veal school. you have been hearing a lot of things about the national urban alliance. i will add a couple. my staff put together a video, which each of you will get a copy of about what they think about n.u.a. it is quite remarkable. actions speak louder than words. this school made double-digit improvements in all areas of test scores this year. we would like to continue with n.u.a. we think it is an important activity, and we would like to thank bill sanderson, the only middle school he had in his lineup for n.u.a. last year, and we would like to continue. have a great evening, and remember, partnerships are important. thank you. >> thank you. i thought i would take this

moment to publicly thank your wife for ensuring that you would stay on with us a little longer. thank you. item k is advisory committee report, appointments to advisory committees. i do have one appointment. i will be appointing mike kim to the public enrichment fund committee. he works as fastwood.com for scholarship providing. are there any other appointments? is it an appointment? >> no, ma'am. >> is it an announcement? because that comes at the he said. >> i will wait. >> thank you, commissioner. the next is item l, special order of business. may we have a motion and second on a resolution on the board of education of sfusd leveing the

special tax for 9-1 -- 90-1 for fiscal year 2010-2011. >> so moved. >> second. >> may we have a reading? >> thank you. with your permission to read the most relevant parts. the board here by levees a special tax for fiscal year 2010-2011 pursuant to the act in resolution in 103-9 s 01 which resolution, including exhibits there to is by this reference incorporated herein. >> i am sorry, that was so fast, i wasn't ready yet. i have no speakers signed up for this item. are there speakers from the board or superintendents? i see none. role call, please.

>> six ayes. >> thank you. we are now at item m, discussion of other educational issues. today we will be getting getting a presentation on the 2009-2010 california standard test results for sfusd. i know we are all quite excited for this presentation. superintendent garcia? >> thank you. i have to set up technology here. >> how long will it take? >> i think about 15 or 20 minutes. >> actually the board has asked me to start putting in mini breaks due to the length of the meeting. should we take a two or three-minute break?

i hear no. [inaudible] >> what was your comment, commissioner maufas? >> my comment briefly was the folks speaking at the public comment were talking to us about programs and things they have experienced, like and want us to continue. so i want to thank them for coming forward. instead of having their experience and going on about their daly business, they came to the board of education and tell us they liked it. that is a big step for us. >> thank you, commissioner maufas. >> good evening, commissioners, and members of the public.

i am waiting. ok. so we are going to present today for the academic achievement highlights is the c.s.d. results, 2010, when the kids got tested in the spring of 2010. there are three main things that we are going to present on. one is the c.s.t. performance, the performance as compared to the state, and a small bit on program impact. what was the cause of these results? so let's start with c.s.t. performance. if you look at english language arts, you have a black and

white copy, too. as you can see, in the past five years, the district has been consistently going up in english language arts. but in the last two years, the gains have been pretty significant. so from 2008-2009, we went up 3.5% in our proficiency rates, and this last year, 2.3%. so we almost have a 6% improvement in the last two years. that is english language arts. the other key thing to remember is, as you look at the percent proficient and advanced, 56% of our students in sfusd grades 2-11 that were tested are performing at proficient or advanced in english language

arts. so we have over half of the students performing at or above grade level. when you look at math, you see a very similar trend. over the past two years, you do see the 6% gain, even in math. the proficiency rate is 65%. so it is 56% in english language arts and 65% in math for the number of students who perform at proficient and advanced. this was grades 2-7. what we also did was we combined all the algebra and geometry and did a combined score for grades 2-11 and tried to look at the trend in math. again, an upward trend with significant gains in the last two years. we aggregated the data for

african-american students for most programs and grade levels. let's begin with the ethnicities. african-american students, what we found was that in the last two years there has been a 6.3% increase in english language arts. and also when you look at math, it has almost been a 9.% increase in math for -- a 9.2% increase in math for african-american students. a similar thing was seen for latino students, and a similar pattern or trend was seen for latino students. we saw two years in a row for them making significance gains in english language arts and even in math. so over 6%. now, we do see this is closing

the achievement gap. it is closing the achievement gap because these grooms have made more gains than the district average. so if we go back to 2006-2007, you will see that the district made a 1.7% improvement, but the targeted groups, only 1.4% and 1.1%. similarly in 2007-2008, it was 1.3% improvement for the district, and the targeted groups only .6% and .7%. and it is only in the last two years where we have match the district average or exceeded it with the targeted groups. so again, for two consecutive years we have matched or exceeded the district average for our targeted groups. you see the same trend in math.

