Little Training, Poor Oversight

Gathered together in their Sacramento office not long ago, the top three California education officials who track school performance were asked this question: Are students doing better or worse these days?

Their answer: a collective shrug.

“That’s not our responsibility,” one said.

The problem is, it’s no one’s responsibility.

California spends $36 billion--more than the entire budgets of many states--on education. But in handing out those dollars, the state has never paid that much attention to whether it was getting its money’s worth.

Sure, there were test scores. Between 1961 and 1991, California had the longest-running statewide testing program in the nation. But except for the discomfort they caused for low-scoring districts, the scores hardly mattered, certainly not to teachers. The state flirted with paying schools for improving their scores, but that experiment--and eventually the testing--disappeared amid political squabbling in 1990.

In the absence of any real measures for accountability, the state has been flying blind for most of this decade. That is a prime reason California’s abysmal showing in 1994 on federal tests of reading--tied for last with Louisiana--came as such a shock.

That sort of surprise could not have occurred in many other states. In Texas, test scores anchor what has become one of the nation’s strongest statewide systems for holding schools accountable.

Texas is California’s cousin in the composition of its students--with similar percentages of poor and Latino youths. Yet in Texas, students from all backgrounds--poor, African American, white, Latino, children of dropouts and college graduates--perform better than their counterparts in California. Texas officials credit accountability--measuring school performance with each group and requiring progress--with making much of the difference.

School Improvement Program

In California, state officials have tied up school districts in paperwork on dozens of specific programs--each with its own requirements, constituents and bureaucracies. But the state has never linked all that to student performance.

Take, for example, the grandfather of all such programs--the optimistically named School Improvement Program.

Begun in 1972, the program sent extra funds directly to schools, no strings attached, to pursue their own ideas for how to improve. For its time, it was innovative because it required schools to give parents some say-so in how to spend the money.

What the schools weren’t required to do was show results.

A quarter-century later, although the program technically no longer exists, the money--now a $400 million-a-year river paying for everything from copying machines to landscaping--continues to pour out, no questions asked.

Or take class-size reduction, one of the most expensive state education initiatives in U.S. history. Although the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson agreed in 1995 to spend $1 billion on it the first year, legislators wouldn’t shell out an additional $100,000 to see if the effort was actually improving student learning.

And so it goes--one grand gesture piled atop another and no way of knowing which ones are working and which ones aren’t.

Children can’t read? Bring on “whole language.” Or Ebonics. Or a tutoring program from New Zealand.

“California has gone through 40 different versions of reform over the past 20 years and . . . one would hope we’d know more about which particular types of programs or interventions are the most cost-effective, and we really don’t,” said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley associate professor of education.

“There’s almost been an anti-evaluation mentality,” he said, noting that conservatives and liberals, for different reasons, each object to spending money on keeping track of what works.

Now, however, that mentality is under siege. Across America, public education is being subjected to scrutiny of its bottom line, heralding what some refer to as the Age of Accountability.

States such as Kentucky and South Carolina have cast themselves in the role of enforcer, handing out rewards and punishments. In Arkansas, schools deemed to be underachievers can be forced to merge with more successful ones nearby.

Gauging Students’ Abilities

Texas’ program is the most thorough, yielding data so specific that it’s easy to compare from school to school or even classroom to classroom how well, for example, Latino fourth-graders are learning their fractions.

Schools in Texas can reap financial rewards for gains in scores on the three-day Assessment of Academic Skills tests, a reduction in the dropout rate or higher student attendance.

The tests, administered in third through eighth grade and again in 10th grade, measure students against state standards for reading, writing and math. On the basis of the tests and dropout rates, each school receives a public rating--exemplary, recognized, acceptable or low performing.

This spring, California students, for the first time since the 1960s, began taking statewide, standardized tests. But those tests, whose results will be released in June, will measure students against national averages rather than against state educational standards that specify what they are supposed to learn in, say, ninth-grade math or fourth-grade reading.

A poor performance in Texas can bring on state-appointed managers to oversee districts or--in the worst case--the dismissal of members of the faculty.

Most important, however, the data doesn’t wind up gathering dust in the principal’s office. Instead, it is used for planning how to get better--a process taken for granted in business, but rare in public education.

At Bel Air High School in El Paso, Assistant Principal Susan Gonzalez, the school’s self-described “data queen,” steeps herself in computer printouts.

