West L. A. Schools Slump, Defying Upward Trend

For more than a year, Linda Rosen has been urging middle-class parents in her Cheviot Hills community to forego the expense of private schools and send their children to the neighborhood public school, Castle Heights Elementary.

The recently released California Assessment Program test scores have not made her job any easier. Castle Heights’ sixth-grade scores dropped across the board in reading, writing and arithmetic. Its third-grade scores dropped in reading, but remained about the same in writing and mathematics.

“This is going to scare the hell out of them,” said Rosen, a parent leader at the school. “(These test results) can erase a year’s worth of work . . . it really worries me.”

But Castle Heights was not the only school to slump, defying an upward trend in the state in third- and sixth-grade scores. Overall, scores declined from last year at other West Los Angeles schools, including Brentwood Magnet, Canfield/Crescent Heights, Carthay, Mar Vista, Overland Avenue and Pacific Palisades elementary schools. By contrast, those schools’ scores were frequently 50 to 100 points lower in each category than the third- and sixth-grade averages in Beverly Hills.

“When those scores come out it is going to be very frustrating,” said Marcy Frerichs, a parent whose children attend the Canfield/Crescent Heights school. “People are going to question why they are so low. The problem is that they compare our scores to Beverly Hills because it is nearby and it is a level that they aspire to reach.

“But it’s not a fair comparison. Beverly Hills has a much more homogenous group of children. And here (in Los Angeles) we have a wider variance of scores because the population is more diverse.”

The Canfield/Crescent Heights School is located on two campuses less than a mile apart. At Canfield, where students attend kindergarten through third grade, the scores declined in reading, writing and arithmetic. At Crescent Heights, where students attend fourth through sixth grades, sixth-grade scores remained roughly the same in writing and improved significantly in reading and mathematics.

Many school officials downplay the importance of the annual statewide test of basic skills. They argue that the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) score is more accurate because it measures the individual child’s ability, not the school’s. The CTBS is a national scholastic test that measures student performance on basic skills.

“The one question that parents always ask when they want information about the school is, ‘How are the scores?’ ” said Marvin Goldenson, Castle Heights’ principal and a former principal of Carthay. “These scores are no indication of how well the school performs or how their child will perform in it.

“We have kids in the 99th percentile and we have kids in the 30th percentile. There is a program to meet each child’s need, whether it’s for remedial help or enrichment. But it is the feeling of some parents that the child does better if the competition is stiffer. I’m not sure that is true. A child can do well at any school.”

Beverly Tietjen, principal at the Brentwood Magnet Science School, said that the drop in scores at her highly sought-after school was the result of a “changing student population” and an increase in the number of students who speak limited English.

Tietjen said that because Brentwood is a magnet, it draws a variety of students of different backgrounds from 194 schools throughout the district. “The students vary from year to year,” she said.

At Westwood Elementary School, Principal Michelle Bennett said several factors contributed to her school’s low performance. “We have changed from a regular neighorhood school to what is considered an under-utilized school.

“Every year we receive about 100 to 150 children from overcrowded schools in the district. A large number of these children are limited- and non-English-speaking children. It is also a highly transient population. They are here one year and they are not the next. It makes an ongoing program difficult to maintain.”

Bennett said that the parents are very active at the school and those children who remain with the program score well on the tests.

“Any parent who judges a school by those test scores is not doing his homework,” said Rocki Degroot, an active parent at Overland Elementary School. “They should go to the school and question the principal, look at the school.”