Lack of Oversight Blamed for Stanford 9 Test Snafu

The simple error in judgment that caused the state to delay the release of much-anticipated testing data this week could have been caught, officials now say, had they been able to devote as little as an hour to monitoring the work of the private contractor before the testing began.

But the fact is that no state officials are in a position to oversee the $34-million academic testing program, the results of which will be a key factor in determining whether schools are labeled winners or losers by a new accountability system.

The reasons are complex. They include ongoing friction between the State Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor, and the Department of Education, which is headed by an elected official.

Contributing to the troubled relationship are the department’s dislike of such exams and the board’s distrust of the department over handling of the last testing program, which was killed in 1994.

Whatever the causes, the result is that massive problems this year and last year related to the reporting of students’ scores by Harcourt Educational Measurement have undermined the usefulness of the largest state testing program in the nation.

This year the company inadvertently misclassified about 250,000 students as still learning English even though they already were fluent. That affected the accuracy of the group scores reported by school districts and caused the state to decide Wednesday to withhold school, district and county data until mid-July, when the problem is expected to be fixed.

Last year, a coding snafu meant the state was unable to analyze student performance by income level, gender or ethnicity. This spring, there were additional problems with getting test materials to about 100 school districts on time.

The company now takes direction from the State Board of Education, the state Department of Education, the Legislature and the Davis administration. It also cuts deals with the state’s 1,000 school districts, each of which now has a separate contract with Harcourt.

But no one is responsible when things go wrong.

State legislators and education officials worry that the lack of oversight of the Stanford 9 could affect the even more ambitious testing efforts called for in state law. In addition to the basic skills test taken by 4.2 million students in grades two through 11, the state is planning at least five other tests, including a graduation test.

But state education officials have been rebuffed when they have argued in legislative hearings that they should be given the resources to monitor the Stanford 9 program.

“The answer we’ve been given is that the department doesn’t have any responsibility in this because the publisher is running the program,” said Gerry Shelton, a top testing official in the state Department of Education.

Shelton said the department has only two people working part time on the testing program. They are responsible for making sure scores are posted on time and that school districts are reimbursed for their costs. To properly monitor the program’s quality, he said, would require about seven full-time positions at a cost of about $800,000.

“This specific problem could have been prevented with an hour of time from one of my staff members,” Shelton said.

Instead, it was discovered only when two school districts became suspicious of their results and alerted the department, which then contacted Harcourt.

State Sen. Dede Alpert (D-San Diego) is sponsoring a bill that would put the department in charge of monitoring testing, the arrangement in most states. Her bill, which is stalled but could gain momentum from this week’s problems, would place the testing program under a single contract with Harcourt--the San Antonio-based publisher--to be overseen by the department.

“We have a Department of Education that has professional people, and they are the ones who should be doing the job,” Alpert said.

The department also would gain the power to withhold payments from Harcourt if the company did not perform adequately. Currently, the only leverage the state has is the power to withhold a $2.27-million performance bond posted with the state board by the company. (State officials earlier had said that bond was worth $1.2 million.)

“The department is basically eliminated from the overall quality control process,” said Doug Stone, a department spokesman.

But the state board is opposed to Alpert’s bill. Board members note that Shelton as well as state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, his boss, have widely criticized parts of the current testing program.

In a recent interview, Eastin herself proposed replacing the current Stanford 9 test with a shorter version.

In an interview Thursday, state board President Robert Trigg said that, under California law, the board is responsible for the test.

He said the board relies on the department and Eastin to handle day-to-day issues. Even so, testing issues dominate the state board’s monthly agenda, taking up at least half a day each meeting. At one recent meeting, the board discussed such minute details as how test booklets ought to be packaged to send out to schools.

But Trigg said that, in light of the recent problems, he will propose requiring Harcourt to pay for an independent auditor to monitor the company’s performance. He said he is opposed to creating “an enormous bureaucracy within the department” and would prefer to rely directly on the company.

“They should know their business, and we certainly are dependent on them,” he said. Also, he said, the state’s less-than-stellar record in administering past tests make him dubious about giving the Education Department greater responsibilities.

Harcourt officials declined to comment directly on Trigg’s suggestion or Alpert’s legislation. But company President Joanne M. Lenke conceded that working in California is not easy.

“It’s clearly a challenge to keep so many different entities satisfied, but we’re doing the best we can,” she said.

On Wednesday, leaders of the California Federation of Teachers and United Teachers-Los Angeles added their voices to those of superintendents who want to end the testing program, in light of the mounting problems.

“Norm-referenced tests, by their nature, are biased in favor of people who are upper middle class,” said UTLA President Day Higuchi. “They give relative rankings that tell parents and students and teachers nothing. It would be better to scrap it entirely.”

* 9TH-GRADE DIP

Educators are baffled by a dip in reading scores between eighth grade and ninth. A3