Ineligible Schools Got Rewards

A scoring error by the publisher of the Stanford 9 achievement test has caused California to send about $750,000 in rewards to six public schools and their teachers, principals and others not eligible for them, state education officials said Thursday.

In addition, 16 schools whose staff members had expected to receive rewards of up to $25,000 each under a separate program have been knocked off the winners list or will receive less than anticipated. All the schools and employees involved are from the Central Valley and were participants in the test administered in 2000.

“We have some mad people,” said Scott Bishop, president of the Kerman Unified teachers union in Fresno County and a math teacher at Kerman High School, which is one of those that is apparently dropping off the winners list. “That’s a lot of money. If we would have got $25,000, I was thinking, ‘That’s a down payment on a new house.’ Or I could actually go out and buy a new car. A lot of people still owe on their student loans.”

State Department of Education officials now wonder whether they can legally allow those from the six Central Valley schools who have already received reward money to keep it. They are also discussing the possibility of reimbursement from Harcourt Educational Measurement, the test publisher.

“The state can’t be in a position of donating money,” said William L. Padia, one of those overseeing the state’s testing and accountability program.

Even the suggestion that they might have to return their modest cash rewards, which were given for the first time this year to all schools meeting specific improvement goals on the test, has riled teachers and other employees.

“We [each] received a bonus in April that was almost $600,” said Bishop. “To pay it back would seem ludicrous and could create a hardship on some family budgets.”

The same scoring error has jeopardized far bigger cash rewards to the 16 Central Valley schools that had expected to receive them. Those rewards--in amounts of $5,000, $10,000 and $25,000--are due out in the next week or so, after several months of delay.

They are intended for teachers and other credentialed employees at about 300 low-ranking schools that showed huge gains on their 2000 test scores. The total pot for that program is $100 million.

After recalculations, 11 schools appear to have been knocked out of the running for those rewards, and five qualified for less money than they had expected.

Harcourt said it plans to work with the state to resolve the issue. Dale Russell, who directs Harcourt’s Stanford 9 program in California, said the company in the future will be less willing to meet scoring deadlines at all costs. “We’re not going to push it if it means sacrificing quality,” Russell said. “We’ll [suffer] a penalty first.”

The scoring mix-up came to light after a Central Valley district contacted Harcourt to report concerns about scores. After reviewing the statewide data, Harcourt realized that it had measured the results of about 19,000 students against the wrong national sample of students.

It reported the scores as if the Central Valley students had taken the test in December, rather than the following spring, by which time they had had several additional months of instruction. That error inflated their results.

The Stanford 9 is an off-the-shelf achievement test that forms the basis for California’s testing and accountability program. It has been the sole criterion for computing the Academic Performance Index, which ranks schools and determines their eligibility for taxpayer-funded rewards.

Despite fierce opposition from many teachers unions, Gov. Gray Davis pushed through legislation to reward schools, teachers and other employees for sizable improvements in test scores. For 2000, schools were eligible to participate in three award programs totaling $677 million.

Besides the money that erroneously went to employees at the six Central Valley schools, the schools themselves mistakenly received funds.

Five of the six schools that received cash erroneously are in the Kings Canyon Joint Unified School District, which is based in Reedley, a Fresno County town. The sixth is in Kerman Joint Unified, in the same county. Critics of the accountability program see the foul-up as further evidence that cash rewards for improving test scores are a bad idea.

“The whole thing’s a nightmare as far as we’re concerned,” said Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Assn., who added that his union has opposed the idea “from the beginning.”

Harcourt has had other well-publicized problems. In 1999, scores were delayed by three weeks after an error inflated the score gains of students who were still learning English. In response, the state Board of Education cut $1.1 million from Harcourt’s $22-million tab.

In 2000, errors or inconsistencies cropped up in statistics on ethnic subgroups and family income, as well as in the reported percentage of each school’s students who took the test. To qualify for rewards, schools must test a certain percentage of students.

Many superintendents and teachers said they would be pleased if the big-money reward program disappeared.

“Frankly, I’m just as glad that we’re not getting that money,” said Jean Fetterhoff, superintendent of Kings Canyon Joint Unified.

“We were seeing some divisiveness as a result [of that program]. If I’m working really hard in a classroom for the right reasons and my kids don’t happen to test very well, but I see a neighbor across the district that is receiving big bucks for what I’m doing, there is a sense of unfairness about that.”

Paul Warren, the state’s deputy superintendent for accountability, said the situation has been “a heartache for all of us.”

“We know that teachers have cashed these checks; we know schools are using this money,” he said. “It would be difficult to ask for it back. We’re trying to find a solution that creates as little upset as possible.”