L.A. Schools Ease Plan for Stricter Pupil Promotion

Senior Los Angeles school officials said they have further scaled back once ambitious plans to end social promotion this year by declaring that English will be the only subject considered, and only students with an F will be held back.

New guidelines that will allow students with a D to pass and that will disregard grades in math and other subjects could mean that as few as 4,000 eighth-graders and 6,000 second-graders, roughly a 10th of those classes, would be in danger of being held back, officials said Tuesday, based on a sampling of schools.

But interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who has approved the changes, reacted angrily Wednesday to those estimates, saying they will prove much too low. “I just don’t know how you pick numbers out of the air,” Cortines said. “I am going to have to deal with the staff on this.”

After learning of Cortines’ reaction, the staff members who released the projections retracted them, saying the numbers could be substantially off. They declined to say whether they thought the estimates might be high or low.

At one point last year, Los Angeles Unified School District officials estimated that half of the system’s 711,000 students were not performing at grade level and could be forced to repeat a grade.

Faced with that grim possibility and under pressure from the teachers union, Cortines accepted a lower standard for promotion. The union had argued that its members were not trained well enough to handle difficult, emotional decisions on who would pass and who would fail.

“The teachers have to be trained in how we do this. We’re changing the way we do business,” said Becki Robinson, United Teachers-Los Angeles elementary school vice president.

Setting the Standards

As the movement to end social promotion takes hold across California and the country, school districts are struggling to define the standards that will determine whether a student passes or fails. If judged by standardized test scores alone, half the students in the Los Angeles school district risked retention.

Soon after Cortines came on board in November as a special advisor to former Supt. Ruben Zacarias, he concluded that the district could not absorb the disruption of such large-scale retention.

Cortines and Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller scaled back Zacarias’ plan to only two grades, two and eight.

Even on that limited basis, however, tens of thousands of students could have been judged to lack proficiency based on their performance on the Stanford 9 test taken by most California public school students each spring.

The new plan devised by the instructional staff only requires teachers to consider last year’s test scores in helping determine a student’s grade and in helping decide whether the student requires tutoring or other special services.

Carmen Schroeder, assistant superintendent for instruction, said that decision was made largely because the results from this spring’s test will not be available until after the deadline for deciding who will be held back, or retained.

Notices will be sent home next month informing parents of failing students that they can still advance with their classmates by passing a writing test this spring, raising their English grades to Ds in June or graduating from summer intervention classes.

The writing test, designed by UCLA’s Center for Research in Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, gives failing students a second chance. To be held back, a student must receive the lowest possible grade on the test as well as an F in eighth-grade English, or a 1 in second-grade reading, said Robert A. Barner, assistant superintendent for student intervention programs.

He said the goal was to eliminate any ambiguity as to who is failing.

“We are not saying all the youngsters who are moving on are proficient,” Barner said. “For sure, all those being retained are not proficient.”

The new plan expands gradually over four years.

Next year, the current standard would be extended to grades three four and five. The third year, a D or better in math would be required in grades four, five and eight. The final year the bar would be raised to require a grade of C or better in eighth grade and 3 or better in the elementary grades.

At-Risk Schools

Despite the drastically reduced numbers, the retention policy could still have significant impacts on some schools, said Barner.

Barner said there are 15 middle schools with 100 or more students at risk.

At Dana Middle School in San Pedro, Principal Linda Lade said, “I find the entire matter of ending social promotion very unsettling because there are so many unanswered questions.”

District officials have preliminarily identified about 180 at-risk eighth-graders at the 1,800-student campus. But Lade said the school is already so overcrowded that making room for even 50 students who are held back would be extremely burdensome.

“The district has provided us with a small amount of money for tutoring, about $35,000,” she said.

School board member Mike Lansing, who runs a boys and girls club just down the street from Dana, sympathized.

“Across the board, everybody’s going to end up short on this,” he said. “We’ve budgeted $70 million to end social promotion. My feeling is we’ll need a lot more than that.”

At the boys and girls club, the prospect of ending social promotion was causing some nervous chatter among eighth-graders.

“At first, I was real scared ‘cause the district said we had to pass math and English--I’m bad in math but good in English,” said Samantha Tonsfeldt, 13. “I’m not too worried now, though, because they changed all that and now we only need to pass English.”

But Tonsfeldt has a friend who has the opposite skills.

“She’s been poring over her English book,” Tonsfeldt said. “Her worst fear is having to stay another year at Dana all by herself.”

Eyana Nichols, 13, said, “I think the message will hit seventh-graders harder than eighth-graders, ‘cause they’ll see what’s going on and know that they are next.

“For those who fail, parents will be ashamed of them, and their friends will be uncomfortable around them,” Nichols said. “Most kids don’t care what their parents think, but their friends would drop them, and that would be humiliating and degrading.”