By Khalida Sarwari
Eight of 12 Campbell Union School District schools scored high on the California Department of Education’s latest Academic Performance Index report released earlier this month.
The eight schools all had APIs above 800. The API rates schools on a scale of 200 to 1,000 based on a school’s performance, with 800 as the state’s benchmark. As a whole, Campbell Union School District has a rank of 834.
Marshall Lane Elementary School had the highest API score in the district.
Capri, Castlemont, Forest Hill, Lynhaven, Sherman Oaks, Village and Rolling Hills all met or exceeded the statewide target score.
While the APIs for Blackford and Rosemary elementary schools and Campbell and Monroe middle schools are in the mid to upper 700s, district associate superintendent Ruth Bareket predicts that these schools could reach 800 this summer.
“The schools are quite close and some dramatic interventions are showing preliminary strong gains,” she said.
The latter three, however, also improved their base scores from the previous year. In addition to those schools, Castlemont, Forest Hill, Lynhaven, Sherman Oaks and Village also showed an improvement.
Marla Sanchez, a spokesman for the school district, attributed the schools’ success to an improvement in English language development and math instruction.
“Our teachers signed up for and used techniques they learned in professional development in ELD and in using academic intervention tools,” Sanchez said. “They were very deliberate in how they used interventions with students who needed them, also. Interventions boost students’ learning in a specific skill so they can get back on track doing grade-level work in that subject.”
The Campbell Union High School District received an overall score of 772. Only Leigh hit the state benchmark, with a score of 822. The lowest score was recorded by Del Mar.
The base API is a mathematical adjustment that the state makes to its school ranking scores to allow for year-to-year changes in the annual tests.
It is based on the test results of the 2010-11 school year and used to calculate a new API–the growth API score–that reflects the 2011-12 school year’s results. That growth API will come out in August.
According to the Santa Clara County Office of Education, the results indicate a trend of higher performance among schools in the county. Sixty-two percent of county schools met or exceeded the statewide performance target for the 2011 base API, compared with 45 percent statewide.
The county had the three top-performing schools in the state for the second year in a row. Murdock-Portal and Faria Elementary, both from the Cupertino Union School District, tied for the top spot and Millikin Elementary from Santa Clara Unified came in third.
Marshall Lane tops list of Campbell schools scoring high in API testing
