Today the California Department of Education released the 2011 Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program exam results. The testing, completed last spring, includes tests in English–language arts, mathematics, science, and history–social science for grades 2 through 11. In this exclusive report, OC180NEWS analyzes the results for the schools in the Los Alamitos Unified School District.
The data for the test results is immense and there are endless ways to slice it. This means the data can be reported in whatever manner the presenter deems most effective.
The Los Alamitos Unified School District, which will present the results at the Board of Education meeting on August 23, tends to look at the data by grade level across all schools.
Thus, for example, the district most likely will discuss third grade results by combining all the elementary schools together and looking at the data for third graders from that perspective. This approach enables the district to focus on results for all students in each grade level, regardless of school. By contrast, at OC180NEWS, we choose to present the data by school site. Thus, rather than combining schools to get grade level results, we combine grades to get school site specific results.
All the data is available to anyone on the Department of Education’s web site. (http://star.cde.ca.gov/.)
The data may be seen at the grade level, by test, and for every school. It can also be viewed by district, county and for the state in total. The test results are ranked into five categories: advanced, proficient, basic, below basic, and far below basic. For some reporting, the state combines advanced and proficient. For purposes of this report, we have selected that protocol as well.
For the Los Alamitos Unified School District in total, the percentage of students at the proficient and advance level is greater than the average for Orange County and the State of California in every test subject. Likewise, the same averages for Orange County are higher than the statewide averages for every test subject.
Unless otherwise noted, the following discussion expresses test results as the percentage of students scoring at the advance and proficient levels.
Los Alamitos High School
Test results fell in four of the five test subjects at Los Alamitos High School. The scores for advance and proficient in history increased from 78.7% one year ago, to 79.6% in the most recent data.
But, all other categories were down. The high school’s math scores saw the largest decline by falling from 60.2% last year, to 53.5% this year. This is the lowest math score since at least 2007 and brought to an end, and completely reversed, the steady improvement which occurred from 2007 through 2010.
The second largest drop at Los Al was in science where the scores fell from 78.9% last year, to 73.4% this year. This is the lowest science score since 2008 and also ends an improving trend.
English language arts fell from 79.9% in 2010, to 78.3% this year. Just like the other subjects noted above, the lower current year scores ended what had been an improving trend. But, unlike the subjects mentioned above, the relative small drop still keeps the current score above the results for 2009 and prior years.
McAuliffe and Oak Middle Schools
The scores at McAuliffe were higher than Oak in three of the four test subjects. But English language arts was nearly the same, and Oak improved more than McAuliffe in three of the four subjects. Oak’s current year score of 88.6% in history beat McAuliffe’s 82.7%. Jumping up 4.3 percentage points from 88.2% last year, to a stellar 92.5% this year, science was the subject where McAuliffe improved even more than Oak.
McAuliffe Middle School
McAuliffe’s scores in English language arts leveled off at 86.5%, the same score as in 2010. This is the first year English scores have not improved at McAuliffe since at least 2007.
History, which experienced a small decline from 83.2% down to 82.7%, was the only subject at McAuliffe where results were lower than 2010. Their math scores on the other hand, stepped up from 75.4% last year, to 83.1%, one of the largest gains in the district. Lastly, as mentioned above, McAuliffe’s science scores jumped up from 88.2% last year, to 92.5% this year.
Oak Middle School
Oak continued its upward trend in English language arts, and even reported its largest improvement since at least 2007. At that time, their English score was only 75.3%. By last year, they had improved to 81.7%, but then they jumped up to 86% this year.
Elementary Schools
The six elementary schools of the Los Alamitos Unified School District are tested in three subjects: English language arts, math, and science. Only fifth grade students receive the science tests. Grades 2 through 5 are tested in English and math.
Of the 3 subjects tested across the 6 elementary schools, the single highest score was in math at Weaver, where 98.3% of the students scored at the proficient or advance level. The lowest score across the three subjects and six schools was at Los Alamitos Elementary where the English arts score was 77.3%.
The single most improved subject across the six elementary schools was at Rossmoor Elementary, where the science score shot up by 9.1 percentage points to 82.9%. Science was also the subject with the largest drop in scores. This happened at Los Alamitos Elementary where the score dropped by 2.6 percentage points, to 77.7%.
Hopkinson Elementary School
Even though the lowest score at Hopkinson last year was already at 86.2%, the school managed improvement in each of the three tests.
Hopkinson’s English score shot up by 7 points in 2009 to 88.0%. But, the were not able to hold that high level and they fell back in 2010 to 86.2%. They moved back up this year to 87.2%, just moderately below their 2009 high point.
2009 was also a move up year for math at Hopkinson when the score improved 5.1 points to 91.1%. But, unlike English, the school was able to continue improving in math in both 2010 and 2011. The most recent score is 94.1%, second only to Weaver’s math score.
