LEARN Report Held Back From Hearing

A long-awaited report on the progress of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s largest reform program--LEARN--was hastily buried last week, just eight days before the superintendent was to give his state-of-the-district speech.

The official reason for pulling the report from the agenda of a school board committee was that questions lingered about whether it exaggerated the importance of relatively small improvements shown by LEARN schools as compared to those not participating in the program, begun in 1993.

Unofficially, however, some sources suggested that it was held back and sent back to district staff for further review because the district did not want the report’s tepid conclusions to undercut the message of optimism delivered Thursday by Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

A copy of the study, which was obtained by The Times, indicates uneven improvement at LEARN schools in the past five years.

About 40% of the 860 schools and student centers in the district have joined LEARN, which stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now. When the program began, 100% of the campuses were to have joined by this year; that goal ended Thursday with Zacarias’ declaration that all schools would adopt some of the reform tenets whether they formally become LEARN schools or not.

According to the report by the Evaluation and Training Institute, the 344 LEARN schools as a group have fared slightly better overall for English-speaking students than schools not in the program. But Spanish speakers have not fully shared in that improvement.

Between 1992-93 and 1995-96, LEARN schools logged greater test score improvement in reading and language sections of the English-language Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. On the math section, however, LEARN schools did no better than other schools.

On the Aprenda tests, which students take in Spanish, scores in reading increased only slightly, while scores in math declined and no progress was found in reading over non-LEARN schools.

That disappointing showing is surprising because LEARN schools tend to have fewer limited-English students who require special language services.

“The district needs to take a look at that--it’s their responsibility,” said Rosalinda Lugo, an educator and member of the LEARN Working Group. “All of us involved in school reform want to see student achievement improve. If that’s not happening for one specific group, it’s all worth nothing.”

As a group, LEARN schools do score higher than non-LEARN schools. On last year’s new Stanford 9 test, for instance, the first group of 145 reform schools, which have been in the program since it began in the 1993-94 school year, scored at the 36th percentile in elementary school reading, compared to 27th percentile for non-LEARN schools.

But LEARN schools also have more affluent students--who tend to fare better on standardized tests.

A separate district evaluation completed recently found that while 73% of the students in the initial 145 LEARN schools are eligible for government-subsidized lunches, the district average was closer to 84%.

The author of that district evaluation, independent analysis unit director Roger Rasmussen, is among those reportedly questioning the validity of the Evaluation and Training Institute study. Using a statistical model that accounted for student poverty, Rasmussen found that LEARN had no significant impact on test scores at the elementary or high school level. At the middle-school level, however, Rasmussen found some correlation between LEARN and better test scores.