FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Catherine Suitor, csuitor@laalliance.org
Alliance’s Sharpened Focus on Reaching All Scholars Is Getting Results
State Test Data Shows Significant Growth for Scholars with Disabilities; High School English Language Arts and Math Scores Place Alliance Scholars in the Lead Across the District and State
Los Angeles, CA, October 10, 2019––Scholars at Alliance College-Ready Public Schools continue to outperform their high school peers across the district and state on California’s state assessments. And after an intensive network-wide focus on meeting the academic needs of all scholars, Alliance’s scholars with disabilities1 posted significant gains on the 2019 Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exams, including a 13-point increase in high school English Language Arts.
“Alliance’s mission has always been educational equity,” Alliance CEO Dan Katzir said, “and we launched our ‘All Means All’ initiative last year to make sure we’re doing everything we can for our scholars, including those with disabilities, reach their academic potential. I’m very proud of the work our scholars and educators have done, and very pleased to see the resulting academic gains.”
112% of Alliance’s 13,000 scholars have special needs.
Alliance High School Scholars Outperform Peers Across District and State
Alliance scholars posted strong performance across the board. 41% of Alliance high school scholars met or exceeded mathematics standards compared with 25% of their peers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and 32% in the state. In English Language Arts, 69% of Alliance juniors met or exceeded standards compared to 52% of students in LAUSD and 57% in California.
Middle School Scholars Maintain Growth
At the middle school level, Alliance schools were able to sustain the big increases on last year’s test, increasing from 38% to 46% of scholars meeting or exceeding standards in English Language Arts and from 22% to 31% meeting or exceeding standards in math over the last two years. In addition, Alliance middle schools are outperforming LAUSD by 5% in English Language Arts.
“Our ultimate measure of success is college completion,” Katzir added. “Our aspiration is 75% of Alliance scholars successfully completing a four-year college education. These results show promising progress, and they show the power of having an unwavering belief in the academic promise of all scholars.”
About Alliance College-Ready Public Schools
Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is one of the largest and most successful nonprofit public charter school networks in the nation, operating 25 high-performing, public charter middle and high schools that educate nearly 13,000 scholars from Los Angeles’ most systematically underserved communities. Alliance schools have been recognized as among the best in the nation by US News & World Report, Newsweek, the U.S. Department of Education and the California Department of Education. Since opening its first school in 2004, 95% of Alliance scholars have graduated from high school and been accepted to college, 73% to a four-year college or university.