The printouts show how each of the school’s 2,000 students--90% of whom are Latino and 70% poor--scored last fall on a mock version of the crucial test. She can see how they did on the six objectives in reading, seven in writing and 13 in math--and she can look for patterns.

Gonzalez also keeps close track of grades. The combination of grades and test scores allows her to monitor the performance of teachers.

That sort of data helped Gonzalez counsel an algebra teacher to rely less on group work and more on formal lessons. And she informed English teacher Joe Beaumarchais that his 10th-graders were weak in combining sentences.

Like other teachers at Bel Air, Beaumarchais spends about three minutes of each class period having students brush up on a skill they will be tested on.

Surprisingly, most of the teachers at Bel Air don’t seem to chafe under such close monitoring. In the bad old days of just three years ago, Beaumarchais said, Bel Air was a freewheeling place where no one paid much attention to attendance, let alone learning.

“Teachers were teaching the same thing for years,” he said. “Staff development was a joke.”

Then, the superintendent of the Ysleta Independent School District, which includes Bel Air, held a dramatic news conference in which he accused the school of “educational malpractice.”

Soon after, the school got a new administration. Every teacher was required to reapply for his or her job, and half the faculty was either not rehired or decided voluntarily to leave. Texas officials call that process reconstitution.

“It was extremely difficult. Many teachers had been here over 15 years,” Beaumarchais said. “But, in the long run, it was the right thing. . . . Our scores since reconstitution have shown that.”

To be sure, Texas’ system is far from perfect. Latinos and blacks have long complained of discrimination in the state. Last year, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit charging that the new state tests have driven many Latino and African American students to simply drop out because they cannot pass and therefore won’t graduate.

But it’s hard to argue with Texas’ national rankings on student achievement.

In the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress in math, Texas fourth-graders finished in the top 10, along with Maine, North Dakota and Connecticut. California was in the bottom 10--ahead of only Louisiana and Mississippi.

Texas spends about $300 per pupil more than California, but “what explains why Texas is improving and California isn’t--and why Texas is narrowing the gap between minorities and whites and California isn’t--is very much its accountability system,” said Kati Hay cock, head of the Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that tracks minority achievement in schools.

“In California, mediocre or poor results are always blamed on the demographics. In Texas, that doesn’t happen.” Texas requires schools to show improvement for all groups of students. Demographic challenges are “not allowed to be an excuse,” she said.

Question of Accountability

Understandably, many California educators have trooped to Texas in the last year to see what they could learn. And, a bill is moving through the Legislature that would institute some of the same policies here.

But many remain skeptical of the state operating such a system. In California, authority is centralized in Sacramento, but accountability is diffused among several elected officials and agencies, none of which can easily be held responsible for school performance.

In Texas, local districts are held accountable, but they also have the power to raise money with local tax increases and have broad discretion as to how they meet the state’s standards.

In California virtually all education money comes out of Sacramento--except for local bonds to build or repair school buildings--and bureaucrats track it to the penny. But because the state is so vast--and its political structure so diffuse--officials have never figured out a way to ensure that the money buys student performance.

Take the state math standards adopted in December. The standards were widely praised by mathematics professors, teachers unions and conservative think tanks for their rigor and balance. Yet state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin continues to campaign against them. And Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias told his staff to ignore them--although students will soon be tested on them. Eastin and Zacarias both say the standards wrongly emphasize calculating at the expense of mathematical understanding.

Ultimately, many believe, it will take not just legislation but a cultural shift before California public schools embrace accountability.

That shift may be starting. Witness what occurred in November, when the schools receiving money through the $105-million Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project gathered to issue a progress report. The elementary and middle schools associated with Lincoln High School in northeast Los Angeles had their students, all wearing red T-shirts, perform a quasi-musical to “express the excitement of coming together” as partners, said teacher team leader Edward De Brava.

But the schools presented no test score data at all. “It was generalities. It wasn’t specifics,” he said. Those doling out the money objected. School officials now “know we need to get focused on results,” De Brava said. “We know it is coming.”

Starting June 30, the state will release test scores on everything from second-grade reading to 11th-grade social studies for every school in the state. The data will be posted on the Internet. Educators worry that the results will be poor. But California will know if its students are doing better or worse.