Less than half of all California students passed new math and English tests aligned with the Common Core standards and considered indicators of college and career readiness, according to results released Wednesday.
Forty-four percent of students in third through eighth and 11th grades met or exceeded the new language-arts assessment, while 34 percent passed the math test. Though state education officials cautioned against drawing comparisons with previous standardized tests, the results reflect long-standing achievement gaps between low-income and affluent students.
"They indicate we have a long way to go," Michael Kirst, president of the state Board of Education, said of the scores. "We knew that, and our motto has been `patience, persistence and humility."'
In San Diego County, the majority of students (51 percent) met or exceeded the language-arts assessment but only 40 percent of students met or exceeded the mathematics standards.
Those percentages were reflected in results for San Diego Unified School District, California's second-largest school district. Forty-nine percent of students tested in SDUSD did not meet the English/Language Arts standards and 59 percent did not meet the Mathematics standards, according to the report.
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The assessments, called Smarter Balanced, test understanding of the new Common Core standards, benchmarks for what students should master by the end of each grade in reading and math. Though the standards have been met with resistance in much of the nation, they have been widely accepted in California.
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Just 1 percent of California students did not take the exam, while in New York, by comparison, about 20 percent of third- through eighth-graders refused to take the test. Opponents have criticized the standards as a federal intrusion into local education systems, though they were developed by a consortium of state and education leaders.
The assessments are also fundamentally different in how they evaluate student knowledge. The state's previous Standardized Testing and Reporting program was a paper-and-pencil multiple choice test. The Smarter Balanced exam is designed to be taken by tablet or computer and is adaptive. Students must show how they reached their answers, and if they answer correctly, they get a more difficult question.
Karla Groth with the San Diego County Office of Education said parents should not compare how students did on this new test versus the old, bubble-in one.
"Really this is one piece of information about a student, so we want to look at the whole body of information for a student and see does this compare? Is this what the teacher's experience was with the student? Some of our kids just fatigued out on the test and didn't do as well."
Results for all of San Diego County:
282,896 students tested
English/Language Arts
21% Standard Exceeded
30% Standard Met
24% Standard Nearly Met
25% Standard Not Met
Mathematics
18% Standard Exceeded
22% Standard Met
28% Standard Nearly Met
31% Standard Not Met
Results for San Diego Unified School District:
60,811 students tested
English Language Arts/Literacy
22% Standard Exceeded
29% Standard Met
23% Standard Nearly Met
26% Standard Not Met
Mathematics
19% Standard Exceeded
22% Standard Met
28% Standard Nearly Met
31% Standard Not Met
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is one of two groups of states formed to create Common Core-aligned assessments. Several other states that took Smarter Balanced exams have released their results, which as a whole appear to be similar to California's. The second testing group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, has not released results.
