School Officials Distressed After Stanford 9 Testing

Eagle Rock Elementary School tried several known brain-enhancers--exercise, Mozart, healthful breakfast fare--but even some of its brightest lights struggled through parts of the Stanford 9 achievement test over the last two weeks of April.

“There were some questions that were just whoppers,” said Nancy Scher, who teaches fifth- and sixth-graders in the school’s small magnet program for highly gifted students.

Go ahead--you try measuring the volume of a sphere.

At schools across the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers and principals have been assessing the assessment test, based on their own observations and the reactions of students. The consensus: Big chunks of the test were out of sync with the curriculum. The math was surprisingly hard. The vocabulary was daunting. The history portions tested knowledge of centuries that weren’t even part of the year’s studies.

Many teachers and principals interviewed at several schools, including highly achieving magnet programs, came away from the experience hoping for the best but bracing for disappointment. The results will be in June 30, when Stanford 9 scores become a very public report card for the area’s schools and, by extension, the individuals who work in them.

Teachers indicated that they were especially distressed by a new feature of the Stanford 9: 70 additional questions, on top of the 380 core questions, designed by the Stanford 9 publisher to test California students’ grasp of the state’s rigorous new standards for reading and math. In Los Angeles Unified, students in grades one through 11 take the Stanford 9.

Confusion reigns as to how much weight scores on this “augmentation” portion will carry. Before the district comes down with a collective case of heartburn, the California Department of Education has some soothing words.

“I think we have to be very careful to remember that the [reading and math] standards haven’t even been distributed to teachers,” said Leslie Fausset, California’s chief deputy superintendent over curriculum. “The frameworks [for how to teach the new standards] will be published next year.”

Even though the standards, adopted in late 1997, haven’t yet made it to the classroom, the tougher questions were included to establish a baseline for future measurements.

The augmentation portion will be scored separately and will not be expressed as a percentile, as is the student’s score on the regular Stanford 9, said Ina Roth, director of student testing and evaluation for L.A. Unified. Nor will it be blended with the main score, which will be used to rank schools and assess, among other things, a student’s readiness for advancement.

However, the augmentation scores can offer some perspective for educators and parents, and Harcourt Educational Measurement, the test publisher, plans to provide a district average for the augmentation at each grade level.

Down the road, the augmentation scores could come into play as the state seeks to hold administrators, teachers and students accountable for academic performance, according to Doug Stone, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. And in L.A. Unified, officials said those scores next year will be one factor in determining whether a student should be promoted to the next grade.

From Venice to Granada Hills, many teachers bemoaned the difficulty of the Stanford 9 and, particularly, the augmentation. At Venice High School, history teacher Doreen Seelig said the 11th-grade test asked several questions about aspects of government and economics that won’t be taught until 12th grade.

At Foshay Learning Center, Assistant Principal Cynthia Augustine picked up the opinion from teachers that “there’s a total mismatch.” Seventh-grade students study biology, yet that level’s test dealt with physical science, she said. On a positive note, teachers said pupils in the school, which runs from kindergarten through 12th grade, appeared to handle the math portion with aplomb.

Despite months of test preparation at 118th Street School, the format and vocabulary were “intimidating and unfamiliar” for the elementary-level students, said Principal Robert M. Caplan. Still, he said he expects overall scores to be higher than last year’s.

The length of the test--at least an hour daily for nine days--”wore on” elementary students at 122nd Street School, said Jorge Briseno, testing coordinator. “By the end, the quality of their work was deteriorating. Their marks ran over the [multiple choice] bubbles.”

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Education writer Doug Smith contributed to this story.