Lauded Schools Are Called Failures

More than a quarter of California public schools won praise Wednesday for meeting state achievement goals on students’ test scores even while those campuses were branded as failures for missing a federal measure of success.

The conflicting messages grew out of separate state and federal accountability systems that left many teachers and administrators frustrated.

Principals, teachers and parents were left to decipher the differences between California’s Academic Performance Index, which rewards incremental test score gains annually, and the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to clear a rigid achievement bar that rose significantly this year.

“Our API scores are going up and up and up and up, but we’re still not making [the federal goal] because they raise the mark on us,” said Principal Joseph Pena Santana of John Adams Middle School in South Los Angeles, which more than doubled its state expectations this year. “As soon as we think we’ve got it, they take it right out from underneath us.”

The state and federal systems relied on the same standardized tests administered last spring and their scores, which were released two weeks ago. The raw test scores showed steady improvement in English and math among California’s public schools.

But the state and federal measures of accountability arrived at distinctly different conclusions about many schools.

California education officials said they were pleased that 81% of the schools had met state improvement targets this year, up from 64% last year.

The state system rated schools on a scale of 200 to 1,000, assigning every campus its own relative target for improvement based on its rating in the previous year.

Still, California officials said, they were unhappy about the results as viewed through the lens of No Child Left Behind. Those results showed that more than 2,300 schools met their state targets but still fell short of the fixed federal goal. If that pattern continues for several years, many of those schools could face staff shake-ups, state takeovers or other sanctions.

The conflict arose largely because the federal bar was raised this year for the first time in California, leaving many campuses unable to reach it. Federal law requires all students to be proficient in English and math by the 2013-14 school year but allows states to set the specific year-by-year targets along that steep incline.

To pass this year’s No Child Left Behind goal, elementary and middle schools in California had to bring at least 24.4% of their students to the proficient level in English-language arts, up from 13.6% last year, and at least 26.5% to the proficient level in math, up from 16.0%.

In California, proficiency is considered to be scores showing that students can do grade-level work and are gaining the skills necessary to attend state universities.

Overall, 5,407 schools met the federal goals in math and English this year, compared with 6,034 last year -- a 10% decrease.

Schools could fail to meet their federal targets because certain segments of their student bodies did not perform well enough on the tests. The most common reason was that not enough students who learned English as a second language proved proficient in English.

Federal education officials defended their system.

In an interview, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said she was confident that teachers and parents could sift through the information produced by the two accountability systems and make sense of their schools’ progress.

“I think it’s true that schools can be making improvement and still need improvement,” Spellings said.

The state and federal systems, she said, are “not necessarily in conflict. We can give credit for progress while you’re working toward an absolute standard.”

But teachers and administrators said their concerns were underscored by the potential sanctions at schools receiving federal funds to help educate impoverished children.

At Revere Elementary in Anaheim, students posted a 36-point API gain this year, bringing its state score to 641. Even so, the school missed the federal goal of having 24.4% of students proficient in English. Revere had 19.3% of students at the proficient level.

Principal Bob Gardner labeled the testing rigidity of No Child Left Behind a “blueprint for failure.”

Although his school is not facing sanctions, he said the federal system is “very frustrating and illogical. There are some things numerically that don’t make sense about the No Child Left Behind program improvement process. What we’re doing here is trying to focus on results.”

State officials are lobbying their Washington counterparts -- without success so far -- to drop the annual federal measurements in favor of the state’s system. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday asked Spellings to help develop an alternative that meets the needs of California and Washington, an idea Spellings said she supported without offering specifics.

Despite the pronouncements of cooperation, administrators and school district superintendents urged their schools to pay more attention to the state measure than the federal one.

“We should look to the API as a more accurate reflection of achievement in California,” said Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of public instruction.

That is precisely the message that Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer delivered Wednesday, when he touted the school system’s overall 16-point jump on the API while downplaying the federal measure.

“It’s out there, it’s another gauge. It’s like Centigrade and Fahrenheit. I’m using Fahrenheit ... then they’ve got this Centigrade scale over here and it has consequences, but I can’t help it. It’s not the scale that’s rational for us to use.”

In Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest public school system, 271 schools made their API goals this year but also fell short on the federal scale. Overall, 279 schools in the district met their federal targets this year, down from 369 last year.

L.A. Unified also failed to meet the federal goals largely because too few special education students and English learners reached proficiency.

Romer said he had no immediate plans to impose sanctions against campuses such as Adams Middle School, despite their consistent failure to make federal marks.

“I have to say to them, ‘Congratulations for the gains you’ve made. You’ve got an arbitrary federal law that calls you something and we’re going to work through it ... but I’m not going to make changes that are going to change your practices.’ I’m going to try to supplement that.”

At Adams -- a multitrack year-round school where more than half of the 2,100 students speak English as a second language -- teachers assumed an equally defiant posture.

“We’re all trying to teach these kids as much as we can,” said eighth-grade teacher Sandy Higgs. “The feds need to come in and see what we’re doing.”

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Times staff writers Seema Mehta, Doug Smith and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this story.

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The accountability confusion

Under conflicting state and federal standards, thousands of California’s public schools are getting the message that they’re both passing and failing at the same time.

*--* State/federal standards Number of schools Percent Passed both state and federal 3,825 44% Passed state, failed federal 2,374 28% Failed state, passed federal 535 6% Failed both state and federal 1,000 12% No state standard* 875 10% Total 8,609 100%

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* These schools were not assigned a 2005 state Academic Performance Index pass/fail for various reasons, primarily that they did not receive an API score last year.

Source: California Department of Education. Data analysis by Sandra Poindexter