51 percent). Los Angeles Unified came close, with 43 percent – at least as the district reports it. Critics also argue that some districts water down some A-G courses.

No district got an overall A grade, and most got C’s and D’s on the relatively modest parameters, an indication of how much work needs to be done. But 17 percent of districts got at least one A and nearly two-thirds got one or more B’s. Only one district – West Contra Costa – with 22 percent African American, 48 percent Latino, and two-thirds of students in poverty – got an F, although some large, high-profile districts recognized for pushing reforms (Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) all got D’s.

All three of the districts profiled in the report got a D for the low percentage of students who fulfilled the A-G requirement. Val Verde Assistant Superintendent Michael McCormick is ambivalent about the measurement while acknowledging the low grade will again draw attention to the district’s course offerings. Facing the possibility of financial receivership two years ago, Val Verde eliminated many elective A-G courses while retrenching to core courses and expanding high school class sizes to 39. It’s a reminder that these decisions have an impact on students’ college aspirations.

In other areas, though, Val Verde, Sanger, and Desert Sands have made impressive progress. Of the three, only Sanger had been on anyone’s radar. This year, Marc  Johnson was named national superintendent of the year by the American Association of School Administrators; since then everyone, it seems, wants to learn Sanger’s secret sauce (300 educators from across America have signed up for this month’s visitors’ day).

What they’ll find is a process, not a program to be replicated. As Ed Trust-West’s Stuart and Hahnel concluded after visiting the districts, “There is nothing particularly innovative about these districts’ strategies; the lessons for others lie in the intensity of focus and shared sense of urgency with which they approach the work.”

Common goals in Sanger and Val Verde

In Sanger, teachers stress the urgency through their work in structured collaborations, Johnson says. “There is a constant focus on specific standards students should learn, on formative assessments that measure whether they are learning them, and on responses to students not getting it, through reteaching and student supports,” he says.  Teachers may group students based on areas they’re not getting and then switch off among those who can work particularly well with those specific students, he says.

The district is committed to direct explicit instruction, the process in which teachers design and deliver well-organized lessons that are built on previous knowledge, Johnson said; but it’s a structure, not a script, that teachers adhere to.

Val Verde’s McCormick can point to a pivotal moment in the district’s progress, seven years ago when the district required high school teachers in core subjects to begin giving six-week benchmark assessments. Teachers had been following pacing and curriculum guides, but didn’t take them seriously, he said, until they knew that the benchmark tests, tied to standards, would count for a quarter of a student’s grade. There was resistance at first, but thinking changed, and daily intensity picked up, he said, when students started doing better on state standardized tests.

Val Verde, like Sanger, has standards-based, assessment driven instruction, but teachers have discretion within the six-week structure over how lessons are taught, he said. Val Verde, with 80 percent low-income student body, is becoming known as a district beating the odds; teachers  take pride in that mission, McCormick said.

What works in Val Verde is not a prescription for every district, but many of  the students will be the first to graduate from high school, not to mention college, McCormick said, “so we have had to take steps to make them competitive for college and work.”

There’s a common culture among high-performing districts and a basic principle of not blaming the kids, Ed Trust-West’s Ramanathan says. “People in these districts look in the mirror, not outside the window.”

*** To download individual district report cards and see how districts of similar sizes and demographics match up, go here.