Oxnard District Reports Scoring Error

Statewide achievement test scores in the Oxnard Elementary School District may be higher than reported last week because of another scoring error, school officials announced Wednesday.

The discovery comes one week after a San Antonio-based publisher admitted misclassifying about 300,000 students statewide as not fluent in English, which officials say probably inflated those districts’ scores.

Oxnard, which is a year-round school district, realized a mistake in its Stanford 9 scores after reading an article in The Times about a year-round district in Long Beach where the results were probably scored incorrectly.

Harcourt Educational Measurement officials say that the scoring problem apparently resulted from not using the correct norm, or average, for the districts.

The national norm, based on a representative sampling of students across the country, was supposed to have been lowered for year-round districts, because the test was given when those students had been in school fewer days than students in traditional schools.

But the norm was probably not adjusted for either year-round district, possibly lowering the scores, according to Ed Slawski, a senior research scientist for Harcourt.

Slawski said Oxnard and Long Beach are the only two California districts that have reported this concern.