State Begins Review of Missing School Results

The state Department of Education began a review Thursday of what to do about seven Los Angeles schools, including Palisades Charter High School, that were left off the statewide Academic Performance Index in an apparent mix-up over their classification as “alternative” schools.

A state official said it may be two weeks before the department decides whether to grant the request of the Los Angeles Unified School District to include the schools in the new accountability system.

“We don’t want to move too quickly and screw something else up,” said Paul Warren, deputy superintendent for accountability.

Principals at several of the schools said they have been besieged by calls from parents who were disappointed not to find their rankings in the newspaper or on the state Web site.

“We’re anxious to know what our ranking is,” said Donald Savarese, principal of Palisades. “We have calls from parents. We have teachers who are interested. I want to know. I don’t know why we were left off the list.”

“We’ve been inundated with phone calls,” said Madeline Nava, administrative assistant at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. “Two every three minutes. Crazy.”

At least two schools outside Los Angeles called the state with the same complaint, but officials at the Education Department said they do not yet know the scale of the problem statewide.

The confusion stems from the law that created the Academic Performance Index. It provided that several categories of schools would not be given scores, including schools with fewer than 100 students, those run by a county board of education and “alternative schools, including continuation high schools and independent study schools.”

The law requires the department to create a separate accountability system for those schools by July 1.

Pat McCabe, an administrator in the California Department of Education Office of Policy and Evaluation, said the seven Los Angeles schools were left out because they identified themselves as “alternative” in annual reports filed with the state.

Four of the schools have the word “alternative” in their titles, a vestige of their origin in the movement of the 1960s and 1970s to design instructional programs with open walls, flexible schedules and casual academics.

Over the years, however, they have moved back into the mainstream.

Forrest Baird, principal of the Arroyo Seco Alternative School, for example, said the school council recently voted to reinstitute bell schedules and require students to use teachers’ last names, wiping out the last remnants of the school’s “alternative” practices.

Two other schools, the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies and the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, also are built around innovative practices such as time blocks to give students extended exposure to some topics.

The seventh school, Palisades, is a charter school, but not different in any significant way from the roughly two dozen other charters that received state rankings, including the middle school and several elementary schools that feed students to Palisades.

Before deciding whether to include the schools in the accountability system, Warren said, the department of education must determine what the designation “alternative” means and whether the schools derived any financial benefits from having that status.

It is possible, he said, that the exemption in the state law was intended only for schools that have special students who are unable to function in regular schools. If so, some clarification of the law may be required, he said.