50% of Pupils Not Ready to Pass, L.A. District Says

If the Los Angeles Unified School District were to completely stop promoting students who are not ready to move up a grade, roughly 50%--or about 350,000 students--would be held back, top district administrators said Tuesday.

More than two-thirds of eighth-graders would be flunked if social promotions were fully ended, according to the administrators, who based their figures on a recent analysis by the district’s staff, which examined standardized test results and trends in district grades.

The depth of the problem, which is far greater than city educators had believed, is one of the prime reasons that the district’s new leadership has scaled back ambitious $72-million plans to end social promotion in all grades this year.

“These numbers are heartbreaking, their scope is huge, and they show what tremendous reform is and has been necessary,” board member Caprice Young said.

“Behind those numbers is the tremendous shortage of qualified teachers and administrators available to deal with the severe problems our children are facing academically,” she said.

Direct comparisons with other large urban districts are difficult because each state has different standards for student achievement.

Because Los Angeles is trying to end social promotion before a state deadline of 2001, administrators there have more statistics than do their counterparts in Orange County on the number of students likely to be held back next fall.

In preparation for the 2000-01 school year, though, some Orange County districts are urging more students to enroll in summer school. Some, such as Garden Grove, have flagged students who are at risk of being held back if their performance does not improve in the next several months.

The parents of 4,700 Garden Grove students in grades 2 through 8, for example, have been notified that their children are not meeting expectations, based on their performance on the standardized Stanford 9 test. The students will be offered a variety of intervention programs, from intensive tutoring to performance contracts, district spokesman Alan Trudell said.

“The promotion-and-retention law that is triggering all of this, we don’t view it as a punitive measure but as a positive way to help students who are struggling in school,” Trudell said. Retaining, or holding back, a student “is considered the last intervention when all other strategies . . . have been unsuccessful,” he said.

Another district, hoping to catch students before they fall further behind, expanded summer-school offerings and focused more intensely on reading this year. About 2,500 elementary students in South County’s Capistrano Unified district were referred to summer school; those who are still lagging are being offered more help.

But the projected failure rates for Los Angeles public schools appear to be among the highest in the country’s major urban systems. Roughly 54% of the district’s 711,000 students are not yet fluent in English--a major problem in meeting state education standards.

Instead of ending social promotion across the board, district officials said Tuesday that at the end of this school year, they would end the practice only in second and eighth grades, phasing in the other grades over a four-year period.

The second and eighth grades were selected for the first year’s implementation because of the need to provide assistance as early as possible and to ensure a successful transition to high school, said Ramon Cortines, who has been chosen by the school board to become interim superintendent next month. Cortines is currently serving as an advisor to Supt. Ruben Zacarias.

How to handle promotions is one of the main decisions that will confront whoever becomes the next permanent superintendent.

On Tuesday the district took preliminary steps toward searching for a candidate, working against a deadline of June, which is when Cortines plans to step down.

This week, the board is expected to appoint a 14-member citizens committee to help guide the search for a replacement for Zacarias, whose contract the board decided to buy out last month.

The committee, which will include parents, teachers, administrators and political and community leaders, will help the board determine its criteria and, board members hope, steer clear of the kind of ethnic political power struggle that marked Zacarias’ forced departure after two years on the job.

The panel is to report to the board by Jan. 17.

“Everything the new superintendent does should focus on the success of children,” Cortines said, adding that although the statistics are distressing they provide a starting point from which to proceed.

“The good news is that the district has made gains of two percentile points each year for the past two years” on standardized test scores, he added. “But the reality is that we’re still at the bottom of the barrel. But we have to be honest about it. How can you go up if you don’t know where you are? Is it doable? Hell yes. Will it happen overnight? No.”

In searching for a permanent superintendent, said school board President Genethia Hayes, “clearly, we should be looking for someone who has a proven track record of dealing with these kinds of long-standing, intractable issues of closing the student achievement gap.”

The district’s new chief operating officer, Howard Miller, added that “the projected retention rates are the real story of LAUSD--not Belmont or facilities or finance; but the fundamental failure of its core mission, the instructional program.”

A senior official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the low ratings will weigh heavily in bargaining negotiations with nine unions set to begin after the new year.

“The real impact of these numbers will be in collective bargaining,” the official said. “No one is going to believe the district has changed until teachers accept in the collective bargaining agreement individual accountability for the success of their students.

“Management we can fix, finances we can cure, facilities we can build,” the official said. “But we have to bring accountability into the classroom level to change the failure of the system.”

Day Higuchi, president of the 40,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles union, which is seeking a 6% salary increase this year, countered that “they can bring these numbers up, but if they are not offering us the money to attract quality teachers, who isn’t being accountable?” The district has 9,000 teachers who have only emergency credentials; about half its students are not fluent in English and a majority are poor enough to be eligible for free lunches.

Separately, as district administrators scramble to spell out precisely the steps they will take to help low-achieving children once they have been identified, board members have begun taking a hard look at “sacred cow” programs and whether they merit continued funds.

Projects that have come under scrutiny include the district’s “urban teacher program,” its intergroup relations branch, even the $5,000-a-year stipends received by bilingual teachers.

“When we are facing a crisis of this proportion everything has to be on the table; there can be no sacred cows,” Young said.

“The district has for years layered one special-interest program on top of another,” she added. “But part of the reason they all exist is that no one has been looking at the underlying causes of problems we’ve been addressing with Band-Aids for so many years.”

Said Hayes: “The priority has got to be to redirect resources and strategies toward those children who are most in need of them, those children who have always been on the bottom academically. That means tough decisions will have to be made when it comes to directing resources and capital.”

Times staff writer Kate Folmar contributed to this report.