Redondo Beach schools took another significant leap forward in standardized testing scores, jumping ten points in the Academic Performance Index, a composite measure of student testing results released by the California Department of Education on Monday.
The district raised its overall score from 858 to 868, well above the state-mandated goal of 800 for each school. For the second year in a row, each school in the district exceeded 800 and four schools surpassed 900. The index ranges from 200 to 1,000.
Jefferson Elementary, which had lead the district each year since the API began a decade ago until last year, regained the top spot it had lost to Beryl Heights Elementary. Jefferson scored 949 and Beryl Heights 948.
The greatest gains posted this year were by the district’s two middle schools. Adams Middle School jumped a full 30 points to 858 and Parra Middle School raised its score 24 points to 887.
“The middle schools absolutely rocked it,” said RBUSD Superintendent Steven Keller. “A lot of credit goes to those staffs, obviously.”
Keller said his goal is for every school in the district to reach 900. Two schools reached that milestone this year – Parras and Tulita, which also jumped 21 points.
“What’s probably most impressive is Parras joining the 900 club and Tulita moving into the 900 club,” Keller said. “Again, you just keep seeing improvement, which is great.”
Areas of concern included the only two schools to decline, Madison and Washington elementary schools. Both were relatively small declines, but Keller said he’d already met with administrators from both schools.
Keller also expressed concern about Redondo Union High School, which gained two points to reach 825. Keller said the expectations for the school are greater and that programs in place to increase the percentage of students bound for higher level education – as well as $90 million in bond construction that will be completed at the school by next year – should also begin more dramatically boosting test scores.
“We are going to have stunning, state-of-the-art facilities at the high school,” Keller said. “We need to hunker down on program improvement for the high school. It’s a good school getting better – getting drastically better with facilities – and we hope to see some significant growth next year at the high school.”
Forty-six percent of all California schools are now at or above the overall statewide target API of 800, up four percentage points from last year. This includes 51 percent of elementary schools, 40 percent of middle schools, and 25 percent of high schools.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell also spoke about raising goals.
“When we set the target goal of 800 on the API 10 years ago, it was ambitious and it challenged most California schools that had never been held accountable for improving academic achievement,” O’Connell said. “Now that nearly half of our schools are at or above this API target, it is time to have a serious conversation about raising the target goal.”
RBUSD Board of Education President Drew Gamet said that gains in Redondo were all the more remarkable given the fact that state budget woes have required the district to trim its budget by $9 million over the past three years.
“That is really directly attributable to the hard work of teachers and administrators,” Gamet said. “Getting these kind of results depends on the fact they are doing more with less…Especially having schools over 900, that doesn’t happen without really high quality instruction going on. Once you get scores in the high 800s and over 900, it just doesn’t matter – there is no kid, except maybe one or two per class, that would be able to walk in and do that without having an extremely high quality teacher in front of them.”
“Once you are at those kind of numbers, it’s really high quality teaching, and working as teams…and making it happen despite what the state is trying to do to us. I mean, we are flying against a trend. It’s also a fact that the closer you get to 1,000, the harder it is to get those points, so the movement we are seeing represents really impressive work by our teachers and administrators.” ER
