SACRAMENTO >> Lake County students feel well short of state marks in English and math, results released Wednesday show. California students’ scores rose from last year to this spring, with gains spanning gender, race, language and socioeconomic differences, results.
That’s the encouraging news. But in the annual English and math state test scores for public-school students, fewer than half of students scored proficient — 49 percent in English and just 37 percent in math. In Lake County the results reached just 30 percent and 19 percent, respectively.
Those statewide scores are an improvement over 2015, the first year of the state’s new version of standardized tests, when just 44 percent of students met English standards and 33 percent met math standards
Educators hailed the improvement, with state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson calling it progress toward upgrading the state’s education system. But critics said the progress is welcome but dismayingly slow, and pointed out the achievement gap separating the races.
While disappointed in the data, Catherine Stone, Middletown Unified School District’s Supervisor, pointed out that students are in a state of transition thanks to the adoption of common core standards.
“It’s a completely different way of teaching math under the common core,” she explained. “It takes awhile to adjust.”
The state’s data for math indeed represented a drop at the 11th grade level. Lake County students met or exceeded proficiency at a 19 percent rate at the high school level. But third graders — part of the common core for three years — passed at a 28 percent rate.
“It’s apples to oranges,” Stone said.
Across Lake County’s districts, performance varied. In math, 55 percent of 11th graders fell short, compared to 70 percent of Konocti Unified students and 42 percent of high schoolers in Lakeport. Numbers for English were more consistent across the board, again perhaps a reflection of common core changes.
Statewide, the ethnic gulf widened in math because white students’ proficiency scores jumped 10 percentage points, far outdistancing the scores of black students whose rates grew by 2 percentage points and of Latino students whose rates increased by 3 percentage points. Students meeting or exceeding math standards included 72 percent of Asians, 53 percent of whites, 24 percent of Latinos and 18 percent of African-Americans.
In English, Latino students who met standards increased from 32 percent to 37 percent — a 5 percentage point jump that helped narrow the gap slightly with Asian and white students, whose proficiency percentages grew by 4 and 3 percentage points, respectively. English proficiency rates were 76 percent of Asians, 64 percent of whites, 37 percent of Latinos and 31 percent of African-Americans.
“The achievement gap is pernicious and persistent and we all need to work together to find solutions that help all groups rise, while narrowing the gap,” Torlakson said.
Results also showed that California students who face the biggest challenges continue to struggle. In math, only 23 percent of poor students, 11 percent of English learners and 11 percent of students with disabilities met standards. For Lake County students 46 percent of economically disadvantaged students failed to meet standards in English, 55 percent in math.
Not surprisingly, children of parents with college education generally outperformed those whose parents topped out after high school or did not graduate.
Overall, there was a mixed reaction to the results.
“This is but one measure,” Stone said. “We have a lot of assessments we do in house. But it tells us we have a lot of room to grow.”
The latest state scores were compiled from computerized, adaptive exams administered last spring to students in grades 3 through 8 and in grade 11. Scores from statewide science exams will be released later.
About 3.2 million California students took the exams. Unlike in some other states, the new exams, which are aligned with the Common Core State Standards that largely have been adopted across the nation, have not generated a lot of controversy. Only 0.7 percent students received exemptions at their parents’ requests.
The exams replace the old the STAR tests, which were paper-and-pencil exams that were suspended in 2013.
Sharon Noguchi is a Bay Area News Group reporter