Just like English and math, 2009 was also a break out year for science at Hopkinson, when the score jumped by 8 points to 89.1%. The science score drop slightly in 2010, but they more than made up for that with a 0.7 point increase to 89.5% in 2011.
Lee Elementary School
Two of the three subjects showed declines at Lee, but the changes in all three subjects were relatively small. The English score drop the most, falling 1.3 points to 84.2%. Other than the drop in 2011, Lee’s English scores have improved each year since 2007.
The math score at Lee edged up0.6 points to 92.6% and the science score slipped 0.6 points to 86.1%. The 0.6 increase in math is remarkable because it comes on top of a whopping 10.5 point increase last year. The 0.6 decrease in science comes after three years of consecutive improvement.
Los Alamitos Elementary School
At LAE the math improved the most and has the highest total score at that school. Their math score improved by 7.1 points, to 88.4%. Even better, this strong improvement comes after a whopping 12.1 point improvement in 2010. Thus, in two years, LAE’s math score has increased from 69.2% , to 88.4% in 2011.
In 2007, LAE’s English score was 65.6%. By 2010, it had improved up to 78.1%. In 2011, their English score pulled back to 77.3%.
The science scores at LAE have been on a roller coaster ride since 2007 when it was only 57.1%. The most recent score pulled back by 2.6 points to 77.7% for 2011.
McGaugh Elementary School
McGaugh had significant improvement in each of the three tests and all three of these improvements came on top of strong gains in 2010 – the only elementary to have gains in each of the three tests two years in a row. The English score improved by 3.5 points to 84.0%, the highest English score at McGaugh since at least 2007. Their English score improved 4.2 points in 2010.
The math score moved higher by 3.3 points to 86.2%. That improvement comes after a 4.5 point improvement in 2010. The science score was the highest and improved the most at McGaugh. Science was higher in 2011 by 7.2 points to 90.9%, and that was after a huge 14.7 point gain last year.
Rossmoor Elementary
Already with high scores, Rossmoor also had strong gains in each of the three tests in 2011. The English score came in at 89.4%, and increase of 4.4 points from one year ago.
The math score surged higher to 92.3%, and increase of 8.2 points since 2010. But, the 2010 number fell 3.4 points from 2009.
The science score had its second strong consecutive annual increase. After a 2.0 point improvement in 2010, the science score jumped higher by another 9.1 points to 82.9% in 2011.
Weaver Elementary School
Even though the 2010 scores for Weaver were all above 90%, the school managed to pull out strong gains in two of the three categories. Not only that, but the one subject where their score did not improve, the decrease was only 0.3 points lower. The English score dropped from 92.5% in 2010, to 92.2% for the current year.
In math, Weaver had worked their score up to 96.8% by 2009 and one might have imagined that was about as high as it could go. The score fell to 94.4% last year. But, they came roaring back even stronger in 2011 with an almost unbelievable math score of 98.3% — a district record.
But, with a 2011 score of 97.9%, science is right behind the math folks. The science score improved by 3.2 points in 2011 after an improvement of 3.7 points in 2010. Since 2007, Weaver’s science score has improved every year from 87.8% to the current level of 97.9% — the second best in the district.
The Los Alamitos Unified School District serves nearly 10,000 students in Seal Beach, Rossmoor, and Los Alamitos. The district includes Los Alamitos High School, a full service high school, Laurel High School, a continuation high school, McAuliffe Middle School, Oak Middle School, and six elementary schools. Mrs. Karen Russell is the current President of the Board of Education. Dr. Sherry Kropp is the Superintendant of the Los Alamitos Unified School District.
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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.
In 
The increased emphasis by education officials at all levels on standardized testing performance has led to the decline of real learning in our schools. I am unsurprised but saddened by the results at Los Al high school, where attitudes in the administration are intractably driven towards producing slightly better test results by any means necessary.
Administrators micromanage teachers’ curriculum choices and lesson plans instead of trusting the professional instincts and training of their staff. They over-police and persecute teachers who use innovative methods or materials that are not district, school, or principal-approved.
As a result, there has been a recent trend of significant teacher turnover at Los Al, where otherwise-qualified, brilliant and healthy teachers have retired or moved elsewhere to avoid being told how to do their jobs. Predictably, test results are starting to catch up with this attitude, as students are only receiving instruction which is extruded through a complicated mesh of regulation and standards.
This top-down style of administration and curriculum does not work and our students deserve better. Our district and school administration should focus on areas where it can considerably innovate, by altering the learning environment or school structure, or otherwise improving our learning paradigm which has been in place for decades. Most importantly, administrators should allow those who are trained in teaching to teach.