Eighty-eight percent of California's public schools fell below the state target for achievement, according to the state's first-ever ranking of elementary, middle and high schools, released Tuesday.
Pockets of excellence emerged in predictable areas, notably the affluent, high-tech mecca of Santa Clara County in the Bay Area. In Los Angeles County, the best-performing districts included those in Manhattan Beach and San Marino and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
The state's top-scoring high school was Whitney in Cerritos' ABC Unified School District. Entry into the magnet school is highly competitive.
The giant Los Angeles Unified School District fared dismally, dominating the bottom ranks. Thirty-four percent of the district's 435 elementary schools and the same percentage of its 136 secondary schools ranked 1 on a scale of 1 to 10, and overall, more than two-thirds landed at 3 or below.
Many Los Angeles schools, however, were able to take consolation in having done well in comparison to similar schools. Nearly a third of the elementary schools that were ranked last, for example, rose into the top half when compared to 100 other schools of similar characteristics in socioeconomic status, teacher qualifications and number of students who are not fluent in English.
Indicating the extraordinary level of public interest in the unprecedented ranking of 6,700 schools, the California Department of Education's Web site was nearly paralyzed by 4,000 hits soon after the data were posted Tuesday morning. At one point, the department had to shut down its system so that data could be e-mailed to news organizations.
"We're thrilled that the public has such a high interest in examining the data," said Doug Stone, a departmental spokesman.
He added that the agency was attempting to put into place additional phone lines to ensure that the public would be able to access the material online, as promised. (It is available at http//:www.cde.ca.gov/psaa.)
The Academic Performance Index, as the ranking is known, is the cornerstone of the state's $242-million push to make schools accountable for students' learning. It is designed to measure academic performance and to establish a base from which school progress can be gauged.
The API, which makes California one of 26 states that publicly rank schools or districts, is for now based solely on results of the Stanford 9 basic skills test, which was given last spring to nearly 4.3 million public school students. Every school is given a score from 200 to 1,000, calculated according to a seven-step formula.
