Troubled Gompers School Receives Award : Education: Action is labeled a “farce,” as only a handful of top students were considered in naming it a distinguished state school.

More than a few eyebrows have been raised by San Diego educators since the announcement that Gompers Secondary School--the site of continuing turmoil over academics, leadership, and integration issues--had been named a California Distinguished School.

School Board President Kay Davis this week called the award “a farce” in light of the troubles at the Southeast San Diego school.

Even city schools Supt. Tom Payzant said the selection, made in mid-April, was “ironic” because of more than three years of refereeing parent, teacher and principal conflicts at Gompers, although he believes the award indicates that the school is not as bad as the critics of its principal and its many curriculum changes believe.

Gompers is the district’s best-known school, with a tradition of winning national academic awards as a result of its high-powered math-science-computer magnet designed to attract students from outside the heavily Latino and black neighborhood as a way to promote integration.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who makes the final decision on the awards each year, conceded Thursday that the annual process for selecting award-winning schools failed to account for the “fluky aspect” of Gompers, a 7th-through-12th grade school, where almost 60% of the students attend only the seventh and eighth grades.

Until this past September, the high school portion of Gompers was a specialty science-math-computer magnet restricted to a limited number of students at grades 9 through 12 and balanced among various ethnic groups through voluntary busing of white students to the school. The junior high was both a large regular neighborhood school for resident teen-agers, with a small science-math magnet for a limited number of resident students and for bused white students.

Yet Honig’s state Education Department used as its major criterion for selection only the standardized achievement test scores from the school’s 1988-89 12th-grade class, consisting of 94 magnet students out of more than 1,300 in all grades. Those senior-year California Achievement Program (CAP) scores from late fall 1988 are indeed impressive, with overall scores far above both district and state averages in both reading and math.

But the school’s CAP scores at grade eight--reflecting its regular junior-high instruction--have been consistently below both district and state averages. Neighborhood parents for years have complained that their children received less-than-equal instruction than bused students unless they were selected for the small magnet.

Much of the multiyear turmoil surrounding the school has centered on controversial attempts by Payzant to extend the high-quality magnet instruction to all students, and especially to improve academic performance of Latino and black junior-high students by exposing them to magnet teachers and a stronger curriculum.

Honig said his department invites a particular school to compete for the annual awards after looking at test scores and other data at the individual’s school’s highest grade. Usually that means grade 12 at high schools and grade 8 at junior highs. There is no process for considering multiyear data at schools such as Gompers, whose students fall across six grades.

“There are a couple of problems with (our award) at Gompers,” Honig said Thursday. “We looked just at grade 12, and that is a small group of students.

“And, when our people went down there for a site visit, they did not pick up on the fact that the numbers of students at the 12th grade are much smaller than at the 8th, and therefore went only into certain classes where they did see good teaching and good curriculum.

“So I would say that Gompers is getting a distinguished award not for its junior high but only for its senior high portion, which (admittedly) is a much more narrow portion of kids. Our people just weren’t specific enough in their review, but they did find a quality high-school education.”

The two people selected by Honig’s office to make the one-day, on-site visit at Gompers said they realize now that perhaps the 12th-grade data does not reflect the school’s overall academic performance.

“But we both liked what we saw going on, a lot of kids actively engaged in learning, a variety of teaching strategies, an excellent race-human relations program, in short a school working hard to overcome a lot of problems,” Normal Carolan, a state education department administrator, said.

“We did learn about problems with the principal, but the state awards program doesn’t have a special section to consider leadership.”

Her colleague, retired administrator John McCoy, said Gompers “is a peculiar kind of school, where the ‘cream’ of students has been selected for the higher grades, but I still think that it is a good school, simply because they are trying to do a lot of things for students, and with teachers admitting that some things they have done are working and others haven’t and they have to try again.”

Honig said his department needs to revamp its selection policy “and look at relative numbers and say that, if the center of gravity of a school is at the junior high level, then look there.

“But I don’t think that I should now say, ‘Sorry, I’m going to withdraw the award.’ So we will stick by our guns and say that it is a quality program at the high school and won’t comment on the junior high level.”

Payzant said some people are saying the CAP 12 scores at Gompers reflect “only the results of non-resident (white) students left in the school and the original magnet.”

The senior high class is 36% white, 36% black, 15% Latino, 10% Asian and 3% Filipino. The overall school population now is 19% white, 42% black, 24% Latino, 12% Asian and 2% Filipino.

“But I do think that there is more going on than that. The award reflects real success in the senior-high classes and I don’t think it’s fair to use” the fact that the award is based on limited CAP 12 scores “as one more way to bash Gompers.”

“Yet I don’t want anyone to say this means everything is fine because you can’t mask the challenge to fully implement the new plan and have neighborhood seventh- and eighth-graders develop academically as well.”

Although the school’s overall 1988-89 CAP 12 reading score was 293--contrasted with the state score of 248--and its math score 333--contrasted with 256 at the state level--there were wide variations among ethnic groups.

White students scored at 411 for reading and 425 for math. But blacks scored only 201 in reading and 270 in math, and Latino students scored 184 in reading and 202 in math. Asian students scored 288 in reading and 358 in math.

Board President Davis said she fails to see how any school can be called distinguished unless “all aspects” are outstanding. “It’s simply amazing to me that Gompers can qualify if you look at the entire school,” Davis said.