SB Unified Schools continue to improve in academic performance, attendance, graduation rates

November 25, 2024, 8:08 am 416 Views 24 Comments

(Courtesy)

Santa Barbara Unified schools are seeing key metrics improve in newly released data from the California Department of Education.

The California Dashboard, released this Thursday, highlights attendance, graduation rates, academic performance, and more.

English Language Arts and Mathematics data is measured by how far, on average, students are from the lowest possible score to meet the standard for the subject. This metric shows how much above or below the expected grade level performance students achieved overall, with a higher number indicating a greater distance from the standard. Academic highlights include:

  • English Language Arts: Slight improvement for the second year in a row to 5.5 points below the standard. The state average is 13.2 points below the standard.

  • Mathematics: Improved for the second year in a row to 36 points below the standard. This is higher than the state average of 47.8 points below the standard.

Below are other key highlights for the District:

  • Chronic Absenteeism: For the second year in a row, the District’s chronic absenteeism rate declined. It is at 16.9% for 2023-24, which is an 8% decrease from 2021-2022. A decline is a measure of success.

  • College & Career Readiness: Increased for the second year in a row to 60.7% in the Class of 2024, which is higher than 54.4% reported in the Class of 2019. The state reports an average of 45.3% of students statewide being College and Career Ready.

  • Emergent Multilingual Learner Progress: Increased 1.7% to 46.9% making progress, which is higher than the state, which saw a decrease to 45.7%

    • Graduation Rate: The percentage of students graduating from high school at SB Unified increased from 92%, to 92.4%. That is higher than the state average of 86.7%.

While all schools have made improvements, here are some key school improvements:

  • Franklin Elementary

    • English Language Arts- 3.9 points above standard

      • Increased 17.9 points

    • Mathematics- 3.3 points above standard

      • Increased 21.5 points

    • Emergent Multilingual Learner Progress: 72% making progress

      • Increased 26.3%

  • Washington Elementary

    • English Language Arts: 25.3 points above standard

      • Increased 13.9 points

    • Mathematics: 5 points above standard

      • Increased 14.9 points

    • Emergent Multilingual Learner Progress: 46.5% making progress

      • Increased 11.1%

  • La Colina

    • English Language Arts: 37.7 points above standard

      • Increased 4.1 points

    • Mathematics: 13.5 points above standard

      • Increased 1.1 points

  • Dos Pueblos

    • English Language Arts: 43.1 points above standard

    • Mathematics: 12.6 points below standard

      • Increased 9 points

    • Emergent Multilingual Learner Progress: 61.2% making progress

      • Increased 7%

    • College/Career Readiness: 71.9% prepared

      • Increased 2.6%

(Courtesy)
(Courtesy)
(Courtesy)
(Courtesy)

“I am proud of the outstanding work our students, teachers, staff, and administrators are doing to increase achievement. The improving data reflects the collective efforts to enhance curriculum, align practices across schools, and provide meaningful professional development. Thanks to everyone’s contributions, our District is continuing to trend in the right direction, and most importantly, our students are thriving.” said Dr. Hilda Maldonado, Superintendent.

The California School Dashboard was created to help communities easily access important information about transitional kindergarten through grade twelve schools and districts. A guide to help parents understand the Dashboard is available here.

SBUnified

Written by SBUnified

Press releases written by the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD). Learn more at sbunified.org

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24 Comments

  2. What I see from this is that our local kids are at about a D+, in a very low-bar scoring system to begin with. They’re essentially flatlining. Hilda, I don’t appreciate your spin on how this is great news. Take your game elsewhere or let someone else who is truly serious about childhood education take over your helm. The spin you’re throwing out is pretty obvious, expected, and very disappointing to see. Someone else hopefully can do better.

    -2

      • I never learned about the 10 commandments in public school. That s why we have church’s.
        Some of the other nonsense brought into schools is unbelievable
        What I get from this article is high education taxes do not guarantee a quality education.

