The district will not release scores for individual schools today. Those will be available July 17 when the state releases Stanford 9 results for all California school districts. Other districts around the region are waiting to release their districtwide and individual schools results later this month, as well. Although Los Angeles Unified's test results showed some improvement last year, scores for most grade levels and subjects rose by just a few percentile points from 1998. And such small gains are expected any time a school district starts offering a new test, said Ronald Dietel, spokesman for the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Teachers become much more familiar with what's on the test, as do schools and districts.
Los Angeles Unified students in most grade levels showed that amount of improvement on this spring's Stanford 9 test. But in elementary grades, the gains were more pronounced. In 1999, for example, students in grade three scored at the 30th percentile on the test's language portion. This spring, third-graders hit the 37th percentile. They registered the same gain in math, jumping from the 35th percentile to the 42nd percentile.