Even Though Lincoln’s Test Scores Dropped, Its Graduation Rate Went Up

On a balmy October afternoon, community members and parents packed into a room at a county building in southeastern San Diego. They were there for a monthly meeting about the schools that feed into Lincoln High. 

Staff from the high school were also in attendance and spoke at length about Lincoln’s new community school designation and the school’s college and career pathways. Co-principal Melissa Agudelo described the school’s shifting teaching philosophies. 

At the end of the meeting, and pressed for time, Stephanie Brown, one of Lincoln’s principals, presented the school’s state standardized test scores. The graphic was inscrutable and cramped.  

Even in the front row, where Francine Maxwell sat, the data was illegible. Maxwell is the former president of the San Diego branch of the NAACP and a longtime community advocate who has volunteered in local schools for years – particularly Lincoln High. 

“They had some pretty slides, but the real slide with the data? How are you going to come with something nobody can read,” Maxwell said. 

Had community members been able to read the slide, they would have seen that the vast majority of Lincoln’s eleventh graders aren’t meeting California’s educational standards. The school’s math scores showed only 11 juniors met state standards. 

San Diego Unified has for years tried to erase the extreme achievement gaps that have plagued lower-income, majority Latino and Black schools like Lincoln High. By most metrics, that effort seems largely to have failed. But even as Lincoln’s test scores have dipped to some of its lowest levels, the school’s graduation rate largely ticked up.  

For at least the past two years, Lincoln’s state standardized test scores have placed the school at the bottom of San Diego Unified high schools. Even before the pandemic, Lincoln had long dealt with significant academic struggles, its scores bouncing up and down as new classes of eleventh graders took the state’s standardized tests. In California, eleventh graders are the only high school grade that’s tested.  

Though educators expected drops in student performance after years of virtual education due to Covid, the high school’s recent student performance is nothing short of shocking. During the 2022-23 school year, about 23 percent of Lincoln’s eleventh graders met state English standards. That’s higher than the previous year, but still more than 30 percentage points lower than the district’s average. 

When it came to math, the results were even more stark. Just three percent of Lincoln’s eleventh graders met state math standards. That means only about 11 of the over 320 students who received scores met state standards. Only two students tested exceeded the state’s math standards. That percentage hasn’t budged from the year before and remains around 40 percentage points lower than the district average. What’s more, about 82 percent of students were in the lowest category.  

Yet even as Lincoln’s test scores have dipped to some of its lowest levels, the school’s graduation rate has ticked up.  

In the 2020-21 school year, nearly 89 percent of students graduated. That was Lincoln’s highest graduation rate in seven years, largely because over the pandemic, some local school districts lowered graduation requirements for students to the state’s minimum. San Diego Unified, for example, lowered the minimum GPA requirement from 2.0 to 1.75 and reduced the number of credits students needed to graduate.  

The following year, San Diego Unified undid those changes and returned to its earlier graduation requirements. That’s why Lincoln’s graduation rate dropped to 84 percent in 2022. Last year, the rate ticked up again, increasing to about 85 percent. That’s about 8 percentage points higher than Lincoln’s graduation rate in 2016-17, even as test scores have decreased over the same period. 

Lincoln’s current graduation rate still places the school at the bottom of San Diego Unified. The school’s graduation rate, however, is nearly identical to City Heights high schools Crawford and Hoover, despite those schools’ test scores being significantly higher. 

There’s a complexity to equating standardized test scores with graduation rates. Because only eleventh graders are tested, scores often vary widely from year to year. Also, graduation rates are an imperfect match since scores apply to the students graduating the next year. So, students who graduated in the 2022-23 school year, were tested in the 2021-22 school year. Students who have fallen behind or test poorly in their junior year can certainly work to catch up in the following year, but research shows that catching up can often be a herculean task.  

Some education officials don’t put much stock in test scores, which often closely correlate to socioeconomic factors like poverty.  

“Standardized tests are biased, and always result in people from communities of color and higher poverty communities doing worse,” said San Diego Unified board member Richard Barrera.  

While the community Lincoln serves is poorer than those of many high schools in the district, it doesn’t explain why both Crawford and Hoover, schools that both serve more students who qualify for free and reduced-priced meals than Lincoln, fare far better on test scores.  

To Barrera, however, standardized tests are not only biased, they also aren’t particularly insightful. He compared drawing conclusions about how well a school is doing from test scores to determining whether a person is healthy simply by their weight. 