in math it is even more distinct where it is exceeding in the last two years. so in the last two years you will see that the district average has been 2.8% and 3%. but the african-american and latino gains have been much higher than that kind of improvement. we have had significant gains for those groups in math, and we call that closing the achievement gap, again for the second year in a row. other news which was significance to share was the samoan students. we have seen similar gains for our samoan students. we have around 500, approximately 500 students that we testeded this last year. and in english language arts we saw improvement in their proficiency scores of 3.3%.

in math it was the highest among all ethnic groups, which was 8.2% for the samoan students. looking at english language learners, we have been making gains right until 2009, but this last year we did see a drop of 3.6% in english language arts for our english language learners. at the same time it should always be noteded if you look at the number of students tested below, you will see from 11,411, it fell to 10,067, the number of students tested. this is an indication that many students got redesignated during that phase, and that is one of the reasons that you see

the drop. >> so if i may, we presume that the students actually being testeded -- tested who are english learners were at a lower proficiency and have now been redesignated and are in a different group. >> thank you. moving on with math. it was almost a flat trend. then we came to the special ed students, and again, we have been seeing similar increases with the special ed students in english language arts. however, again i am going to bring you down to the number of students tested because some of them, the students, have now the option of taking capa or c.m.e. similarly in math we saw

significant increases with the special ed students in both the previous year and this last year. disaggregating it by grade level, we have seen that in the last five years, there has been around a 5% to 10% increase in the grade level gains across all grades. in english language arts, a trend that was noticed was that for grades two, three and four, there was a flattening,. we didn't see significant improvement, but we did in grade five at the elementary level. in math, at all grade levels there was significance growth.

math was much more distinct. the largest gain we saw was again at grade six. we've never seen a 6% increase in grade six. one of the reasons that could be infered if those gains is that this was the first group of kids that had everyday math in the elementary and were now moving on to sixth grade. so the preparation level could be a component. how do we compare to the state? how does the san francisco unified school district scores compared to the state? at every level we match or exceed the state level in english language arts and math.

how do we compare to other urban districts in the state of california? we are higher than the other urban districts, though san diego has matched us in english language arts. in math we are still definitely the highest as compared to the state. so as we feel the pride over these results, we must also always remember that when looking at our african-american students as compared to other urban districts districts of -- urban zrinths, we have the lowest performance, and we should be mindful of that trend. >> the state closed the

achievement gap with regards to its latino students but did not do so with regards to its african-american students. in math the state did manage to close the gap -- narrow the gap i should say -- with both the african frown and latino students, just like us. and the last slide, we have been brainstorming with different principles. what could be some of the reasons for our success? we took one pattern, which are the math gains that we are seeing, and tried to break it down from the curriculum to the student level. what we found was in terms of the curriculum, principals have reported, and we have found that the adoption of everyday

math curriculum and its implementation has caused some of these great gains, and this has been represent indicated because the same patterns were seen in other places where every day math was adopted. also, what we saw is that algebra, offense -- the algebra for all, we have that policy, and now we have increased participation in algebra for eighth grade from 65% to 83%. so we have 83% of the students participating in al:bra at eighth grade. in terms of programs that have shown -- math programs for which we have a formative evaluation on the website, the final report will be posted september 15th so you can see

it all. it is an evaluation of the following programs that have shown success. project seed, ebgy, mind and algebra thinking. these programs have shown significant gains. all schools that have have participated in them have shown some double-digit growth in math. also in speaking with the principals, what they say has been most helpful as a strategy that they used is the individual learning plan. actual reflection of the students' needs and targeting those needs has helped bring up the scores. so the individual learning plan has been a key. other structures and systems that we brain-stormed on were

schools that did interim assessments and had planning level meetings, for instruction and student feedback did receive positive results. also, the results-oriented cycle of inyeary which the partners put forth has had a lot of success in our schools. thank you. >> i think we have a number of questions and comments. thank you so much for the presentation. some of it is really good news and obviously reflects the work we need to continue doing. commissioner fewer? >> thank you for all of this really good info. i think there are some other stats that i would like to see, though, to serve as more evidence of how we are closing the gap. for example, i would like to

see the test results by race of asian and white students and compare them to our african-american and latino students. we want to see gains, but we would like to see accelerated gains from the african-american and other populations. if we had incremental gains like this and not double-digits gains, it is going to take us a very long time. then i would like to see also our african-american population in comparison to their other districts and their african-american population, meaning our african-american population has been decreasing every year, and i would like to see, for example, with oakland, how many african-american students they have so we can do a comparison about their success rate, their achievement

rate of african-americans compared to ours when we have so few. our rate -- i mean we don't have very many african-american students in comparison to some of these other districts, and so it seems to me then that we could be doing better. then i also would like to see the algebra stats. you said we increased the percentage of students taking algebra from 63% to 85%. then i would like to see that brown down by race. those stats i think would be very telling about where we are, not to diminish the success that we have had this year and are celebrating, but as a reminder that we have a long way to go and a lot of work we need to do yet. thank you very much.

