by Mark McDermott
Every autumn the Manhattan Beach Unified School District receives what school board trustee Bruce Greenberg likes to call its “report card,” or what is more cumbersomely known as the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, a battery of standardized tests required by the state to measure how well students are learning.
MBUSD has always performed well in the tests relative to most school districts, with well over 80 percent of students routinely meeting or exceeding state standards. But the district has experienced a small but persistent decline in CAASPP scores since the pandemic. In the years prior to the pandemic, for example, nearly 85 percent of MBUSD students met or exceeded English Language Arts standards, but after a 2.48 percent decline last year, this measure had dropped to 79.52 percent. Math scores had likewise dropped districtwide from nearly 80 percent meeting or exceeding standards pre-pandemic to 72.99 percent last year.
Jonathan Erickson, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, presented this year’s CAASPP results to the school board last week and was happy to announce that the decline had come to an end.
“We’re seeing what we wanted to see, a rebound,” Erickson said. “We’d like in future years for this to become a swoosh type thing — if you could visualize a giant swoosh with a short tail on the left and a high tail on the right. We’re not there yet, but it is safe to say that we’ve broken the negative trend.”
Districtwide, students scored a 1.64 percent increase in ELA scores, with 81.16 percent meeting or exceeding state standards. In math, student scores rose 2.08 percent, to 75.07 percent. Specific grade-level data for ELA testing showed significant improvements in grades 4, 5, 7 and 11, with decreases in grades 3 and 8. The biggest increase was an 8.66 percent jump, to 76.15 percent, in 11th grade scores. The biggest decrease was a 6.34 percent drop in grade 6, to 77.90 percent.
“With all of these, there are things to celebrate, and areas to look at for work,” Erickson said.
In math scores, the biggest gain was a 13.51 percent increase, to 73.17 percent, in 8th grade, and the biggest decrease was a 4.42 drop in 11th grade, to 54.09 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards. The big improvement in 8th grade scores confirmed something district staff believed last year, when there had been a 13 percent drop at that level — a middle school math teacher position had a series of substitute teachers that may have been the source of the problem.
“We had some thoughts about what had happened and that it would be an anomaly, and we see the giant bounce back in data this year, so it’s very reassuring,” Erickson said. “We feel like we’re doing the right work for this particular grade….In grade 11 math, we have seen the reverse trend.”
One area of ongoing decline in this year’s battery of standardized assessments was the California Science Test (CAST), in which districtwide student performance dropped 2.66 percent to 58.29 percent, down from 66.09 percent two years ago and 60.95 percent last year.
“This was a smaller decrease from last year to this year, but [the decline] still is leading to it being a focus area,” Erickson said.
Compared to districts statewide and throughout LA County, MBUSD performs well above average. Statewide, 47.02 students met or exceeded ELA standards, while 47.20 did so within LA County, compared to 82 percent of MBUSD students. In math, 33.38 percent of California students met or exceeded standards, 32.86 percent in LA County, compared to 73.15 of MBUSD students.
Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Dr. Irene Castillo-Gonzalez unveiled a new comparison the district analyzed this year, showing how MBUSD performed among the top performing K-12 districts in the state.
“We are fifth in ELA performance, tied with our neighbor, Palos Verdes, at 81.16 percent,” she said. “When you look at this top 10, we also were the highest in growth, at 1.64 percent…We have a top 20 in the state … .and we see that for math performance in the state of California, we are seventh in the percentage of students who met or exceed standards in math. And you can see we had the largest change in the positive direction [in math] at 2.08 percent as well.”
Castillo-Gonzalez said a frequent question the district receives is how it performs compared to neighboring districts.
“First of all, we collaborate a lot with our neighbors. We’re sharing best practices,” she said. “And when you look at how our neighbors are performing, we saw that El Segundo and Redondo were also in the top 20 for math and ELA. Redondo was ranked 18 in English Language Arts and 15th in math, and El Segundo was 15th in ELA and 14th in math. So I just want to celebrate our neighbors as well. We think about high achievement in the South Bay.”
One area MBUSD has emphasized is student participation in the CAASPP tests. The state requires a 95 percent participation rate among students, and while MBUSD achieved that rate districtwide, Mira Costa High School did not — 91 percent took the math tests, and 94 percent ELA.
All grade school students take the tests, but only 11th graders at the high school. Testing was moved from May to March last year in order to conflict less with AP testing. Trustee Jen Fenton said while she appreciated that an attempt was made to better time the tests, students at this age are invariably overtasked.
“Whether you give it January or November or May or June, these kids are spent,” she said. “I mean, my kids showed up because they knew, and they’re going to kill me for saying this, but I think they probably hit C, C, C for every single answer.”
Student board representative Alex Weinbaum said the tests still competed with a lot of other crucial aspects of her junior year.
“It’s such a jam packed part of the year,” she said. “Even with me, I was like, ‘How can I get this done as quickly as possible so that I can do like — if I have five homework assignments and I had two tests to study for, and my AP exams coming up, and my ACT tests. Junior year is such a crazy, crazy year for us, so maybe doing it at a point of the year where there’s a little bit less going on would be helpful.”
Student board member Henry Michael said that providing extra credit or some other kind of actual incentive would be helpful.
“I think that possibly talking about incentives for students to take the test because they’re more incentivized to study for their AP exams, or study for their exams for the classes that actually show up on their report card and then will get reported to college,” he said.
The good news is that AP scores at Mira Costa are soaring over the past four years. “In 2021 we had 78 percent of our students who took the AP exam pass. In 2022, 80 percent, in 2023, 82 percent, and in 2024, 85 percent,” Castillo-Gonzalez said. “So that is really exciting to see that passage rate increase over the last four years.”
Greenberg said the annual release of the test results was his favorite board meeting of each year, because it gets at the core mission of the school board.
“This is our district report card,” he said. “And just like with the students, the report card isn’t the end all, be all of everything they do. You take your AP test, you have your extracurriculars, there’s a whole college readiness package of things that measure how you’ve achieved as a student. And obviously there’s a whole package of other things that measure our achievement as a district, in addition to and beyond the CAASPP scores. But they are very important. They are how we compare our performance from year to year, and our performance versus other districts.”
Trustee Tina Shivpuri thanked the district staff for not only putting in the work for the presentation but for putting the data to work to improve student performance.
“I think we’re all lovers of data,” said Trustee Tina Shivpuri. “And seeing how the presentation today definitely mapped back to last year was a great way for us to kind of reflect what we saw last year to what we saw this year. It’s a testament to the work and the research you put in Day 1, like, ‘Okay, we have something going on in this 8th grade class. Where can we look and make sure that it doesn’t spread across all of eighth grade.’ And you guys tackled it straight away.” ER
