Yesterday, the California Department of Education released the official SAT results for last year. Los Alamitos High School fared better than the two previous years, but not quite as well as some other indicators might suggest.
The Department of Education publishes an amazing amount of data about California schools and sorting it out can be a bit of a trial. To know how well the Los Alamitos Unified School District is doing, there is data to measure almost anything imaginable. Measuring the cumulative content taught by the district is not the same as measuring how well our students are being prepared for college.
Perhaps the broadest measure is the API, or Academic Performance Index. According to the California Department of Education, “The API is the cornerstone of the state’s academic accountability requirements. Its purpose is to measure the academic performance and growth of schools. Test Results Used in the API measure the performance and progress of a school based on results of statewide tests at grades two through twelve. A school’s API is a composite number representing the results of these tests. The API is a numeric index (or scale) ranging from 200 to 1000.”
Los Alamitos High School has recently done very well on this index. The score for 2006 was 836, and 837 in 2007. Both years were good enough to be considered in the top 10% of California schools. In 2008, the API increased to 851. The statewide rankings for 2008 have not yet been released by the State Department of Education.
Achieving high performance on the API is a major component of being designated as a Distinguished School, an award which Los Alamitos received for 2008. Achieving top scores on the statewide test is a primary focus of the district at all grade levels. The district’s data management system collects data on test performance and teachers interpret the information to adjust their teaching approaches accordingly.
These tests are called the CST, or Content Standard Test, and they measure the degree to which students have learned the content they are expected to learn. This does not, however, mean that students are being appropriately prepared for college. That’s where the SAT comes in. Rather than measuring specific knowledge or course content, the SAT is supposed to predict college performance.
To the extent the SAT measures higher level thinking, and the District is very focused on the content required for success on the statewide tests, there is a risk of a disconnect. If too much of the District’s efforts are teaching to the statewide tests, SAT results and college admissions could be disappointing. Gregg Stone, Assistant Principal/Curriculum at Los Alamitos High School, said “If you focus too much on strictly a test prep strategy and focus strictly on getting a high score on CST, you might lose the goal of the learning which I think is the level of complexity you are asking a kid to perform.”
There are several factors which play upon all these test results and data. The SAT is, of course, a test students self-select to take. This means that if a higher portion of the students take the test, the results could go down. That is exactly what happened to the High School’s recent SAT results.
While the average SAT scores at Los Alamitos High School are still pretty good, they are not as high up on the statewide scale as the API. For the last three years average SAT scores for Los Alamitos High seniors have been 1625 (2006), 1597 (2007), and 1639 (2008). These scores have placed Los Al High in the 83.4% (2006),89.8% (2007), and 86.7% (2008) percentiles. The dip in total score in 2007 corresponded with an increase in the portion of seniors taking the test. In 2006, 64.9% of the Los Al seniors took the test. That number increased to 70.3% in 2007, and then fell back again in 2008 to 63.9%. In reflecting on the 2008 SAT results, Stone said “We didn’t do poorly by any means, but we can also still do better in terms of helping to prepare kids–both in the number of kids taking the exam as well as their performance on the exam.”
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About Dolores Barr, Publisher
Dolores Barr has lived in Rossmoor since 1992 and has created this site to provide local news for the people of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Rossmoor, Leisure World, Sunset Beach, and Surfside, California. My husband and I have had two students graduate from the Los Alamitos Unified School District and currently our Grandson, Ricky Apodaca, grade 3 at Weaver Elementary, is actively involved in youth baseball through LAYB and youth football through FNL.
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