>> i do want to reply to that. there was a binder that was given at the board office on friday which includes every single one of these results. african-american for other districts is what i just put out and said that african-american were performing -- >> i meant the number. i think we have a smaller number of african-american students in comparison. >> yes. >> so i was sort of wondering how our achievement is still lower than the other districts that have large percentages of them. but thank you. i haven't been into the office, so i will take a look. thanks. >> i wanted to thank you for the presentation, too. it is great to see that we are making progress every year towards our goals. i was interested a little bit in what you said about the

number of students taking the capa and particularly the c.m.a. the c.m.a. was new in 2009, is that right, that we had students first take it. for english language arts, there was definitely a drop in the number of students tested in 2009-2010. also under math, there was a big drop in 2008, and then it has continued to drop since then. is there a reason for that, and do we have any sense yet about how the c.m.a. is doing, whether we can do a better job? >> did you get a copy of the press release? because also those results are included in the press release. >> i can look at that. but the other thing i just wanted to highlight, and i will

give the deputy superintendent credit for pointing this out, the generally low level of proficiency among our special ed students. these are the students we have not exempted out. these are the students that in our judgment should be able to perform and become proficient. so 18% proficiency in english ang arts and 33% proficiency in mathematics is not where we want to be. >> commissioner maufas, and then vice president mendoza. >> this may require a more in-depth conversation, but my questions are based on the data you have presented to us and actually from the public speakers' comments about the things that are working for families and teachers that make teaching more interesting to

do, and they are more engaged with their students. i believe part of those results are here in the numbers, and i would like to know what are these programs that we have complemented in the schools where we are seeing such gains that are actually new over the last two years that can attest and attribute to these numbers. just because they started doing math every day, that wasn't the only thing. i know in schools we have been bringing teachers and students together in a meaningful way. i definitely want us to be well aware of the things that we are doing that are different at these school sites that are reflected in these numbers. >> yeah, sure. there are the programs i mentioned up here. we have a detailed evaluation

for n.u.a., which we will put out. that was one of the programs mentioned tonight. we will put those reports out by september 15th on the website for everyone to review. in terms of the conversations, that would be good. we can provide you with a summary from our prince cal conversations for -- principal conversations for can you see. but primarily the things that they mentioned in terms of the structures and systems is the grade level planning time and the coordination, as well as the six-week report out on progress as being some of the reasons for the success. so forming those structures of reflecting on practice and changing instruction based on what you see or what you can reflect on targeting student

needs through the feedback you get from the assessments. >> and then just to follow up, did i hear you mention that student feedback was incorporated in some of the reflections? >> the student work is what is, you know, looked at, and then feedback can be provided in terms of how to target student needs. >> thank you for clarifying. vice president mendoza and then deputy support -- deputy superintendent. >> president kim, i wanted to expand a little bit on what had been mentioned in terms of the anecdotal evidence. as the teams are out in schools walking in the classrooms, talking to teachers, talking to principals, some more of the information that has become clear to us is that the

opportunities in those schools that have shown dramatic gains for teachers to collaborate with other teachers about their instructional practices has been invaluable. it really is a credit to those teachers and principals in those schools that have carved out the time within the instructional day to allow those opportunities to happen among teachers. they have also talked about aligning all of the efforts within a school system around two or three very specific goals for student achievement. that means after-school programming is aligned, and the instructional folks, the teachers, the principal are having those conversations with the after-school providers as well. but more importantly, students know where they are performing as it relates to standards, and the standards-based report card has been really helpful in driving that conversation. but more than that, once thief identified what their -- once

they've identified what their goals are for the year, they are focused on those goals. they talk about setting very high standards for the students. students with needs, disabilities, african-american, and teachers talking about what are their educational needs. a teacher can tell you right away who the two or three children in their classroom is and what their needs are. so the big take away that we are learning right now is collaboration, spess fifty in terms of what they are focusing on and then consistency and coherence, and we are looking at taking that system-wide. >> thank you. >> you just answered my questions that i haven't asked yet. yet. thank you very much.