Tracy Press

It turns out the API scores for a few local schools are better than originally reported.

Two schools had higher Academic Performance Index scores than what were published in the Tracy Press on Saturday, May 24.

New Jerusalem’s Delta Charter High School, though in the state’s bottom 20 percent, scored 625, higher than most schools in the 12,000-student Tracy Unified School District.

New Jerusalem Elementary is the smaller district’s strongest school in terms of its API scores, though it’s about average by state standards.

Jefferson Elementary School District, meanwhile, needs simply to maintain its score of 811, since it already surpasses the state API goal of 800.

Dave Thoming, superintendent of the 130-year-old 750-student New Jerusalem School District, attributes his schools’ steadily improving scores to a focus on language instruction and teacher training. New Jerusalem scored better than 75 percent of schools countywide.

"We’re never really satisfied where we are," he said. "We’re always looking at ways to improve. But the most important thing to us is (whether) we improved from last year. And we did."

Smaller districts tend to perform better, on average, than their larger counterparts, Thoming said. In part, that’s because curriculum, teacher training and most other things that allow for an improvement in test scores are simpler to enact on a smaller scale.

"I’d like to think it’s because administration is closer to the students," he said. "I think that we can react a lot sooner to issues because we don’t have a giant bureaucracy to go through."

The single-school Banta Elementary School District ranks better than half of schools statewide but in the bottom 30 percent of schools with similar demographics and size.

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written by CATPReader , May 28, 2008

Yeah great way to say that Tracy schools still suck. The school is still in the bottom 20% of the states schools yet still is higher than most of other schools in the district. That means Tracy schools are worse than 80% of the rest of the states school. Yeah way to attract businesses and growth. Those measure A people should be proud because no one will want to move here with schools that are that crappy.