        -2

      • ANON – yep. It’s so funny to hear people here cry about “DEI classes” and CRT while at the same time encouraging or just being completely silent about Christianity being forced on children in public school. Talk about actual indoctrination!

        Are the Cons actually aware of how wildly hypocritical they are or do they just not care?

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      • How are they better than national avg? CA schools are ranked as the worst schools in the country.
        Did you mean SB performs better than the state avg?
        Which is a very low bar, very low especially considering CA is one of the largest economies in the world.
        Pitiful

        -3

    • Hell must have frozen over, because I agree with Basic. I have been tracking test scores of a variety of schools since the latest round of tests (2015). The district took a big hit during COVID, as expected. But the reason why this article mentions the 4 schools that it did? They are the only ones to see any measurable improvement. You want to know the reason? Money. It’s money. Schools with wealthier students and/or outside funding (Franklin) do better.

      For a district that is so focused on equity (a good goal), that they have gotten rid of honors classes in junior high, erased the CK program at La Cumbre, spent time trying to dismantle the GATE program, tried to get rid of 5th grade camps, and are disallowing PTA funded after school programs… they are failing. Miserably. Particularly in junior high (the only area where I’ve pulled scores based on socioeconomic advantages), the disadvantaged kids are doing worse all around. (Except at La Colina because: money)

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  3. Quite a positive spin put out there by the district’s well-paid public relations department to somehow try make it look good that half the students in SBUSD cannot read proficiently and math is even worse. And the standard of California is pathetic since the state ranks in the bottom half of all the states. Good try but the kids who struggle to read are not thriving–not in elementary school and certainly not on secondary classrooms– despite the word salad reassurance by the Superintendent.

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  5. California does not rank last or even 2nd to last in K-12 education. It’s ranked #37 overall in education. Given the amount of wealth in our state, we should be doing much better. One would think with all of the wealth in SB that our local K-12 schools would rank up there (according to 2024 national statistics) with states like Florida (#1), Colorado (#5), New Jersey (#4), or New York (#12). Not enough money? No. Not enough teachers? No. Spending time, money, and energy on non-basics? Yes. I agree that it is wonderful that the graph show positive progression and I hope that trend continues.

    -2

  6. CA is 37 out of 50 for educating kids. Simple fact and it’s a sad, unacceptable state of affairs – and those who wanna spin it, redirect, misdirect, or distract from this in any way aren’t paying attention to what the real issues are and are a big part of the problem, not the solution. It’s a real interesting thing, denial.

    -2

  7. BASIC – “CA is 37 out of 50 for educating kids.” Not really true, but that should be no surprise. Again, look at the various studies. This one, for overall “Education,” puts CA at #23. Again, the rankings are all different depending on what you’re looking at.

    https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

    Your simplistic approach of only teaching to the test is not beneficial to the overall education of our kids. It’s just not. Now tell me how you also have a degree in Education or something like that…..

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  8. The part of this discussion that is most often overlooked, not even mentioned once in the article nor the comments that I’ve read, is the question of how valid are the tests that these numbers are based on, and how valid are the results. Standardized tests -the very definition of “one size fits all”- are written by groups of educators who are every bit as fallible and biased as anyone else, and corporations make a ton of money writing, printing, distributing, evaluating (essays are *supposed* to be carefully read and fairly graded by a human, or a team of humans), and reporting scores. In every one of those tests are some questions that are intentionally trying to confuse children, and questions that a majority of students answer correctly are often removed from subsequent versions of the test. These test are essentially comprehensive final exams given a month before courses even finish.

    How closely do these test results actually describe what students have learned? Do students try their best on these tests? Do they take time away from their current subject matter to review material taught months ago so they are fully prepared? Are they motivated to excel on a test that has nothing to do with their grade in the class? Schools have a lot riding on the results, but for individual students not so much.

    I’m not saying the tests are worthless, but people shouldn’t, in my opinion, hold them as infallible measurements of individual student knowledge.

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