Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Assessment Results topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
SFUSD posts baseline Smarter Balanced results: about half of students meet grade-level standards, with wide subgroup gaps
Summary
District officials released Smarter Balanced benchmark results showing roughly 52% of students met or exceeded English-language-arts standards and 48% met or exceeded math standards. The presentation highlighted persistent achievement gaps for African American students and students with disabilities and strong correlations between absenteeism and lower scores.
San Francisco Unified School District officials presented the district’s first baseline Smarter Balanced (SBAC) results at the Sept. 29 board meeting and described the results as a mixed picture: overall proficiency at roughly half the students, but large and worrisome gaps for specific subgroups.
Chiefs from Research, Planning & Assessment said participation was near the state target (about 95%) and that more than 25,000 students in grades 3–8 and 11 took the assessments. District-level results showed about 52% of tested students met or exceeded standards in English language arts and about 48% met or exceeded standards in math. In both subjects, results were better than the field-test predictions the state released last year.
Disaggregation revealed the largest performance gaps by subgroup. African American students and students with disabilities had the lowest proficiency rates in both ELA and math. The presentation also noted a roughly 30-percentage-point gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers. District staff reported strong positive correlations between SBAC performance and interim district measures such as the Scholastic Reading Inventory and the district’s common learning assessments, and strong negative correlations between performance and chronic absenteeism as well as high concentrations of targeted subgroups at some schools.
Board members requested deeper comparisons with other "core" districts and asked for detail on district strategies that have produced better subgroup results elsewhere. District officials said parents will receive individual student score reports by mail within about two weeks of the presentation and that staff will make school-level data accessible to board members. The district emphasized that SBAC scores are a single indicator and encouraged families and educators to view them alongside classroom-level measures.
Staff said schools are already incorporating SBAC-based inquiry cycles — review of data, goal setting and adjustments to instruction — and will use Smarter Balanced interim assessments to inform instruction this year. The board asked for follow-up discussion of progress measures and the School Quality Improvement Index expected in November.
