School Rankings Rankle Some

For the fourth year in a row, Sixth Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles has landed in the academic basement among California’s public schools.

Statistics released Tuesday showed that the campus and 404 others around California have remained stuck in the bottom position since state rankings began in 2000. Once again, these schools ranked 1 on a scale of 1 to a coveted 10.

But the disappointing result did not tell the whole story behind this lack of movement.

Sixth Avenue Elementary and dozens of other low-ranking schools across the region produced some of the biggest testing gains over the last four years.

Partly because of the way the state designed the ranking system, these schools have had a hard time separating themselves from many other campuses whose test scores have barely budged or even declined. And schools such as Sixth Avenue have struggled to move up because many campuses with higher rankings also have improved their test scores.

All that upsets Sixth Avenue Principal Katie Harris Greene, whose school near Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district has consistently raised its test scores.

“I have people here who do not view themselves as a 1. Neither do I,” Greene said. “When you put a label on an institution, you are doing a disservice to it.”

The school ranking system is part of the state’s Academic Performance Index, which uses standardized test results in grades two through 11 to measure achievement.

Each year, the state gives every California school an API score from 200 to 1,000, with 800 being the target. The state also divides campuses into 10 roughly equal groups, whose results were released Tuesday. Beyond bragging rights, those rankings are used to help identify schools that need extra help or possible shakeups such as a new principal.

(Results are available on the Internet at api.cde.ca.gov.)

Schools serving mostly low-income and minority children have more often wound up in the lowest ranks, while suburban campuses with more affluent students generally have reached the highest ranks. That pattern has held for the program’s four years.

Sixty-two percent of schools that were in rank 1 four years ago are still on the bottom rung, according to a Times analysis of state data. These campuses are concentrated in urban districts such as Los Angeles, Compton, Lynwood and Santa Ana, among others.

Wilson Elementary is among the schools that have yet to break out of the bottom rank, even though the Santa Ana campus has far exceeded its API testing targets all four years.

“It’s a slap in the face when you meet these targets and the state tells you you’re still a decile 1 school,” Principal Robert Anguiano said. “If you don’t move up, it’s a sign that the state isn’t validating all the work you’ve done. [Scores] are going up and up, but we’ve still got this ranking.”

Anguiano and teachers agreed that Wilson’s ranking matters less to them than the improvement they see in their mostly Latino students, 91% of whom are learning English and 90% are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.

“A lot of teachers are frustrated,” Susan Lear, a 26-year Wilson veteran, said of the ranking system. “It can get you down if you let it, but that is not our focus here. We know what we’re doing in our classrooms.”

At Edgemont Elementary in Moreno Valley, a rank 1 school that also has shown improvement, Principal Maribel Mattox sought to turn Tuesday’s results into a rallying cry.

“It tells us that we have to continue to work hard, to have high expectations of students,” Mattox said. About 60% of the students are still learning English.

State education officials defended the API system, saying it is working as intended. Because the ranks are a comparative measure, a tenth of all schools will always occupy positions at the bottom and another tenth at the top, depending on their test performance.

“No one is [punishing] any school for being in the first decile,” said William Padia, director of the Office of Policy and Evaluation for the state Department of Education. “It’s just meant to show how they are doing relative to everyone else.”

And the system is a tool to identify struggling schools in need of extra attention -- campuses such as Virgil Middle School in the crowded Pico Union district of Los Angeles.

The sprawling campus has floundered in rank 1 for four straight years, showing only modest improvement while failing to meet its state test score targets. As a result, Virgil is under watch by state and school district monitors.

Administrators and teachers say it’s hard to overcome hurdles faced by their students, many of whom are immigrants and speak English as a second language.

Math teacher Luis Herrero called the expectations by the state to improve test scores “very unrealistic.”

“It’s not possible, and it hurts me to say that,” he said.

Monitoring visits from district officials “are nerve-racking,” Assistant Principal Philip Toyotome said. “Our teachers feel like they are under the gun. As administrators, we feel the pressure too.”

Teachers at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights said they too feel pressure to improve. Like Virgil, Roosevelt has remained a 1 for four years.

Two years ago, the state and district removed the previous principal because of low test scores.

Under new Principal Cecilia Quemada, the school now holds regular staff meetings to help teachers improve scores and sponsors pep rallies to pump up everyone for testing.

It also holds pizza parties for classes in which the required 95% of students show up on testing day. Students are told the scores are vital because “it’s a picture of you, as well as the school,” Quemada said.

Still, teachers say it is hard to make up for students’ past education.

“It’s very difficult when [our students only] read and write at a third-grade level,” math teacher Charles McKay said.

At the other end of the API scale, 79% of schools with a rank of 10 four years ago have consistently stayed on top. These schools are in La Canada-Flintridge, Manhattan Beach, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Irvine, Laguna Beach and other mainly upper income communities. Those rankings are often touted by real estate agents and community leaders.

Educators said the API system was designed to help schools at the bottom by giving their students additional credit for improved scores. But schools that start out very low have to improve much more to rise in the ranks than a school, for example, trying to move from 6 to 7 on the state scale.

“The fact that a school remains a 1 simply means that it is not beating the state’s rate of improvement enough to cross over that next threshold,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford education professor who heads a committee that advises the state on API technical issues. “What matters is the absolute improvement we see year after year.”

At Sixth Avenue Elementary, the API score has shot up from 344 to 592 since testing began. If students can break 610 on this spring’s tests, the school will be able to join the second rank.

Teachers are proud of their results and say the continued low ranking does not properly reflect progress at a school where 51% of the youngsters are still learning English and 100% qualify for free or low-cost lunches.

“It’s frustrating to hear about it all the time: The kids are failing or that the teachers are not doing their jobs,” fifth-grade teacher Linda Bull said. “We know that our kids can learn and perform. I accept slow growth as opposed to no growth at all.”

Camille Harris, a pre-kindergarten teacher, agreed.

“We don’t labor on the negative,” she said. “We know what we need to do, and we’re moving in the right direction.”

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Grouping Southern California schools by rank

The state Department of Education divides all schools in California into 10 equally distributed group rankings for the Academic Performance Index. Rank 1 is the lowest, based on students’ performance on standardized tests. Chart shows the percentages of schools in each of the 10 rankings for the Los Angeles Unified School District and some Southern California counties.

*--* L.A. Other San Unified L.A. Orange Ventura Riverside Bernardino School County County County County County Rank District schools schools schools schools schools 1 21.9 7.9 5.7 7.1 9.1 10 2 14.9 12.3 6.6 8.2 13.6 14.7 3 14.4 10.3 7 8.8 12.4 14.3 4 12.7 12.4 8.3 6 11.2 11.9 5 7.5 9.9 6.3 8.2 15.7 11.9 6 8.7 9 8.8 8.8 12.1 9.5 7 7.3 7.6 7.7 7.7 6.7 10.7 8 4.5 9.1 11.2 10.4 10 10.2 9 4 10.4 19.3 16 7.9 4.3 10 4.2 11.2 19.1 17.6 1.5 2.6

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Results and rankings for individual schools are at https://api.cde.ca.gov.

Source: Los Angeles Times analysis of California Department of Education data

Times staff writers Joy Buchanan and Regine Labossiere; Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis; and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.