Charter School Test Scores Probed

A Pacoima charter school that has gained national attention as a leader in Los Angeles school reform is under investigation for possible doctoring of answers on the standardized tests released this week, The Times learned Monday.

Los Angeles Unified School District administrators said they began an inquiry after receiving an anonymous tip about possible cheating at Vaughn Next Century Learning Center on the Stanford Nine exam, which was given last spring.

The district’s reform coordinator, Joe Rao, said a preliminary examination of test answer sheets pointed to one class in which “an inordinate number of answers were changed from wrong to right.”

When Vaughn Principal Yvonne Chan was contacted, she suggested two other classes where she suspected there might have been problems, Rao said. In one of those two, changes also had been made, he said.

Chan, who was traveling in Philadelphia during a break in Vaughn’s classes, could not be reached for comment.

Vaughn became one of the district’s first charter schools in 1993, joining an elite group of public schools that obtain waivers from some local and state education regulations in an experimental effort to boost student achievement and parental involvement.

Under Chan’s aggressive leadership, Vaughn has become a high-profile symbol for the school reform movement and was cited by President Clinton for its achievements. In 1996, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton stopped at Vaughn on her national book tour.

Pending the outcome of the investigation, Vaughn’s scores were withheld when the district’s scores were reported this week, district officials said.

The district has also withheld test scores at Crenshaw High School pending a review of discrepancies that appear to have resulted from errors in distribution of the tests.

Some classes at Crenshaw apparently took tests that were meant for other classes, said Esther Wong, director of the district’s Information Center branch.

Wong said she expected that Crenshaw’s scores would be published for the school after some students’ results are eliminated.

The Vaughn investigation appears to be more troublesome.

Rao said the district was allowing Chan to conduct an internal investigation for now, but also is consulting the test’s author, Harcourt Brace & Co., to see what role it might play in determining the extent of the cheating and whether school’s overall test results can be salvaged.

A spokeswoman for Harcourt Brace said the publisher does not maintain an investigative unit because its tests, unlike college entrance exams such as the Scholastic Assessment Test, are administered solely by school personnel.

Wong said her staff is examining the answer sheets from all grades at Vaughn to determine the extent of the problem.

“We’re looking at the answer sheets, at each and every page, which is very time-consuming,” Wong said.

Part of Vaughn’s novelty is its emphasis on on-campus social services such as health care. The racially diverse school was attractive to Mrs. Clinton because it mirrored the kind of urban village she describes in her book “ ‘It Takes a Village’ and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.”

But even as the school has continued to take credit for its innovations, its test scores have lagged behind its goals.

In Vaughn’s charter petition, which comes up for renewal by the school board in June, the school pledged to increase students’ scores on standardized tests 10% to 20%.

After some improvement in earlier years, Vaughn’s 1995 scores registered more declines than increases in reading, math and language, compared to 1994.

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Chan attributed the drop to her decision to test all the school’s students, including those recently in bilingual classes and those being moved into regular classes from separate special education programs.

Because the district changed tests in 1996, the current scores cannot be compared to those of previous years.

Even so, this year, the scores were not impressive, lingering well below the 30th percentile at most grade levels and plummeting in fourth grade to as low as the 12th percentile in reading.

A combined score for all the tests at the third-grade level reached the 27th percentile. Still, that was well above the third-grade score for nearby Fenton Charter (17th percentile) and for other non-charter schools in the area, such as Pacoima Elementary (18th percentile) and San Fernando Elementary (19th percentile).

The cheating allegations underscore increasing public scrutiny of the way test scores are used to measure the quality of public schools. This scrutiny is particularly intense at charter schools, which are effectively granted amnesty from some rules in return for proof of higher achievement.

A recent study of charter schools conducted by the PACE Research Center at UC Berkeley showed “widespread pressure to come up with data that show them meeting their goals,” said Bruce Fuller, associate professor of public policy and the center’s director.

“It could well be there are teachers in the charter school movement that are feeling pressure to show learning gains and this may be an unintended consequence of that,” he said.

Sue Burr, co-director of the California State University Institute for Educational Reform, acknowledged that charter schools face greater pressure to be accountable, but said she was unaware of any trend toward cheating.

“To use one example would be painting by a pretty broad brush over what may be an error or some mistake in a classroom, but not undue pressure in the schools,” Burr said.

When informed of the Vaughn investigation, Supt. Ruben Zacarias said he could not predict whether it would affect Vaughn’s charter review next year.

“We should not judge a whole school by the transgressions of a few,” he said. “But it’s serious and it needs to be looked into.”

Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this story.