Test Scores Spur Removal of 2 Principals

Two Santa Ana principals have been reassigned after their schools turned in poor test scores, a foreshadowing of what could happen statewide next year to the leaders of low-performing schools.

The reassignments already have prompted cries of unfairness in linking standardized test scores so closely with the fate of educators.

“The policy does not assist or support schools,” said Jan Boukather, who stepped down as principal of Hoover Elementary School in February, days after the Santa Ana school underwent an on-site evaluation that she considers unfair. “Instead of supporting an administrator or a staff, what that policy does is set in place a feeling of a punitive action.”

As part of California’s massive push toward accountability, the state’s Stanford 9 standardized test is, for now, the only measurement used to rank school performance. Schools whose students score low and fail to show year-to-year improvement can be taken over by the state and their principals and teachers reassigned. The first of those reassignments could occur at the end of this next school year, as the program enters its third year.

But the Santa Ana Unified School District pushed forward with its own program years ahead of the state--in fact, before the state started using the Stanford 9 test. Since the statewide testing started, though, the district has used its scores as benchmark measurements of school performance and added the possibility of restructuring schools that failed to improve their scores, said Associate Supt. Donald Stabler.

District scores are traditionally low, with 70% of the students scoring below the mean in mathematics and more than 80% scoring low in language arts.

Under the district’s program, if a school fails to show appropriate improvement, a team of evaluators will conduct an on-site review. Based on the results of that review, any or all staff members could be reassigned.

DeVera Heard was removed from Wilson Elementary School in late June after eight years as principal. She has been reassigned as principal of Community Day High School, one of the district’s alternative schools. (Boukather, who asked to return to the classroom, will begin teaching first grade at Harvey Elementary School later this month.)

“It’s punitive,” Heard said. “I don’t think it’s designed to be other than that.”

Nobody argues that educators need to be held accountable for what they do, she said. “However, you want to make sure you follow due process. If there’s a problem, tell me there’s a problem and give me suggestions to correct it.”

The Stanford 9 scores at both affected schools were among the lowest in Santa Ana, a district where most students live in poverty, are learning English and face other challenges that impact their education.

District Supt. Al Mijares said the district was not attempting to be “condemnatory or unfair” in reassigning the two principals.

“Our effort here was to say that there is nothing more important than student achievement,” he said. “And if it appeared as though a school was stuck, it became important for us to have the conviction to change that.”

The dissent in Santa Ana could foreshadow similar complaints when a program for low-performing schools reaches the point of potentially reassigning staff at the end of the coming school year.

In the state’s Immediate Intervention Under-Performing School Program, schools that are ranked below average on the Academic Performance Index can apply for extra funding to help bring up scores.

But with that money come heavy responsibilities. If schools that receive funding do not show the expected improvement in the next year’s index, the state can take them over in the third year, and the state superintendent can appoint different administrators.

But participation in the program is voluntary, noted Doug Stone, a spokesman for the state Department of Education.

“It’s our belief that schools wouldn’t volunteer for the extra resources if they didn’t believe that they could not turn it around themselves,” he said.

Mijares calls his district’s program a successful work in progress.

“Our scores have gone up consistently over the past four years,” he said. “We have grade levels that are now reaching the mean on a standardized test.”

But, he said, many of the district’s schools are still struggling.

Although Heard and Boukather say they support the program, they criticize the review process.

They say they weren’t given sufficient time for their staffs to prepare for the on-site evaluations, whose dates were changed three times. They also question the findings in the evaluators’ reports and say they were not given an opportunity to meet with the review team leader to discuss those findings.

Heard said the report on Wilson Elementary included general recommendations that were not helpful.

“We were already doing the majority of those things that were suggested, plus innovative things that weren’t even included in the report,” she said. “One of the findings was, indeed, look at all these things you have as hardships and barriers, and you’ve been able to move the kids forward.”

While acknowledging that Hoover Elementary had the lowest test scores in the district, former principal Boukather said its Stanford 9 test scores had risen last year by 17 points, just short of the 19 points set as its target for improvement.

The school faces exceptional challenges, she said: Seventy-eight percent of Hoover’s students are at the poverty level; the average parent does not have a high school diploma; 77% of the students are English-language learners (with 35% in the bilingual program); and 95% of the students are bused in.

Mijares said Hoover and Wilson elementary schools were not chosen for on-site evaluations as a result of just one year’s performance but as “a three-year snapshot.”

“If you look over a three-year period,” he said, “you’ll see they were hovering right at the bottom or were on the bottom of all the 54 schools in our district.”

In assigning new principals to the two schools, Mijares said, “we just felt we needed to give the schools a fresh start, and that’s what we are attempting to do right now.”

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Times staff writer Andrea Perera contributed to this report.