Flaws Found in Rankings of Schools

California Department of Education officials acknowledged Tuesday that a widely reported statewide ranking that compared the academic performance of schools with similar ethnic and economic characteristics was faulty, primarily because of poor data provided by school districts.

In a letter to superintendents dated Monday, the department noted that about 400 schools have contacted state officials to request that their rankings alongside similar schools be recomputed.

In most cases, these schools underreported the percentages of low-income students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches under federal laws.

That meant that the schools were compared with schools in more affluent areas, where students tend to have higher achievement.

The similar-schools rankings were part of the state’s unprecedented Academic Performance Index, the cornerstone of the state’s $242-million campaign to make schools accountable for students’ learning.

Although only one of several components of the index is in place--and although the index confirms the already widely known fact that affluence boosts academic performance--the rankings have assumed great importance.

The Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, for example, recently noted that nearly all of the schools in its reform program outpaced their comparison schools. Annenberg officials cited these differences in API comparison rankings as evidence that their efforts are paying off.

The index, reported Jan. 25, is aimed at measuring academic performance and establishing a base for gauging future progress. For now, it is based solely on results of the Stanford 9 basic skills test, which was given last spring to most public school students. Each school was given an API score from 200 to 1,000, calculated according to a seven-step formula.

Those scores were then ranked statewide in 10 groups of more or less equal size from 1 to 10. Schools were separated by type--elementary, middle and high schools--and ranked within those categories.

A second ranking of 1 to 10 compared each school’s 1999 API score with the scores of 100 schools with similar socioeconomic traits and other factors. Many schools made much of that similar-schools ranking because they fared better against peer schools than in the overall statewide ranking.

State officials Tuesday said the letter would flush out perhaps an additional 100 schools, out of a total of 7,000 that were included in the rankings, that will request a revision.

But they indicated that the changes would not affect the overall statewide rankings or growth targets that schools received.

Many schools showed a wide divergence in their rankings. It was possible, for example, for a school to have a statewide ranking of 2 but a 10 in its group of peer schools.

Districts have until Feb. 25 to review each school’s data and to request that the similar-schools ranking be reconfigured. The new rankings for those schools will be released about mid-April, the department said. At that time, the department will also release the names of the similar schools against which each of the schools was ranked.

The problem resulted from erroneous data compiled during last spring’s Stanford 9 testing, the agency said.

“We’ve paid schools to work with Harcourt [Educational Measurement, the test publisher] to get more accurate data,” said Paul Warren, the state’s deputy superintendent for accountability. In the future, he added, “schools would be on the hook for cleaning it up. The API will have reinforced the importance of that.”

State officials, at the request of Los Angeles Unified School District, also will compute API rankings for seven high-profile district schools that had been omitted because they are classified as “alternative” schools. The schools, including Palisades Charter High School and Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, were classified as alternative schools but operate as traditional schools.