A Report on the Vasquez High School Scores
8-26-04 - by Ron Bird – B.A. Mathematics
Another year has gone by at Vasquez High, another class has moved on and another years worth of test scores have been released. The good news, according to the Daily News, is that "Acton-Agua Dulce Unified had some of the highest scores in the Antelope Valley". The bad news is that at the high school level Vasquez High’s scores are far below the scores in the Santa Clarita Valley and in certain subject areas, even far below comparable schools in the Antelope Valley and some are even below state averages.
Lets looks at the 2003-4 STAR (Standardized Testing And Reporting) test results from last year. Each student’s score is placed in one of five category levels: advanced, proficient, basic, below basic and far below basic.
A simple mechanism to evaluate how well a school is doing is to look at what percentage of its students’ scores are in the advanced and proficient categories, then compare those percentages to other schools’ averages as well as state averages. I used Quartz Hill High and Hart High as schools to compare to Vasquez High. All comparisons are using 9th grade students.
The good news is that Vasquez High did well in English. Proficient (or better) was attained by 51% of Vasquez high’s 9th grade students last year. This matches the 52% at Quartz Hill High and 37% Statewide but below Hart High’s 58%.
In Biology: 41% of Vasquez High’s students attained Proficient (or better) versus 39% at Quartz Hill High, 30% Statewide and 41% at Hart High.
Mathematics and Chemistry did not see such glowing results.
In Geometry only 5% of Vasquez High’s students attained proficient (or better) versus 49% at Hart High, 30% at Quartz Hill High and 24% Statewide.
For Algebra II only 2% of Vasquez High’s students attained Proficient (or better) versus 34% at Hart High, 29% at Quartz Hill High and 24% Statewide. Only 50 students took Algebra II at Vasquez High.
In contrast High Desert’s Algebra I class scored 46% proficient (or better) which was significantly above statewide averages, but had fallen 20% below 2002-3, when they scored 66% proficient (or better). These are the same students that took geometry in 2003-4 at Vasquez High as ninth graders (as Algebra I is a prerequisite) and were now 98% not proficient.
For Chemistry only 7% were in the proficient (or better) category. This compares to 42% at Quartz Hill High, 28% Statewide and 22% at Hart High.
While the SAT test results are not yet available for 2003-4, we can look at the SAT scores from 2002-3.
Only 24% of the graduating seniors at Vasquez High took the SAT exam compared to 37% statewide and 41% in LA County.
Vasquez High beat both the averages at Quartz Hill High and statewide for the English component of the SAT. For the Math component Vasquez High lagged behind both Quartz Hill High and the statewide averages as well as the LA County averages.
Mathematics is an area in desperate need of improvement. The math at Vasquez High simply does not measure up to our communities’ potential.
We really need to test the soil at Vasquez High and High Desert. There must be something in Vasquez High’s soil that grows mediocrity in math.
Sarcasm aside, there are a significant number of students that choose not to move from High Desert to Vasquez High. I’m sure that this is one component of the explanation for the low math scores at Vasquez High, but certainly does not fully explain these low scores.
Author’s note: Although much of this article deals with objective numbers, some subjective statements were made. Although the author has attended various local meetings, none of these subjective statements should be construed to reflect the opinion of these organizations and solely belong to the author in their entirety.