Programs to Boost Student Scores Don’t--Funds Cut Off

In 1969, when California began to offer grants for so-called demonstration programs that would encourage better reading and math instruction for low-income students in junior high schools, it seemed to be the right idea at the right time.

The “war on poverty” was still being fought, the nation was sensitive to the problems of the poor and educators were searching for ways to improve the basic reading and math skills of disadvantaged students.

These programs “were designed to show how kids in poor schools could achieve better scores in reading and mathematics--not a bad idea,” said Fred Tempes, an assistant state superintendent of public instruction.

But 17 or 18 years later, when Department of Education officials began to review what was formally called the Demonstration Programs in English-Language Arts and Mathematics, they found that in some cases the teaching methods were outdated, state curriculum frameworks were being ignored and California Assessment Program (CAP) test scores were low.

“They were not only bad, they were finely tuned bad,” said James R. Smith, deputy superintendent of public instruction for curriculum and instructional leadership.

Yet it has taken two full years to make significant changes because directors of the 30 or so local demonstration projects have effectively lobbied the state Board of Education and the Legislature.

“You have to be careful about funding new programs,” Tempes said. “As the years go along, they develop their own constituencies and lobbies and then you can never get rid of them.”

Although the math and reading demonstrations are only a $4-million item in the $15-billion state education budget, the effort to revise or eliminate them has taken on symbolic importance.

“They’re a legend around here,” Smith said.

The fight began when state education officials began to review textbooks, curriculum frameworks and other basic instructional tools after state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig took office in 1983.

“We were looking over the horizon at all the stuff we do,” Tempes said, “looking for things we could use to crank up curricular reform.”

When evaluators were sent to the math and reading demonstration projects, they found “they were doing the same things they were doing when they started,” Tempes said. “That wasn’t the idea at all.”

For instance, the new state-approved curriculum framework in mathematics stresses the “problem-solving approach to mathematics, where the kids do a lot of hands-on stuff,” said Les Pacheco, a junior high school consultant for the Department of Education. But pupils in some of the demonstration projects were working instead with “drill sheets, doing multiplication tables over and over and over.”

Twenty years ago, when these programs were started, many educators believed that children learn by linking together “predigested chunks” of knowledge, Smith said, but since then research in cognitive learning and other fields has shown that “when you teach people little skills, the only thing they learn is little skills--they don’t make a whole.’

James Tucker, director of a demonstration project at Santa Barbara Junior High School, disputed Smith’s claims. He said teachers at some of the demonstration schools “have been more or less on the cutting edge of educational reform in the state.”

Teachers at his own school, which ranked in the top one-third in eighth-grade CAP reading scores, provide “probably the purest example of what the state curriculum is trying to do, Tucker added.”

But scores at some of the other demonstration schools, even those receiving more than $150,000 a year in special state funds, were among the lowest in California.

For instance, Pacoima Junior High School, in the northeast San Fernando Valley, has been granted almost $2.7 million since entering the program in 1970, yet ranks near the bottom in eighth-grade CAP math scores.

Elaine Lindsay, who has been director of the Pacoima project for many years, defended the accomplishments at this school, which has a high percentage of low-income students, including many who speak little or no English.

“When the program started, we would take 750 incoming seventh-graders each year, some with math skills at fourth-grade level,” Lindsay said. “At the end of the year, these very same youngsters would go out at ninth-grade level, at least,” as measured by the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS).

But Smith, the deputy state superintendent, said this was “living proof that you can raise test scores without increasing learning.” He said the CTBS measures “rote skills” but not “the ability to think” and that the California Assessment Program is a much better way of determining how much mathematics a student actually has learned.

When eighth-grade CAP testing began in 1984, Smith said, “we picked up the fact that these claims of great progress just weren’t valid.”

Convinced that the demonstration programs had to be revamped completely, if not abolished, Smith and other Department of Education officials seized upon a suggestion that had been made by the legislative analyst’s office a few years before--that funding of the existing programs be gradually reduced and that the money be used to finance new projects at other disadvantaged schools.

But this proposal ran into a buzz saw of opposition, led by Bill McLean, director of the demonstration programs at Compton Middle School in Bakersfield.

“We decided we weren’t going to let them do this to us,” McLean said. “We saw it as a political move on the part of the superintendent (Honig), who was having some difficulty getting people to go along with his curriculum reforms and needed some money to dangle in front of them.”

McLean organized a letter-writing campaign to legislators in whose districts the demonstration projects were located.

He concentrated on the late state Sen. Walter Stiern (D-Bakersfield), who wrote letters to key senators in 1987 and again just days before his death in early 1988, urging them to continue the existing financial support for the programs.

State Sen. Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland) mentioned the letters in the eulogy he delivered for Stiern at the state Capitol.

According to state education officials, McLean’s efforts were largely responsible for a 1987 Senate committee vote killing budget language that would have reduced funding for the demonstration projects.

But the Department of Education refused to give up.

“It became a matter of pride,” Smith said. “Everybody who spent the time to look at these programs agreed that they weren’t what they should be and we weren’t going to be done in by this lobbying effort.”

The department began lobbying on its own, helped by the legislative analyst.

“We talked to assemblymen and senators,” Tempes said. “We put together a fact sheet and walked it around to members of the education committees (in both houses). We just spent some time trying to educate folks.”

The effort paid off a year later when the department made another attempt to reduce financial support for the existing programs and to use the money that was saved to start new projects. Once again, the Senate said no but this time the Assembly agreed and a budget conference committee from the two houses also agreed.

So funding for the old programs was reduced by one-third this year and will be cut by another one-third in each of the next two years. Meanwhile, 21 new programs have been approved and another 17 will be considered by the state Board of Education next month.

“We need demonstration projects,” Tempes said. “We’ve got great frameworks, but we don’t have very many places where people can go to see these things.”

Pacheco said this is especially true at the junior high school level around the state.

“We feel very good about this,” Smith said. “We don’t win very many.”

McLean conceded that “the battle appears to be over and the department seems to have won. . . . We’re just crushed by the fact that they took out after us but what can we do? We’re just a small group of schools. . . . What can David do against Goliath?”