For the fourth year in a row, Sixth Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles has landed in the academic basement among California's public schools.
Statistics released Tuesday showed that the campus and 404 others around California have remained stuck in the bottom position since state rankings began in 2000. Once again, these schools ranked 1 on a scale of 1 to a coveted 10.
But the disappointing result did not tell the whole story behind this lack of movement.
Sixth Avenue Elementary and dozens of other low-ranking schools across the region produced some of the biggest testing gains over the last four years.
Partly because of the way the state designed the ranking system, these schools have had a hard time separating themselves from many other campuses whose test scores have barely budged or even declined. And schools such as Sixth Avenue have struggled to move up because many campuses with higher rankings also have improved their test scores.
All that upsets Sixth Avenue Principal Katie Harris Greene, whose school near Los Angeles' Crenshaw district has consistently raised its test scores.
"I have people here who do not view themselves as a 1. Neither do I," Greene said. "When you put a label on an institution, you are doing a disservice to it."
The school ranking system is part of the state's Academic Performance Index, which uses standardized test results in grades two through 11 to measure achievement.
Each year, the state gives every California school an API score from 200 to 1,000, with 800 being the target. The state also divides campuses into 10 roughly equal groups, whose results were released Tuesday. Beyond bragging rights, those rankings are used to help identify schools that need extra help or possible shakeups such as a new principal.
(Results are available on the Internet at api.cde.ca.gov.)
Schools serving mostly low-income and minority children have more often wound up in the lowest ranks, while suburban campuses with more affluent students generally have reached the highest ranks. That pattern has held for the program's four years.
Sixty-two percent of schools that were in rank 1 four years ago are still on the bottom rung, according to a Times analysis of state data. These campuses are concentrated in urban districts such as Los Angeles, Compton, Lynwood and Santa Ana, among others.
