Teachers Puzzle Over Sixth-Grade Slump in State Math Test Scores

It was intended to be a rigorous lesson on the complexities of ratios and cross multiplication. But some of the students in teacher Yong Li She’s sixth-grade math class had other ideas.

One boy threw balls of paper. Another put a sticker on his forehead while the girls next to him giggled. “I got a D in this class,” he shouted to a classmate. “That’s better than you!”

The Virgil Middle School teacher forged on. It was all just part of teaching math at the messy crossroads of middle school.

Sixth-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District joined students at nearly every level in capping four years of steady improvement on state math and English exams, according to test results released Monday.

But excitement over the scores was tempered as district officials were left to make sense of a dramatic decline in math performance between the fifth and sixth grades.

“We have done a good job in elementary school of teaching to the standards and saying, ‘Here are the expectations,’ ” Supt. Roy Romer said. “But it’s a very big question of what has happened to our performance” in sixth grade.

Even though many still struggled to meet statewide targets set by the federal No Child Left Behind law, a higher number of California students last spring met the math benchmark compared to 2003.

Increases in L.A. Unified’s test scores outpaced state averages at many grade levels. In third grade, the proportion of students at or above the federal requirements in math jumped 20 percentage points over the last four years. But between fifth and sixth grades, Los Angeles students faltered. Last year, 38% of the district’s fifth-graders reached or exceeded the math proficiency level. In sixth grade, the total was only 26%.

Yong Li She, along with other district math teachers and education experts, suggested that the decline was due to more complicated material being taught while sixth-graders were struggling to adjust to middle school. The differences include having multiple teachers for the first time and being the youngest students.

“It’s a big change; it’s confusing,” said Robert Stone, director of the University of Wisconsin Center of Education for the Young Adolescent. “Intellectually, emotionally and physically, there is a lot going on.”

“It’s all about attitude,” She said. “They start to change physically and mentally.”

A Times computer analysis of the statewide math scores found that students who remained in the same school for fifth and sixth grades did better in sixth-grade math than those who made the switch from elementary to middle school. The sixth-graders who stayed on the same campus showed a 1% drop in math performance compared with a 7% drop for those who switched to middle school. Most Los Angeles middle schools begin at sixth grade.

As in many other states, California’s exams are pegged to a system of standards that specify what students should know in each subject at every grade level. In sixth grade, teachers are expected to cover material including basic algebra, geometry, percentages and probability.

Heidi Mahmud, another Virgil math teacher, said that last year more than half of her 70 sixth-graders struggled. About a quarter never caught on, she said.

The problem is compounded in Los Angeles Unified, where overcrowded middle schools often have more than 1,500 students.

Edgar Villatoro, 11, one of She’s students, remembered being confused and intimidated when he started at Virgil, which has 2,800 students.

“You have to move from class to class,” he said, “and go up and down stairs.”

Villatoro and his classmates may have fared better in the Anaheim City School District, where students remain at the same school from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Despite overcrowding problems and a diverse student population, Anaheim sixth-graders slipped only slightly from fifth grade, with many schools posting gains.

“I personally think it’s great that sixth-graders can stay at the elementary level,” said Linda Op de Beeck, who has taught at Anaheim’s Barton Elementary for more than a decade. “They’re still very young. Having that familiarity with a teacher all day long is very beneficial.”

Op de Beeck spent nearly two hours Tuesday teaching math, including an hour on linear equations, a foundation for algebra. Using a scale and different colored chess pawns that represented variables and integers, the students practiced solving equations such as 2 (x + 4) + x = x + 16. (The answer is x = 4).

She said it’s material that the students’ parents would have learned in eighth grade: “It’s very hard. It’s very high level.”

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Times staff writer Joel Rubin and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.

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Changing schools

This year’s California math standards tests show that sixth-graders in their first year of secondary school did significantly worse than sixth-graders who attend the same school as fifth-graders.

Scoring proficient or better

Sixth-graders who attend school with fifth-graders: 43%

Sixth-graders who attend secondary schools: 38%

Source: California Department of Education