Plan Eased 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. “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.

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.

In Orange County, most school districts have rushed to provide tutoring, after-school services and otherwise intervene to keep students from being kept back.

Saddleback Valley Unified School District has a remedial tutoring program for students in danger of failing, and Orange Unified, which began retaining failing middle-school students two years ago, expanded its retention policy to include the entire district this year, in anticipation of the state law.

Buena Park’s policy, however, will be tailored to suit the needs of its multilingual school population. About half the district’s students are not fluent in English, and they will be measured more by rates of improvement than on a predetermined level of skills.

Officials at Capistrano Unified School District say they plan to use a variety of measures to determine whether to retain a student.

Students’ scores on the district’s tailor-made standardized test, plus grades and classroom tests all will be considered, said Susan McGill, executive director of elementary instruction for Capistrano Unified.

“It’s too early to tell how many students we’re going to have to keep back--we do know we have students we’re working with on intervention plans and we’re hopeful that those [plans] are going to be successful,” McGill said.

“I don’t know the specifics of what Los Angeles is doing, but we intend to follow the state law,” McGill said.

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 bypasses standardized tests in determining which students will pass.

Times staff writer Lisa Richardson contributed to this report.