SVUSD Report Card - Part 5. Summary

We’ve spent a week looking at schools in Lake Forest and comparing them with other schools within SVUSD, and then looking at the district in comparison with the other 3 districts that serve nearly 100,000 students in South Orange County. Here's what we found

• Looking at student performance using API scores and concentrating on the scores for individual cities/areas in South Orange County, it appears that children in Lake Forest schools do poorly when compared to most of the children in cities or areas surrounding us. Compared to most other cities, our schools receive fewer high rankings, have an overall lower rank, and have fewer schools appearing in the Top 100. We are not the bottom of the barrel, but we have nothing to brag about.

• On average, children in SVUSD have lower average API scores when compared to the children in 3 other school districts serving South Orange County. What is most revealing is that when we have the same city (MV and RSM) served by two different school districts, in each case the students served by SVUSD do slightly worse.

It is clear that the performance by our children is not as good as the performance by children who are served by the other districts in South Orange County. On almost every measure we examined, the performance of our children is far behind the achievement levels of children served by Irvine, Laguna Beach, and Capistrano School Districts.

One can ask the legitimate question as to whether or not the fault is in the system or in ourselves (to mis-quote from the Bard). Is the makeup of the children of Lake Forest and the rest of SVUSD compared to the other school districts on critical indicators such that we need to accept the fact of lower API scores and fewer medals?

To begin to answer this question, I examined several factors available from the Census data -

• Percent of White people

• Percent of Asian people

In studies of school achievement, all of these factors, at one time or another, have been found to be correlated with achievement, bearing in mind that correlation is not necessarily causality. I compared the demographics for the cities where the students had the best scores with the cities where the students had the lowest scores, and here are the average scores on each of the factors. The first set of scores is for the students in schools in the top performing cities.

•  Percent of white people - 77.8 vs. 78.8

• Percent of Asian people – 13.7 vs. 7.3

• Percent of Hispanic people – 10.25 vs. 21.9

• Median Household Income - $116,157 vs. $91,921

On only two of the variables (Percent White, Percent Home ownership) are the top and bottom performing cities similar. On the rest of the variables, the demographics favor the top performing schools.

To some extent then, the fact that students in Irvine, Laguna Beach, Ladera Ranch, Coto, etc. perform better than students from Lake Forest, Dana Point, Laguna Hills, etc. is that the home conditions for these children appear to be more favorable when it comes to those factors that impact school performance. In other words, Asian children generally do better than White children who generally do better than Hispanic children, so if a city or district has more Asian children and fewer Hispanics, in general their children (and by extension their schools) will obtain higher scores on achievement tests, more of their children will go on to college, etc. The same can be said for children of wealthier families and children who come from families where one or more parent has a college or graduate education. And of course, these variables (race, education, income) co-vary.

When Lake Forest is compared to the rest of the cities, we have a higher percentage of Hispanic families (2nd highest), fewer White families (2nd lowest), fewer families with a B.A. or higher degree (3rd lowest), and a lower median household income (4th lowest). The same is generally true of SVUSD when compared to Irvine and Laguna Beach.

The closer a city is to another city in demographic profile, the closer they are in average API scores. Of the 14 cities profiled in this study, our closest comparison is Laguna Hills where the API rank was 7.75 and ours was 8.1. The cities that had the least similar demographic profiles were Ladera Ranch and Coto de Caza, and their API ranks were 10.

If family demographics appear to be the main determinant of achievement scores for children, nonetheless children in Lake Forest (and by extension SVUSD) do not do so poorly as the demographic differences might suggest. For example, the API rank for Coto is 23% higher than for Lake Forest, yet Coto has median household income 82% higher, 60% fewer people living below the poverty line, 68% fewer Hispanics, 25% more white families, and 44% more families with a B.A. or higher.  Similar differences can be found comparing Lake Forest with Ladera Ranch, Laguna Beach, Irvine, etc. So, however poorly Lake Forest students may do when compared to children from Ladera Ranch, Coto de Caza, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and Irvine,, those differences pale when compared to the demographic factors which favor the achievement scores of the children from those other cities.

The original purpose of this series was to examine the achievement scores of students in Lake Forest schools to make a broad determination whether or not establishing a separate school system might benefit the future achievement of these students. Based on this research, there is no evidence that having our own school district would necessarily improve the achievement scores of our children. There may be other reasons to advocate for a separate school system (e.g., more control, more schools), but advancing the achievement scores of our children is probably not a valid one.