School Scores Can Make or Break a Neighborhood : Education: Real estate agents use the results. And the home buyer grapevine is important to property values.

They may be subjective, they may be arcane, they may not even be right. But for a pinched little pile of numbers, the new school assessment scores have, as usual, packed a mighty punch.

In Hermosa Beach, Cathy McCurdy, school board member and mom, could not wait to show off. “D’ja see the scores?” she called to people along funky Pier Avenue. “D’ja see the scores?” she asked the Kiwanis Club.

They had. In fact at the Kiwanis luncheon, as McCurdy anted up a requisite “Happy Dollar” to the club pot, the Hermosa Beach city school district’s scores in the California Learning Assessment System got a standing ovation.

For too long, the city had struggled to throw off its reputation as a singles’ sort of town. Now, it seemed, McCurdy’s hometown was poised at an image-making moment: Its school district had scored among the county’s best.

In Cerritos, where Whitney Junior-Senior High School rated No.1 in almost every subject area gauged, real estate agent Greta Aqui was smiling and smug. The questions may have been broadened, the test’s name may have changed, but her local school, as usual, came out on top.

Not long ago, she sold a dog of a property, three teeny bedrooms with a vinyl-- vinyl! --pool for $285,000, based on its proximity to the coveted Whitney school, which takes only the best students in the area.

“People don’t even know if their kids will test into the school,” Aqui marveled. “They buy anyway.”

Life, she cooed, is sweet for the real estate agent who can boast: “Walk to Good Schools.”

Meanwhile in Brentwood, Carole Schiffer was, as usual, putting the latest test scores in her clip-and-save pile for use as a preemptive strike. She, too, is a real estate agent, but her market falls into that terrifying turf that her colleagues only whisper about--Los Angeles Unified School District.

Never mind that some of the state’s best schools are in the district, and that educators chide that a good student will learn anywhere. The home buyer grapevine has it that the district is a ticket to Stupidville and a resale “Don’t.”

For her, the test scores are a form of early disclosure, like letting the buyer know right off that an ax murder occurred two doors down.

“We acknowledge that fear and concern, and they see we have nothing to hide,” Schiffer said solemnly.

To many Californians, the periodic rite of school assessment is an esoteric exercise that seems mostly to yield reams of box scores for a game they are not sure they understand. This year’s edition did not make things easier: In an effort to better reflect actual achievement, the tests were changed, toughened and renamed, but the new numbers are even more confounding than the old ones.

In the lexicon of modern parenthood, the number of points your child’s school scores on what used to be called the CAP test, and is now called the CLAS test, is a crucial statistic, right up there, say, with hours of labor and the square footage of your house.

What percentage of your child’s classmates passed muster in reading, writing, math? Were the scores better or worse than the year before? And then there are the extra credit questions: Does this mean you should shell out the money for a private school? Or sell out and move to a “better” district? Or just stew about it and consider the value of bedtime stories by, say, De Tocqueville instead of Dr. Seuss?

In the palm-lined suburbs of Southern California, an entire mythology has sprung up around what constitutes a “good” neighborhood, real estate agents say, and to the extent that there is a backbone to that pecking order, it is the school assessment test. Any home shopper can tell you that the South Pasadena schools routinely score higher than those across the Pasadena city line, and that the Westside school scores leap for the sky as you cross the boundary into Beverly Hills.

Any real estate agent is well versed in the argument that you actually save money by paying more for a house in a “good” school district because mortgage interest is tax deductible, but private school tuition is not.

So never mind that, under the new and improved tests, it takes a good 20 minutes and a calculator to gauge the effectiveness of your neighborhood school. In the rarefied world of parents-with-school-aged-children, the CLAS scores have become Topic A.

“Schools are just a real vital part of what makes a community,” said Rick Learned, who owns a lumber store in downtown Hermosa Beach. For too long, he and other families in the sleepy beach community complained, Hermosa Beach had a reputation as a single person’s town, a funky outpost of surfboard shops and biker bars.

It was a place to date, maybe, but not to mate, a place where the majority rented rather than owned. A lot of things came to mind when someone mentioned Hermosa Beach, but the public school system was not one of them.

“The schools have been good for a long time,” Learned said, “but the recognition has been a long time coming. . . . I think this will cause a lot of people to view us better than they did before.” He added: “I know that the big thing real estate agents sell about an area are the schools.”

Chris Broadhurst, a real estate broker in Hermosa Beach, has already begun to picture the possibilities. Until now, she said, South Bay home buyers usually had two locales in mind if they had school-age children--the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Manhattan Beach.

“People would sacrifice lot size, or move from a two-bathroom to a one-bathroom house, just to get into the Manhattan Beach schools,” Broadhurst said. “Now, people will come in saying: ‘I want to live in the Hermosa Valley section of Hermosa Beach because it’s beautiful and quaint and a block away from one of the best schools in the county.”

Broadhurst and others say that aside from the CLAS scores (or the CAP scores in years past), it is hard to say how a “buzz” develops singling out one school district from others that are equally good. Yet even newcomers to Southern California often choose their neighborhood based on the grapevine grading system that has sprung up to help parents pick the best school for their money when they buy a house.

“It doesn’t seem to be based on much factual information,” said Teresa Howe, director of relocation services for Jon Douglas Co. real estate. “It’s water cooler talk. People will move here saying, ‘We hear the Las Virgenes school system is good,’ but they won’t know much more than that.

“We have companies Downtown where everybody (from out of state) will want to end up in Santa Monica,” she said. “Why Santa Monica? Why not some other place with good schools? Well, a lot of times, it will be just the boss saying, well, ‘My kid goes to school in Santa Monica,’ and people feeling pressure to follow the boss.”

In Cerritos, Aqui said she has clients from other countries who have asked her to call the moment she gets a property in the highly regarded ABC Unified school district, especially if it is near Whitney High.

“It doesn’t matter what the house looks like,” she said. “I put Whitney High School (on the listing) and boy, it sells real fast.”

But Schiffer in Brentwood said she tries to encourage her clients to ignore the conventional wisdom and make their own decision about schools.

“I usually tell them that I went to Hamilton High, which, when I started there, was one of the top-rated schools in the country,” she said. “Then it went in the toilet, then it came back, then it went up and down again and--well, I tell them, look at how I turned out.

“Usually,” she said, “we end up laughing.”