Fullerton District Shows Biggest SAT Gain

At one end of the spectrum of SAT scores released Thursday was the Fullerton Union High School District, which chalked up the most dramatic improvement in the county, while Saddleback Valley Unified School District experienced a slight decline after years of steady improvement.

Administrators at both districts on Thursday were pragmatic about the results.

“Last year just happened to be a peak year,” said Saddleback Valley Unified Supt. Peter Hartman, describing this year’s dip as statistically insignificant. “These numbers are very close.”

Part of the decline, Hartman said, could be attributed to the broad swath of students--about 54%--who took the test. A large turnout of students, experts say, can tend to flatten scores.

Also, Hartman said, the academic ability of each class tends to vary slightly from year to year.

“The SAT is a compilation of a student’s lifetime,” he said. “Your ability to affect those scores in the last year of education is pretty hard.”

At the Fullerton Union High School District, administrators couldn’t exactly pinpoint their students’ dramatic improvement.

But some mentioned the hiring last summer at Fullerton High School of a new principal, Cynthia Hall Ranii, as a possible reason for that school’s big increase over last year’s scores, particularly in the verbal section of the SAT.

“She’s pretty incredible,” said Julie Sambuco, the district’s director of evaluation and technology. “I’m sure it made a difference.”

Ranii was out of the state Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

But Diane Hockersmith, one of the school’s assistant principals, credited Ranii with encouraging teachers to develop themselves professionally by pursuing outside courses and sharing ideas and teaching plans with one another.

“Our whole emphasis was on quality learning and working as a team,” Hockersmith said. “We have a magnificent faculty and what we did was focus on the overall program for every student.”

Scores throughout the district may have been boosted by the presence on four of the district’s six high school campuses of the International Baccalaureate Program, an accelerated curriculum in which selected students are subjected to comprehensive courses in English, a foreign language, the humanities, the arts and other subjects.

“It doesn’t happen magically and it doesn’t happen overnight,” Sambuco said of the improved scores. “We have pretty rigorous college-bound courses and we’ve got these kids on really rigorous schedules.”

Among other things, she said, teachers in the district are encouraged to increase their instructional minutes by making “the most productive use of every minute they have with the students. They don’t spend a lot of time taking roll or conducting surveys. They get in there and teach the content.”

Ultimately, though, Sambuco said, it is next to impossible to attribute the improvements to any single factor.

“If we could point to one thing,” she said, “we could do this over and over every year. You really can’t.”