Test Scores Slip for State’s Pupils After Era of Gains : Education: Supt. Honig blames budget cuts. Most schools in L.A. district are among those faring poorly.

After almost a decade of near-steady improvement, achievement test scores for California’s public school students are showing ominous signs of slippage.

On California Assessment Program exams given to more than 300,000 eighth-graders last spring, students registered declines in reading, science and social studies and held relatively steady in writing and mathematics, results released Tuesday showed.

Schools in Los Angeles County generally followed the downward trend. A few districts--notably Compton Unified--did far worse than most. And just 32% of Los Angeles Unified’s eighth-graders performed at adequate levels in all five subject areas.

But some districts, including Rowland Unified, Glendale Unified and Lennox Elementary, posted gains.

Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, blamed the decline statewide on education budget cuts. For two or three years, as California’s deepening recession played havoc with the state treasury, school districts throughout the state have coped by increasing their already-large class sizes or reducing academic-enhancing extras.

They also have cut back on nurses, school psychologists and other services as the number of children with special needs was increasing.

“We’re disappointed and concerned but not terribly surprised,” Honig said, noting that the state’s basic education funding slid about $60 per student between 1989-90, when scores peaked, and 1991-92.

The CAP tests, given since the mid-1980s to students in grades three, six, eight and 12 to help assess the progress of school reform efforts, were canceled for the 1990-91 school year after then-Gov. George Deukmejian blue-penciled the testing funds. Last year the state Department of Education got enough money to test eighth-graders.

Test officials found a slight but telling drop in scores overall. On a scale ranging roughly between 100 and 400, last spring’s eighth-graders earned an average score of 259--four points lower than the marks earned by eighth-graders two years earlier.

Fewer than half the students displayed adequate knowledge levels in the five areas tested.

Scores dropped by four points in science to 265 and by five points in social studies to 255. Math and writing scores stayed about the same, slipping by just one and two points, to 270 and 257, respectively. Despite the recent slippage, the scores in these four subject areas remained well above the marks earned when the assessment program began in the mid-1980s.

Most troubling were the reading scores, which fell 10 points in two years to 247, wiping out most of the gains won since the mid-1980s.

“The reading drop is significant, and we’re worried about it,” Honig said. “The real questions are how serious is this and what should we be doing about it.”

Besides budget cuts, Honig cited increases in the numbers of poverty-stricken families and in immigrant students not yet fluent in English as possible factors in the test score decline.

Priscilla Wohlstetter, an assistant professor of educational administration and policy at USC, said budget concerns have impinged on efforts to improve student achievement.

“The concern has been on avoiding bankruptcy and keeping afloat, as opposed to on instruction and learning,” Wohlstetter said.

In Los Angeles Unified, which has been cutting its budget for four years while the number of needy students has grown, scores dropped five points in two years. The district’s overall average score of 213 kept it well below the state average of 259.

Several other local districts did as poorly, and some did worse. The troubled Compton district, which narrowly averted a state takeover earlier this year, posted the most dismal results of all. Its average mark of 153 was the lowest in the county. Just 14.9% of its eighth-graders displayed adequate achievement in the five subject areas. That made Compton the only large school district in California with fewer than 20% of its students showing satisfactory skill levels.

There were some bright spots among local districts, however. Average scores in Glendale climbed 23 points, to 291, and more modest but still significant gains were made by several others, including Lennox--where most of the students come from homes where Spanish is spoken--Burbank Unified, El Monte City, Glendora Unified, Rowland and Lynwood unified school districts.

“These were districts that beat the trend even under very difficult conditions,” Honig said. “To keep the focus is very difficult, even under the best of circumstances. The ones with the big drops are going to have to figure out what happened and what they’re going to do about it. . . . As we come out of this recession, we want to be in a position to make those large gains again.”

USC’s Wohlstetter said cooperation among various school factions--especially employee unions and district administration--is especially important in times of financial and other crises.

“There has to be a collaborative effort. People have to be willing to put self-interest aside and push toward a common goal,” she said. She cited Miami’s Dade County district as an example of collaborative school reforms being carried out despite tight finances.

The results released Tuesday mark the end of an era in California’s testing program. Beginning this spring, school officials will begin administering a new generation of exams tied to statewide performance standards that will put more emphasis on thinking skills.

Unlike the current generation of tests, which are aimed solely at assessing the performance of schools and districts, the new exams will include scores for individual students as well.

TEST RESULTS: B3