Marty: The education treadmill

The $96 parcel tax proposed by the Hollister School District
must do more than merely refill their coffers to cover
”
previous mistakes.
”
It must advance the goal of improving education.
The $96 parcel tax proposed by the Hollister School District must do more than merely refill their coffers to cover “previous mistakes.” It must advance the goal of improving education.

First, the district should make a public report on the actions taken to address the 26 specific recommendations that the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team deemed necessary to get their financial house, including costs, in order. Second, the district must implement programs to improve the education experience and performance of all its students.

To accomplish that, the district must become inventive, evaluating the demographics and performance of their student body and designing programs specifically to fill those needs.

District students consist primarily of two subgroups with very different backgrounds and performance profiles; 73 percent are Hispanic/Latino and 22 percent White according to state data. Additionally, students may be categorized as socioeconomically disadvantaged and English learners, two significant negative influences on educational achievement, and a student can be in multiple groups.

More than 62 percent of the district’s students are classified as disadvantaged and 40 percent as English learners. Both categories are highly concentrated among the Hispanic/Latino subgroup.

Five schools had “significant” subgroups of white students, 18 to 42 percent of the school’s enrollment. The Academic Performance Index for the white subgroups was 817 to 864 and the district average was 843, all above the state target of 800. 

Eight schools had significant subgroups of Hispanic/Latino students, 51 to 92 percent of the schools’ enrollment. The API for the Hispanic/Latino group was 702 to 790 and the district average was 730. The district API averages for the socioeconomically disadvantaged and English learners were lower, 722 and 704, respectively.

These disparities in student demographics and relative performance underscore the need to have programs tailored for various levels within the district. For those students at the top, the programs must be challenging enough to advance their considerable capabilities at an accelerated pace.

For students with low scores, especially those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and English learners, the programs must be able to close the inherent performance gap in only a few years. Otherwise they will fall further behind as they try to master both basic skills and grade-appropriate instruction simultaneously.

For students in between, the programs must be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses and design a path to maximum performance within their capabilities. 

These results show that school APIs are largely pre-ordained by which student groups are prevalent in each school. I excluded the Dual Language Academy, students with disabilities and alternate education programs from my evaluations due to their special circumstances. One difficult question is, does attending a school with better performing students lift all students in the school? The limited data available would appear to support that theory, although it does not identify why.

All groups, whites, Hispanic/Latinos, the disadvantaged and English learners at schools with higher APIs generally did better than similar groups in schools with lower APIs; but which came first, the good students or the good schools?    

I believe that the two entities work together; better schools make better students make better schools and so on, but schools must make the first move. That’s why parents with students in higher scoring schools oppose transferring to lower scoring schools. It’s also the primary reason the district should phase in their new policy of limiting interdistrict transfers rather than doing it all at once. The district schools must be prepared to maintain or improve the performance level of the transferring students.

If the Hollister School District wants my parcel tax vote, they need to show me how they are going to get off the educational treadmill. They must plan to change the game, not merely move the pieces around.

Data Note: I calculated much of the data from individual 2009-2010 school reports. Interested readers can obtain earlier data including performance and staffing reports from www.ed-data.k12.ca.us.

Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.