State to Pay Schools for Better Test Scores

Hundreds of schools across Southern California will soon receive financial rewards for boosting scores on state achievement tests, an unexpected windfall that has come as a pleasant surprise for many cash-strapped campuses.

In Orange County, 285 schools will share a total of $6.3 million for meeting the state’s performance targets on exams taken in spring 2001.

The payout comes months after schools were supposed to receive the cash awards, promised as part of the governor’s 3-year-old public school accountability program.

Budget woes in Sacramento forced education officials to halt disbursement of reward funds in February--and called into question whether money would come at all.

“I’m just thrilled we are getting the money that we had pretty much written off,” said Rhonda Friedman, principal of Garden Grove High School, which won $51,374 in reward money. “Right now, anything that comes our way is appreciated.”

Garden Grove Unified got the largest share of the money for Orange County. About $935,000 will be distributed among 45 schools.

Friedman said some of the money likely will be used to install more lockers on campus. Currently, there are not enough lockers for every student at the school, forcing many to carry their books around all day in backpacks.

Statewide, 3,428 schools will receive $67.3 million in reward money to spend on new teaching materials, technology and other extras, Gov. Gray Davis’ education secretary, Kerry Mazzoni, announced this week.

Schools should receive checks by the end of September, said Ann Bancroft, spokeswoman for the education secretary.

The bonuses amount to $36.88 per student tested. Bancroft said an additional $39 per student is proposed in Davis’ budget, which is being debated in the Legislature.

To qualify for the rewards, schools had to achieve a required growth amount on the Academic Performance Index for their campus enrollment. The index represents a public ranking of schools based on test scores.

Schools also had to meet growth targets for specific groups of students, including children from low-income homes and from various ethnic groups, said Bill Padia, director of the policy and evaluation division in the state education office. Although the money that schools will receive this year is much less than initially promised, administrators said they understand the state’s budget crisis and are happy to get something.

“Nobody built their budgets on this, but it’s something they can use to fund a wish list of things that would be an additional bonus for a school,” said David Smollar, spokesman for the Capistrano Unified School District, which won about $750,000 for 27 schools.

“It’s like the difference between a car with a stereo and a car without a stereo,” he said. “You don’t need the stereo to drive, but the stereo might make the drive more relaxing and entertaining.”

Because the funding is one-time money, it can’t be used to hire counselors or specialists--a critical need for many districts.

That is one reason most school officials said they aren’t worried that the rewards program was not reinstituted this year.

“If I believed that teachers’ performance across the state was really motivated by this kind of possible reward, then I’d say it needs to be continued,” said Dean Waldfogel, superintendent of the Irvine Unified School District, which will get about $281,102 under the rewards program. “I don’t happen to believe that.”