Where Are We? RAND's Report Card

By Teresa Rochester

There were more questions than answers Wednesday night as a RAND researcher unveiled a report on the status of Santa Monica and Malibu schools.

"Where are we," was the initial question posed by the community group Community for Excellent Public Schools and tackled by RAND researcher Brian Stecher, who presented a historical overview of the district and compared it with similar and high achieving school district.

"The purpose is not to advocate a particular point of view. It is to provide an objective view of the school district," Stecher told the crowd in McKinley Elementary School's auditorium, that included Santa Monica Mayor Ken Genser, school board members and Santa Monica College trustees.  "When you leave here tonight you won't have everything you need to know about the school district."

What audience members did have when they left was a host of questions ranging from academic equity and a lack of a uniform curriculum to increased teacher resources.

Stecher's report compared the Santa Monica/Malibu School District with five school districts statewide similar in size and demographics and five districts that achieved the highest ranking on the state's newly instituted Academic Performance Indicator that currently ranks school performance solely on standardized test scores.

The report found that:

• Santa Monica/Malibu revenues are above those of similar districts but are lower than the revenues of the highest API achieving school district's, which tend to be located in highly affluent areas such as Piedmont and Palo Alto in the Bay Area and Palos Verdes and San Marino in Southern California.
  
  
• Santa Monica and Malibu teachers are highly experienced - more so than the high API districts - and tend to be better educated than the teachers in the comparison districts are.
  
  
• Santa Monica/Malibu Unified School District's administrative costs are similar to both similar and high API achieving districts and that the SMMUSD has higher costs for its certified staff than similar districts but lower costs than high-ranking districts.

• While Santa Monica/Malibu spends less on teachers the district spends relatively more on classroom aids than both comparison groups.
  
  
• The district provides better access to computers than similar districts at a rate of approximately one computer per seven students.

• The sizes of Santa Monica High School classes fall between high-achieving and similar districts and SAMOHI is on par with higher achieving districts in offering five foreign languages. The study found that an unusually high number of SAMO High students take performing and fine art classes and fewer of the school's students take career preparation courses. The study also found that SAMO High students Advanced Placement tests participation and success rate falls below that of high-achieving schools.

• The study did find that the school district has lowered its dropout rate to that of high achieving schools and that the district's API scores are at the high end of similar schools. More Santa Monica students are also completing admission requirements for the University of California and California State University systems.

"There are no red flags pointing at problems but there's a lot more work to decide where the conversation goes from here," Stecher said at the conclusion of his report. And the evenings panelists had plenty of ideas on where to take the conversation.

"How Santa Monica Schools achieve at the level of the high-achieving schools, that is the challenge," said panelist and former mayor Dennis Zane, whose son is set to start school in the district in a year. "It's not resources. Those schools have similar resources. Perhaps one of the challenges is to look to educate parents in having more of a role."

Other panelists, who included teacher's union president Beth Muir, SAMO High Principal Dr. Sylvia Rousseau and Special Education District Advisory Chair Allan Shatkin, cited the district's lack of a uniform curriculum, academic equity and linking the budget to district goals as concerns.

"Take a macro look at what's going on in the district," Shatkin said. "The farther north you live the reading scores get higher. The farther south you live the scores get lower…As this data goes out we need to take a look with a critical eye at what's going on from site to site…We need to learn how our budget addresses our goals."

"It represents a very small window on what the district is," said Rousseau about the data. "The best it does is raise more questions…If we value all of our children how do we bring equity to the district?"

Rousseau pointed out that the API offers what she called "a narrow spectrum." She added that the highly touted performance indicator is based on a standardized test that does not currently align with state curriculum.