Want better test results? Try longer school hours

For the North County Times

Now that slightly more than half of California's students are proficient in grade level standards for English, not quite half in math, State Superintendent Jack O'Connell boasts that the state's latest school test scores have shown "steady academic progress" over the past eight years.

Scores have improved by an average of 2 percentage points each year. At this rate, it will take another 20 years for California to meet the No Child Left Behind goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

O'Connell laments the lack of progress in closing the achievement gap separating Latinos, African Americans and the economically disadvantaged from their white classmates. The 20 to 30 percentage point difference in English and math scores has barely budged in a decade.

O'Connell announced two initiatives targeted to close the gap: the newly adopted Common Core standards and a book on research-based approaches to teaching English Learners. He says his staff will help schools implement the book's recommendations.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book, "Outliers: The Story of Success," suggests the solution to improving school performance may be simpler than we think ---- more instructional time. He points to KIPP charter schools (Knowledge Is Power Program) as a model. San Diego's KIPP Adelante, the only one in the county, has achieved impressive results with the very student population O'Connell wants to help.

A public charter school enrolling 360 students in grades 5 through 8, Adelante features an extended school day (7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.), a longer school year, and monthly Saturday classes. All students are economically disadvantaged, 87 percent are Latino, 64 percent are English learners. Forty percent of their parents did not graduate from high school.

So how did they do on this year's California Standards Test? While just 28 percent of Adelante's first-year fifth-graders were proficient or above grade level in English, 75 percent of eighth-graders had attained that level. In math, 22 percent of fifth-graders were proficient, while 75 percent of eighth-graders were. The school's Academic Performance Indicator (API) places it in the top 10 percent of similar schools and top 20 percent of all schools in California.

In comparison, only 61 percent of Vista's eighth-graders scored at or above proficiency in English and only 49 percent in math, despite the district's multimillion-dollar investment over the past several years in an off-the-shelf, proprietary reading program designed to be a quick fix for low test scores.

Rather than placing his faith in revised school standards and another how-to book for teachers, maybe Superintendent O'Connell should spend more time helping California compete successfully in the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" school funding program.

It's intended to help states replicate the success of schools like KIPP Adelante.