Three O.C. Schools Stand to Miss Out on Testing Bonuses

More than 150 schools across California, including three in Orange County, have been warned that they might no longer be eligible for huge financial bonuses because not enough of their students took a standardized test last spring.

The rewards are part of the state’s new Academic Performance Index, the state’ accountability program. The index evaluates schools on how well they do on the Stanford 9, a standardized test given to all students in grades 2-11, and on how much they improve from year to year.

Schools with the biggest gains are eligible for large monetary rewards, including $25,000 for teachers of high-achieving classes.

But last week, state officials notified Commonwealth Elementary School in Fullerton, Fitz Intermediate in the Garden Grove Unified School District and the county’s charter school for home schoolers that because they had exempted more than 10% of students from the test, their API scores might be invalidated. Schools without API scores are not eligible for rewards.

The State Board of Education instituted that regulation on Oct. 11 to make sure that the API system is fair, said Doug Stone, spokesman for the California Department of Education. Otherwise, schools might be tempted to exempt students expected to perform badly, in order to bring the school’s average up, Stone said.

“The fundamental premise of the API is that the score for a particular school has to be representative of that particular school,” Stone said. “If it’s not, it could corrupt the API.”

Rick Martin, principal of the Orange County Charter School, said he was disappointed by the state’s ruling. Students at the school improved 38 points and had been eligible for rewards.

Even though more than 29% of the school’s 1,400 students did not take the test, Martin said state officials should have taken into account the fact that many children do not come to the campus every day. The school’s four campuses provide computers, teaching consultation and other resources for home schoolers and children on independent study because of illness. Getting them all together in one place for five days to take a test is quite a feat, he said.

Al Sims, who oversees testing in the Garden Grove Unified School District, said his district probably would not be appealing because Fritz Intermediate did not improve enough to qualify for rewards in the first place.

In Fullerton, Supt. Ron Cooper said that the state’s data was mistaken. Enough students at Commonwealth were tested, he said, and the district office has notified the state of the mistake. But Commonwealth was not issued an API for an additional reason: State officials noticed testing irregularities at that school indicating that cheating may have occurred in one classroom.

Cooper refused to comment on that issue.