Zacarias Cites Gains and Vows Improvements

Los Angeles schools Supt. Ruben Zacarias pledged Monday to make improvement of third-grade reading a major focus this year and said he plans to severely reduce the district’s diverse and often incoherent textbook offerings.

Zacarias said he will ask the Board of Education to adopt only three textbook series, in place of at least 13 now in use, and demand that each high school and the schools that feed into them choose just one. The move should help the many students who change schools within the district by minimizing the chance that they will be bounced from one curriculum to another.

The textbook proposal was the main new initiative in Zacarias’ second annual back-to-school pep talk for school administrators, in which the 69-year-old superintendent ticked off a list of accomplishments and reiterated oft-stated goals of increasing accountability, ending social promotion and overhauling teacher training.

Zacarias lavished praise on district staff for coming through on his promise to put a textbook in every student’s hands this school year through the purchase of hundreds of thousands of new books this year.

But those purchases could make it difficult for Zacarias to achieve his goal of paring curriculum choices because district records show that schools chose haphazardly from 13 textbook sequences.

The district’s 27 “clusters”--generally consisting of two or more high schools and their feeder schools--typically bought eight to 10 different core reading series, and many schools picked three or more. Textbooks are expected to remain in use for seven years.

“He’s trying to unring a bell,” said board member David Tokofsky. “We blew it!”

Tokofsky complained that the textbook initiative should have preceded the spending of $80 per student in state funding provided by Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1997 reading initiative.

“Only once in a 30-year period do you get $80 per child to remedy the abysmal reading scores in the district,” Tokofsky said. “What he ought to do is plead with the publishers, ‘We made the wrong order. Can we send these back to you?’ ”

“That might well be,” Zacarias said Monday afternoon, noting that “some of those books may still be in their cartons.”

Zacarias took the criticism in stride, saying that he has found widespread support for the proposal.

“We have to begin,” he said. “Is it something we can implement this year, or will we have to wait until next year? I don’t know.”

Zacarias said he has directed the district’s instructional staff to review by Oct. 1 all reading programs in kindergarten through fifth grade. He said his proposal could reach the board between November and January.

In an otherwise upbeat review of the district’s performance in the 1997-’98 school year, Zacarias conceded that third-grade reading was stagnant despite overall improvement in test scores.

“Every child must be reading at or near grade level by the time he or she leaves the third grade,” he said. “This is a must.”

His prescription involved a host of reforms. First, he said, he would insist that every elementary school have a step-by-step reading program that stresses phonics.

Zacarias repeated his often-stated determination to end social promotion, the practice of passing students from grade to grade even when they haven’t mastered the subject matter.

Conceding that it can’t be done without intervention to help students who aren’t keeping up, Zacarias pledged to find the money for tutoring after school, on weekends and over semester breaks.

Finally, he said he has ordered an analysis of what the district gets for the $100 million to $200 million it spends, “depending on whose figure you use,” for teacher training.

Some of the subjects taught, such as school budgets and collaborative teaching, may be important, he said, but “in the meantime, we have children who can’t read. That’s where the money has to go first.”

In the 75-minute address at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Zacarias liberally promised the district’s employees, about 1,500 of whom were in attendance, that the staff at district headquarters would do more to make their work appreciated.

He said the district had improved last year in five of the seven accountability measures he set out, including lower dropout rates, higher enrollment in advanced placement classes and an increase of two percentile points on standardized scores.

Although it is statistically only a blip, the 2-point improvement is significant because it keeps pace with Zacarias’ goal of boosting scores 8 points in four years.

District officials had previously announced a disappointing single percentile point increase in the statewide STAR test taken this spring.

The figure Zacarias used Monday, however, reflected weeks of staff work to combine results of the English-only STAR test with the Aprenda test taken by the district’s Spanish-speaking students.

Despite the districtwide gain, Zacarias said, he will hold every school accountable for future improvement and will make “personnel changes” in those that don’t perform.

Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin contributed to this story.