Cavazos Issues ‘Terrible’ Report on U.S. Schools : Education: He deplores results of survey, but California School Supt. Honig says he uses misleading figures as an excuse to denigrate system.

Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos released the controversial annual state-by-state survey of educational achievement in America on Wednesday and deplored the meager results as reflecting a national “indifference, complacency and passivity.”

Asked at a news conference if the results--known as the annual wall chart--could be condemned as “horrible,” the secretary replied: “Yes, it is a terrible report, but there also are some improvements shown. So it’s not really a terrible report. It’s a balanced terrible report.”

But the secretary’s critics did not accept this bleak assessment. Bill Honig, California’s superintendent of public instruction, said, for example: “I think the secretary is misleading the American public. It’s almost as if he’s going out of his way to make things look bad.”

Cavazos based much of his assessment on an increase in the dropout rate nationally and a slight decline in national test scores, including those of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The SAT is used in 22 states, including California, to screen college applicants.

He called for radical reforms of the educational system--advocating for example the new programs in the state of Minnesota and the city of Richmond, Calif., that allow parents to choose schools for their children. Cavazos said the wall chart also demonstrated that “increased spending has failed to produce improved results.”

To bolster this argument, the secretary released a graph that showed total federal, state and local spending on elementary and secondary education soaring in the last 10 years, while test scores remained static. This kind of graph has been denounced as misleading in the past by Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Education Committee, because he said it failed to show that federal spending, which targets minority groups, declined during these years.

Asked for evidence that a restructuring of school systems would improve pupil performance, Cavazos replied: “Anything would be better than what we have now. We have to start somewhere. . . . If you just put more dollars into it, it’s not going to happen.”

But Honig, in a telephone interview, dismissed the wall chart and Cavazos’ assessment of it as “an obvious political ploy . . . to push choice and get off the hook for spending money. . . .

“This is very unfortunate because teachers and educators who are pushing for quality should be getting credit for that. But he is using the results as an excuse to beat down the school system. . . .

“The secretary is way off base when he says that investing money does not pay off,” Honig said. “Everyone knows that it does.”

The wall chart, first issued seven years ago, gets its name because the state-by-state information, even when printed in small type, is so voluminous that it needs long sheaves of paper to accommodate it all. This year’s chart, in fact, was issued on two lengthy sheets.

According to the charts, average SAT scores dropped from 906 out of a possible 1600 in 1986 to 903 in 1989 in the 22 states that use these tests. While this was cited by Cavazos as an example of poor performance, critics pointed out that the charts also showed that an increasing percentage of high school seniors were taking the test each year. The increase in test takers could account for the decrease in average scores.

The states ranking highest in SAT scores were New Hampshire (932), Oregon (927), Maryland (914), Connecticut (908) and California (906); the worst were Indiana (871), Georgia (847), the District of Columbia (846), South Carolina (838) and North Carolina (836).

In looking at school dropouts, the charts measured what it called the national graduation rate--the percentage of ninth-grade students who graduate from high school on schedule. The rates for 1988 therefore showed the percentage of ninth-graders in 1984 who managed to graduate four years later.

This method is scorned by many critics who believe that it inflates the dropout rate. For example, children who skip a year of school but come back to graduate would be counted as a dropout under the Education Department’s method.

According to the charts, the national graduation rate increased from 69.7% in 1982 to 71.1% in 1988. The 1988 rate, however, was a drop from the 1987 rate of 71.7%.

States with the highest graduation rates in 1988 were Minnesota (90.9%), Wyoming (88.3%), North Dakota (88.3%), Montana (87.3%) and Iowa (85.8%). California ranked 42nd with 65.9%, while Florida ranked last with 58%.

California ranked 31st with its expenditures per pupil of $3,840, below the national average of $4,243. It ranked 50th with its pupil/teacher ratio of 22.7 (above the national average of 17.4 pupils per teacher), and fifth in average teacher salary of $35,285 (above the national average of $29,567).

Some educators had expected the charts to be dropped this year, since they did not measure achievement in all the national education goals set by President Bush and the nation’s governors earlier this year.

Progress in the eradication of adult illiteracy, for example, is not measured. But Cavazos said the charts represent “a snapshot of our current educational performance and therefore provide a starting point for developing strategies designed to achieve our national goals.”

Although the total performance was a lackluster one, according to the secretary, he did note some progress in a few areas. Cavazos pointed out that scores in advanced placement tests had moved upward since 1982, that black and Latino students had achieved significant gains in math and science scores and that an increasing percentage of high school students now take biology and other science courses.

EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA, 1989 Average SAT score: 906 National average: 903 Rank (out of 22): 5 High school graduation rate*: 65.9% National Average: 71.1 Rank among states: 42 Expenditures per pupil*: $3,840 National average: 4,243 Rank among states: 31 Pupil/Teacher ratio: 22.7 National average: 17.4 Rank among states: 50 Teacher salaries: $35,285 National average: 29,567 Rank among states: 5 * 1988 figures. Source: U.S. Department of Education