Broad Prize goes to Long Beach, Calif.

10/14/03 -- The Broad Foundation has awarded the 2003 Broad Prize for Urban Education to the Long Beach Unified School District in California in recognition of its success in raising student achievement.

The district received $500,000, which will be used to award college scholarships to more than 100 graduating seniors from low-income families.

Each of the four districts that were finalists in the 2003 competition received $125,000 in scholarship money. The four finalists are the school districts of Boston; Garden Grove, Calif.; Jefferson County in Louisville, Ky.; and Norfolk, Va.

NSBA Executive Director Anne L. Bryant is a member of the review board that helps select the winners.

The Broad Foundation created the annual Broad Prize to:

• regain public confidence in public schools by spotlighting districts making gains in overall student achievement and reducing the achievement gap across ethnic groups and between high and low-income students;

• reward public school systems that are successfully using creative, results-oriented approaches and techniques to better educate children; and

• create an incentive to dramatically increase student achievement in the nation's largest urban school districts.

The Long Beach Unified School District, with 97,000 students, is the third largest district in California. The U.S. Census Bureau has called Long Beach the most ethnically diverse city in the nation.

Sixty-nine percent of Long Beach public schools met or exceeded the growth targets on California's Academic Performance Index (API), compared to 53 percent of schools statewide, says district spokesperson Chris Eftychiou. Ninety-three percent of Long Beach schools increased their overall API scores.

Among the reforms undertaken by the districts are intensive reading and math instruction and a series of academic checkpoints or performance standards that make sure students are ready to move from one grade to the next. The district also credits a high degree of parent satisfaction and a thorough data collection system with helping it win the Broad Prize.

Because of California's budget deficit, the Long Beach school system has had to cut $40 million from its budget, resulting in a freeze on non-teaching positions and other cuts. But district officials say they have so far shielded classroom instruction from the cuts by dipping into reserves and controlling costs.