Scores Fuel Calls to Reform, Divide L.A. Schools : Education: Poor CLAS test results send shock wave through L.A. Unified. Educators agree that teaching methods need to be updated but cite a lack of money.

Armed with the most reliable--and among the worst--data yet on the state of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District, officials acknowledged Wednesday that the school system needs to fundamentally change the way students are taught to meet the demands of a more rigorous curriculum.

The release of the dismal California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test scores this week sent a shock wave through the nation’s second-largest school district, as administrators, teachers and parents worried about how the beleaguered school system can better prepare its students to compete.

They agreed that the low reading, writing and math scores prove that Los Angeles Unified needs to update its teaching methods. But without more money to reduce class sizes--among the largest in the nation--and buy new textbooks and teaching materials, officials acknowledge that they face a Sisyphean task.

“Revolutions don’t happen overnight,” said Teresa Riddle, assistant principal at Paul Revere Middle School in Brentwood, where less than half of the eighth-graders scored in the top three levels in reading and just 26% scored in the top tiers in math.

“It’s very scary when you’re out there teaching 20 or 25 years and all of a sudden someone says, ‘No, do it this way.’ It’s not going to be an overnight process.”

Los Angeles school district officials said the tests, given to 92,000 students in grades four, eight and 10 last spring, outpaced teaching methods in the district. They said the exams--which rely heavily on essay answers--were difficult and the standards high, leaving schools that typically score well on tests unable to reach the demanding top performance levels.

“Really and truly, math education (locally) has lagged behind the state,” Riddle said. “So much of the CLAS test related to math simply has not been taught in the schools.”

The district results, which were significantly lower than statewide scores, showed that only 17% of fourth-graders reached the top three levels in reading; just 24% of the eighth-graders and 25% of the 10th-graders. Math scores were much lower, with 85% of the fourth-graders scoring in the lowest three levels, 90% of the eighth-graders and 94% of 10th-graders.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Helen Bernstein said that last spring’s CLAS exams were difficult for many teachers and students who were first exposed to the new methods by the test itself.

“They put the cart before the horse,” Bernstein said. “This was a pretty scary test for teachers and students. They didn’t know what to expect. That test was supposed to be looked at as a learning experience--I don’t think it was ever taken that way.”

L.A. Schools Supt. Sid Thompson said he will present a proposal to the Board of Education on April 20 to revamp teaching--particularly in the lower grades--to improve students’ language development and focus on math and science.

Thompson has assembled a small task force of administrators to help create “an action plan” to use money from a National Science Foundation grant to better train teachers and to provide remedial help for students, among other things.

“We owe it to the students to . . . prepare them for the 21st Century,” said Bob Hamada, a district administrator who is working on implementing the math and science grant. “But it doesn’t start at the high school level--it has to start at the elementary” schools.

But while the district’s goals are high, education officials say it could take years before the largest district in the state sees results. “People push for quick results,” said Lynn Beck, an education professor at UCLA.

“Virtually all of the research suggests it takes five to 10 years to see changes in standardized test scores. It’s challenging for Los Angeles Unified, but they have shown a strong commitment to reform.”

Because legislation to fund the CLAS tests was vetoed by the governor, the school district now has no statewide form of assessment. Students still take the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, but that test measures individual student performance and does not provide for comparisons to other districts.

The CLAS tests were hailed by educators as the nation’s most progressive set of student assessment tools. But they were embroiled in controversy locally because they asked probing, sometimes personal questions and included controversial reading passages.

Some district officials said they hope that a new test, to be developed by the state, will more accurately measure what students are being taught. But they said the CLAS system of open-ended questions and fewer multiple-choice answers was a good approach--it was just that not all schools in the system are teaching the updated curriculum with more hands-on learning, less memorization and more group work.

Schools that have focused on writing and math, for example, produced better results.

Margaret Thomas, the principal at Beethoven Street Elementary School in West Los Angeles, where 54% of the fourth-graders scored in the top three levels in writing but only 21% made it to the top in math, said she believes that teachers need more training, but that more traditional approaches to learning should not be discarded.

“We’re too quick to throw out what we know works, and we embrace something new and untried,” Thomas said. “It’s a process of starting over all the time.”