Test scores reflect familiar wealth gap among districts
By Jill Tucker
When education officials released the state’s first standardized test scores in two years, Piedmont, Hillsborough, Woodside and Orinda were at the top of the Bay Area list, with nearly 90 percent of students on track for college.
The story was much different in communities like East Palo Alto, San Lorenzo and Antioch, where as many as 4 in every 5 students were off track, failing to meet state standards.
While this was the first time students took the computerized Common Core test, the scores released last week matched an all-too-familiar historical pattern: They fol-
lowed the money. They reflected entrenched economic and racial patterns despite decades spent trying to counter them and level one of the country’s most important playing fields.
In Piedmont, students are mostly white and Asian, a home costs $2 million on average and a typical family earns $207,000. In East Palo Alto, predominantly Hispanic and to a lesser extent black, the average house costs $600,000 and families make $50,000.
More than 70 percentage points separates the Bay Area districts with the highest scores from the districts with the lowest. The achievement gap, the results show, is not only alive and well but possibly growing.
Starting over
In many ways, the public schools are starting over with this test, hitting the reset button with new Common Core standards that emphasize critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and deep analysis, while adopting computerized assessments to replace multiple-choice paper tests.
But the achievement gap reset to old levels, too. And in the days that followed Wednesday’s release of the scores, education officials across the region acknowledged that the stark divide defined by the scores was a gut punch.
“It was sobering,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of Education Trust-West, an Oakland nonprofit group dedicated to closing the achievement gap.
No one expected the gap to disappear in the first years of the Common Core curriculum and assessments. But get worse? They hoped not.
Big spending
Billions of dollars and big reforms from presidents, governors, superintendents and school boards have been pumped into the nation’s public schools in an effort to close the achievement gap over the past few decades.
“Closing this achievement gap is a challenge that may seem daunting now, but it will seem inevitable once we do it,” President Bill Clinton said in 2000. President George W. Bush later called it a national scandal.
Yet the Common Core standards are more rigorous, requiring students to do more, know more, demonstrate more. Education officials said it will take an even greater commitment now to close the gap, finding ways to get the best teachers into the neediest schools and push more resources to the most at-risk kids.
By Friday, education advocates and officials across the region had regrouped, saying that even though the starting line had shifted backward, the end goal was worth the extra effort.
That’s because the Common Core standards and curriculum are focused not on whether kids know facts and figures but whether they’re ready for college, said Muhammed Chaudry, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, a public education policy and advocacy organization.
“We didn’t know how bad it was before,” he said. “We didn’t even know where we stood.”
Depressing result
At San Francisco’s Bret Harte Elementary, where nearly 90 percent of students are from lowincome families, the scores showed less than 10 percent of students were on track for college. It’s depressing, said Principal Jeremy Hilinski, but, “It gives insight into where we need to go, what we need to teach.”
The Bayview neighborhood principal noted that his students are now required to fill in text boxes and click and drag and type on computers, machines they might not have at home — a digital divide reflected in test scores. In addition, his students have less exposure to travel, museum visits, concerts or even trips to the beach.
“Life experience has so much to do with critical thinking,” Hilinski said.
At many schools with top-tier scores, those life experiences are not unusual. And those kids have other advantages, too.
At Piedmont Unified, every student in grades six through 12 gets a Chromebook to take home. The district had a technology overhaul in the past few years and computers are a basic part of the school day, said Superintendent Randall Booker. Parcel taxes and community funding help keep classes small.
Not just money
But it isn’t all about money, Booker said. It’s what the money means. It means the kids who enter kindergarten are still there 13 years later. That teachers feel supported and stick around, too. And parents are heavily involved.
“When you move into Piedmont, you’re moving into a school district and there is a commitment to that,” Booker said, acknowledging other public school districts don’t have the same resources and support.
“To a certain degree, you have privatization of public school districts,” he said. “That’s what it’s turned into.”
For those in East Palo Alto and Oakland — especially at test score time — it can feel like a losing battle to overcome the obstacles many students face: poverty, instability, language hurdles, absent parents, violence, trauma, hunger. But it’s not hopeless, said Smith of Education Trust-West.
“If anything, these test results should give everyone in the state urgency to close the gaps,” he said. “I don’t want to wait 200 years to close the achievement gap in California. We can do it in this generation.”
Oakland officials aren’t giving up, either.
“I believe in our children,” said Devin Dillon, the district’s chief academic officer. “I believe the success of our state depends on the success of this city.”
‘You get back to work’
Still, she acknowledged, the test scores were tough to swallow.
“You grieve for a day, and you get back to work,” Dillon said. “We don’t have time to be demoralized.”