Test-Score Gap Spurs Call for District Help : Education: Smaller classes and higher-paid teachers are suggested for schools serving black and Latino students, who are falling further behind whites and Asians.

The president of the San Diego school board Tuesday suggested giving heavily minority schools south of Interstate 8 extras that other schools would not get to boost achievement of their largely black and Latino students.

Shirley Weber said class sizes in those schools might be lowered to as few as 20 students, from the more than 35 they now average, and that teachers could receive higher pay.

Her far-reaching ideas, which she promised to refine into specific proposals for action, came after trustees learned Tuesday that the already glaring achievement gap between black and Latino students, and their white and Asian counterparts, grew even wider this year, according to results from new standardized achievement tests taken in the spring.

The disappointing results, despite several major efforts by the district to improve black and Latino classroom performance, angered not only from Weber, a professor of Africana studies at San Diego State University, but also Jacqueline Jackson, education director for the San Diego Urban League.

Jackson told trustees that black and Latino parents should demand that the district hand over to them the tax money now being spent on their children’s education “and let them find a system that can educate better, because the public schools have now clearly demonstrated that it can’t educate our children satisfactorily.”

Other board members expressed unease with the results, but Weber spoke long and passionately about the need to “shock” the system into changing its existing policy of paying all teachers the same salary and maintaining uniform class sizes, even though teachers at some schools have a tougher job getting their students to succeed academically.

The testing results presented Tuesday contrast with a policy adopted by trustees in 1990 to require all schools to halve their achievement gap between white and Asian, and black and Latino students within two years, based on test scores. Jackson pointed out to the board that, despite the policy, the trustees have so far wrestled unsuccessfully with how to hold schools accountable to that goal.

“Obviously very little of what we’re doing is working, and the community is becoming increasingly impatient,” Weber said in an interview. “The (black and Latino) community has made stronger commitments for parent involvement, attendance is up at many schools, yet none of this is showing up in the test scores.

“The gap is actually widening, it’s getting worse, and there doesn’t seem to be anything we’re doing that is turning it around.”

Weber said she understands that many teachers are “trying their best,” but that many heavily minority schools have a 60% turnover rate each year for teachers, with too much time spent each year learning to run the class rather than offering the best instruction.

The latest test scores for students at minority schools--identified by the Superior Court in 1980 as needing special academic attention--failed to meet the national median for any of the 12 grade levels tested in reading and language, and for only three of 12 grades in math.

The scores are from the new ASAT (Abbreviated Stanford Achievement Test), a multiple-achievement test adopted by the district this year because it is considered more difficult than its predecessor. Its questions require students to apply more than basic skills.

The results at the predominantly black and Latino schools show, that for all grades, only 30.9% of students scored at or above the national median in reading, 33.2% of students were at or above the norm in language, and 44.3% were at or above in math. The court requires all students in all grades at minority-isolated schools be tested each spring.

Districtwide comparisons can be made only at the fifth and seventh grades because only students at those two levels were tested in non-minority schools in the spring.

For all district fifth-graders, 57.4% scored at or above national norms in reading, 57.4% in language and 53.9% in math. A racial breakdown shows white fifth-graders scoring 74% in reading, 77% in language and 78% in math; for Asians, 56% in reading, 68% in language and 79% in math; for blacks, 37% in reading, 44% in language and 41% in math; for Latinos 32% in reading, 45% in language and 53% in math.

For all district seventh-graders, 57.9% were at or above in reading, 53.1% in language and 58.1% in math.

Weber did not accept caveats by district testing administrators Tuesday that no multiple choice test can adequately reflect what students are being taught, and that there have been strong gains since 1980, when the court first ordered consistent efforts to improve minority achievement.

“No test will ever cover everything, but this test seems to be measuring something that somebody, mainly (white and Asian) kids are getting in the classroom while others aren’t,” Weber said. “You can change the test to another test, but that doesn’t address the fundamental issue of what is happening in the classroom, that things are just not being done right.”

Weber said her ideas for providing extras to the schools south of I-8 are meant to “level the playing field.”

Weber conceded that her ideas will be tough for the San Diego Teachers Assn. to handle, although Weber raised the ideas in a general way with during a lunch last week with teachers’ union president Hugh Boyle.

“The union admits that it is harder to teach in Southeast (San Diego),” Weber said. “But we’ve got to try something.”