Statement from the Education Trust-West on the Release of NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment Data - California Results
December 1, 2005
The results of the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Trial Urban District Assessment released today show that students in some of the largest districts in the county are making significant gains, but that still too many students are not reaching proficiency in mathematics and reading. The Trial Urban District Assessment (a special project of NAEP) tests a representative sample of students in ten large urban districts, two of which are in California: Los Angeles Unified and San Diego City Schools.
California Districts Are Making Progress
The good news is that achievement gains from 2003 to 2005 in San Diego and Los Angeles outpace the gains made by California as a whole. In Los Angeles Unified, the percentage of fourth grade students who performed at or above proficient in reading increased from 11 percent in 2003 to 14 percent in 2005. And in fourth grade math, the percentage of students who performed at or above proficient increased from 13 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in 2005.
In San Diego, the percentage of fourth grade students who performed at or above proficient in math increased from 20 percent in 2003 to 29 percent in 2005. The percentage of San Diego’s fourth grade students reaching proficiency in reading is the same in 2005 as it was in 2003 (22 percent), but achievement gaps are narrowing. The achievement gap in reading between fourth grade Black students and their White peers decreased by 7 points since 2003. And the achievement gap between Hispanic fourth grade students and their White peers decreased by 6 points since 2003. In San Diego, students are not only improving faster than the state as a whole, they are also outperforming California in the fourth and eighth grades, in both reading and math.
But Student Performance Levels Are Still Too Low
Despite these encouraging results, many students in both San Diego and Los Angeles are still performing way below where they need to be. Forty-nine percent of San Diego’s fourth grade students are performing at the “below basic” level in reading and thirty-nine percent of San Diego’s eighth grade students are performing at the below basic level in math. In Los Angeles, sixty-three percent of fourth grade students are performing at the below basic level in reading and sixty-two percent of eighth grade students are performing at the basic below level in math.
When we look at the data broken down by subgroup, the percentages of students scoring at the lowest level of performance increases: 62% of San Diego’s Hispanic 4th grade students are below basic in reading; 60% of San Diego’s Black 8th grade students are below basic in math; 72% of Los Angeles’ Black 4th grade students are below basic in reading; and 68% of Los Angeles’ Hispanic 8th grade students are below basic in math.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Other large urban districts are having considerably more success with their students overall, and with their poor and minority students. For example, African-American fourth-graders in New York scored 19 points higher in fourth grade reading than African-American students in Los Angeles. And in Boston, low-income eighth grade students scored 19 points higher in math than low-income students in Los Angeles.
It's clear that there are some large urban districts that face similar challenges as California, but are producing far better results for their students. While both Los Angeles Unified and San Diego City Schools should be commended for their progress and for their willingness to participate in an assessment that allows them to examine how they measure up to other large urban districts, they should also take advantage of the information provided by this assessment and learn from their successful peers in other large urban districts across the country.