“Tests don’t tell you anything about what’s happening at Lincoln,” Barrera said. “They don’t tell you about whether students are making growth … and there’s no link between how a student will do on standardized testing, and how they will do in college,” he said. 

In a brief conversation during a district event at Lincoln, trustee Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, whose subdistrict includes Lincoln, said she’s more concerned with if students are ready for what comes next, whether that be a job or college. According to California’s recently updated schools dashboard about 37 percent of Lincoln students qualified as prepared, 7 points less than the statewide average. 

Barrera said there are more useful datasets to determine school performance, like what grades students receive, how many meet college eligibility requirements, how they fare if they do end up in college and graduation rates. Some of that data is less digestible and more difficult to access, but as is the case Lincoln, it can also clash with the most basic measuring stick we have: test scores. 

For community members, the test scores aren’t surprising. Student performance at Lincoln has long been a contentious issue. A decade ago, former Superintendent, and current United States Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said, “What’s happening at Lincoln is at the heart of the struggle in America,” she said. “When we get Lincoln right, we get America right.” 

The school’s longstanding struggles have inspired spats between city councilmembers and San Diego Unified trustees, and even vanishingly rare discord at school board meetings. The achievement gap in the Lincoln cluster was also featured on the national stage when it was cited during by Sen. Susan Murkowski during Marten’s hearing deputy secretary hearing. 

They’ve also led to persistent instability. Lincoln has weathered repeated administrative shakeups as the district has strained to find ways to improve academic outcomes for students. A costly rebuild – then the most expensive in the district’s history – also hasn’t translated to the success district leaders had hoped for. 

For some, the administrative rollercoaster the district has put Lincoln through is at least partially to blame for the school’s troubles.  

“There have been continued systemic interruptions. If you happen to have siblings coming behind each other, they would never have the same administration … there was never time to build a bridge with the community,” Maxwell said. “Lincoln deserves to be completely excellent, but you have to hold people accountable.”  

The latest leadership change, implemented in 2021, gave the school two co-principals – Agudelo and Brown – each responsible for separate grades. Since taking over, the principals have taken a Small Schools Pathway approach which gives students the option of pursuing performance and communication technology, biotech and engineering or medical and emergency services. 

In an email, Agudelo and Brown wrote that they’ve focused their post-pandemic recovery efforts on increasing support beyond the school day with initiatives like extended credit recovery programs that allow students to make up classes they may have missed of failed. They’ve also worked to create connections with local industries and job creators. “Offering our students a wide range of adults who are dedicated to their success is one way we see students understanding the value in their education,” the principals wrote. 

“Working hard to connect with our students and families creates more trust. We want our program to be transparent, safe, and predictable. We also want every student, regardless of academic impact due to the pandemic, to see a way to finishing high school and creating a choice filled life after graduation,” they wrote. 

The principals touted that according to California’s recently updated School Dashboard, Lincoln’s math and English test scores had increased by 15 points and 21 points respectively, a measure that’s different than the percentage of students meeting standards. Still, even with the increase the school’s English scores are 94 points below standard, while its math scores are 181 points below standard.  

Lincoln’s co-principals struck a slightly different tone on test scores than the district trustees.  

“Test scores are one metric that indicates how students are performing and we do acknowledge them as one way to understand how our students are doing,” the principals wrote. 

LaShae Sharp-Collins, a professor at San Diego State University, former president of the local chapter of the Association of African American Educators and current state assembly candidate, graduated from Lincoln. She, like many Lincoln graduates, is deeply proud of the school and what it represents. As Sharp-Collins put it, she’s a Hornet for life. 

Sharp-Collins thinks test scores are a flat metric that don’t consider the diverse needs and life experience of students, or all the intangibles that schools like Lincoln offer. 

“There’s so much good that comes out of that school. So much love from so many people,” Sharp-Collins said. 

From the admin team to the coaches of Lincoln’s storied sports programs, she said adults truly care about how students are faring. To her, that’s likely at least part of what explains the wide disconnect between junior year test scores and graduation rates for the following year: “people have improved drastically because they probably found someone that really helped support them through the process,” Sharp-Collins said. 

“These people give their last to these kids to make sure that whatever they need, and that’s one of the things that people don’t see. Those are things that you can’t measure,” she said.