L.A. Board Members Schooled on Education Reform in Texas

Three Los Angeles Board of Education members traveled across Texas recently to gather impressions of the statewide school reform program considered among the nation’s most effective.

The first lesson they learned was one of humility, according to board member Jeff Horton.

“In Los Angeles we’re so arrogant about ourselves, we think if it didn’t happen here first it can’t be worth much,” Horton said.

As the Los Angeles Unified School District focuses on improving accountability this year, it may have a lot to learn from the smaller, but in many ways similar, school districts in Texas.

Horton and board President Victoria Castro, who recapped their four-day trip for The Times, said they came home with a clear understanding that the district gets too little educational mileage from its test scores.

“They’re published in the paper. So what?” Horton said. “Everybody goes home for the summer. We don’t use the data for anything. It’s used to beat up on the school. But it isn’t used to drive anything in the system.”

Texas, in contrast, has a statewide system of student testing that measures each district, school, classroom and student against the whole state.

Teachers know their students’ strengths and weaknesses--at the beginning of each semester--and principals can pinpoint subjects or skills that a teacher is not getting across in the classroom.

Students who transfer from one part of the state to another don’t get lost in the system because their test scores are geared to a statewide identification number.

Teacher union officials in California have expressed skepticism about the use of test scores to evaluate classroom performance. But Horton and Castro said union leaders in Texas told them that teachers there are on board because they have an objective standard--and don’t have to worry about their careers depending on a principal’s personality or whim.

The key to success is focusing on evaluation rather than reward and punishment, both board members said.

“What we got clearly was that principals get extensive staff development to understand this data,” Castro said. “Any new principal that comes through is trained in that.”

Similarly, teachers can get training that is aligned to their needs, Castro said. “The tests assist teachers to be better able to teach,” she said.

The school board authorized the $17,000 trip as part of an initiative to establish accountability standards that will hold all district employees to the improvement of student performance.

An accountability task force of educators, business leaders and parents is scheduled to report to Supt. Ruben Zacarias in September on its search for the most effective measures in use in America.

Horton and Castro said their impressions from the trip will help them assess the task force findings.

Future trips are contemplated to other urban school districts, such as Chicago’s.

Texas was chosen for the first trip because of its success in improving the performance of students in districts that are demographically similar to the 681,000-student Los Angeles district.

Horton and Castro came home convinced that socioeconomic factors, which are known to play a large role in how well students perform, can be overcome with enlightened accountability.

The Texas system classifies test scores at each school by ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic level. Schools are awarded one of four ratings, from low performing to exemplary based on the scores of the lowest group.

The schools thus are forced to pay attention to their poor and minority students, traditionally low performers.

The two board members conceded that their observations were cursory and that they came home without answers to some questions, such as how well Texas students are doing in comparison to the rest of the nation.

Unlike the norm-referenced tests used in California, which rank each student against a national sample group, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills was designed to measure how well students have mastered the statewide curriculum.

Since the accountability system was instituted in 1993, the percentage of students passing the test has gone up each year, according to a report in Education Week.

Three-fourths of the low performing schools improved their ranking and the number of exemplary schools increased thirtyfold, from 22 to 680, the report said.

Parts of the Texas plan, such as statewide standards testing, could only be adopted by the Legislature.

But the two board members said they saw plenty that could be appropriated just by doing it.

“Even with what we have, there is a lot more we can do,” Horton said.