School Debate Tests the Truth

In asserting his case for control over city schools, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has presented a selective and sometimes misleading case to prove that the Los Angeles Unified School District is a failing system.

Villaraigosa and his team have focused on data that present Los Angeles Unified in the worst possible way, almost entirely discounting that the school system is improving faster academically than many other school districts and compared to California as a whole.

At the same time, the school district, playing defense, has emphasized accomplishments while glossing over shortcomings, including an overall academic standing that is well below average. And the school system has perpetually resisted acknowledging the extent of its dropout problem, pointing to a state measure that its own analysts recognize as deeply flawed.

The state Legislature is scheduled to take up Villaraigosa-backed legislation this week that would give the mayor substantial authority over L.A. Unified. And both the school district and the mayor are trotting out data to bolster their positions.

The district cites its progress, while Villaraigosa says the district is failing.

But is it?

“It’s indisputable that the district is moving in the right direction even though more needs to be done,” said Jack O’Connell, state superintendent of public instruction, who does not oppose mayoral control per se but who faults the Villaraigosa plan. When something appears to be working, “it’s important to stay the course. You don’t want to have a new education philosophy every other year.”

At town hall meetings, press conferences and private meetings, Villaraigosa’s team distributes handouts based on factual material and research, but his presentation is skewed.

Through the prism of the mayor’s statistics, L.A. Unified looks like the worst of the worst by every measure, including the dropout rate, student achievement, rate of improvement and the achievement gap.

What’s missing is context.

One mayoral handout deploring the very real achievement gap between white students and black and Latino students suggests that white third-graders outperform Latino and African American seventh-graders in reading. As the mayor’s school reform campaign website, www.excellenceinlaschools.com puts it: “African American and Latino seventh-graders read below the level of white third-graders. This achievement gap is the civil rights issue of our time.”

The claim is based on standardized test scores, and indeed Latino and black seventh-graders have lower raw scores than white third-graders. But the third-graders were being tested on third-grade material while the seventh-graders were being tested on more difficult seventh-grade material, so a lower score in seventh grade doesn’t mean that a student can’t read as well as a third-grader.

In an interview, the mayor, too, was misled by the graphic when asked to explain what it meant. He deferred to staff when the error was pointed out.

“I look to experts, and that’s who these guys are,” Villaraigosa said, gesturing to staff. “I trust them. I don’t represent that I have that level of knowledge.”

On another chart, the mayor shows how poorly the district’s fourth-graders perform on the National Assessment of Educational Progress: 81% of fourth-graders are rated less than proficient in math and 86% are less than proficient in reading.

But California’s measurement of progress is the Academic Performance Index or API, which is based on the state’s academic standards. The API results, which appear nowhere in the mayor’s handouts, tell a different story.

“There were tremendous increases in scores at the elementary level,” said Pat McCabe, director of policy and evaluation for the California Department of Education. While acknowledging that Los Angeles “is below where you want to be,” he noted, “L.A. Unified has moved up substantially, with much greater growth than at the statewide level. Los Angeles schools substantially outperformed schools that are similar to them in terms of a starting point.”

Over the last six years, the percentage of district students judged proficient or better in state tests has not only improved at every grade level, it’s rising faster than the state average. In fourth-grade reading, for example, the percentage of proficient L.A. Unified students rose 79%. The state increase was 42%. At the same time, the absolute percentage of proficient L.A. students was 34% in 2005; for the state, it was 47%.

Los Angeles middle and high schools also are improving faster than the statewide rate, but their overall achievement is lower than at the elementary level. The latest test results, officially released today, are not expected to change this overall picture.

Villaraigosa, echoing dissident academics, dismissed the importance of the performance index. He pointed out, correctly, that the API’s weighted system assigns greater numerical value to schools that go from bad to better than from good to great.

As an indicator of progress, however, the state’s API has some advantages over the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Villaraigosa’s choice. The API is based on testing all students in all grades, every year, in a variety of subject areas. The national assessment tests a comparatively small sample of fourth- and eighth-graders, with a narrower scope of testing.

Like the mayor, the school district also presents data selectively. One district handout, for example, lists the API improvement of California districts from 1999 to 2005. Los Angeles Unified sits at the head of the class, better than Long Beach, San Diego, San Francisco and the state as a whole. But a more complete picture would include a second bar, one that represents actual scores, which would show the district nearer the bottom.

L.A. Unified also has produced comparisons suggesting that the district holds its own or better against other large urban school systems when it comes to educating students with limited English and those living in poverty. This comparison applies to both California school systems with better reputations and the school districts of Chicago and New York City, which are cited as models of the positive effects of mayoral takeovers.

Villaraigosa waves away such documentation: “You’re not going to get me there. I’m asking for mayoral oversight over Los Angeles, not New York or Chicago. I believe this district is failing to graduate enough of our children when they lose nearly half of them.”

On this subject, Villaraigosa has found vulnerability. The mayor cites researchers who have concluded that the school district’s actual dropout rate is about 50% rather than the official 24.2%.

In his documents and in person, Villaraigosa insinuates that the district is lying about its dropout rate. District officials agree with Villaraigosa that their computation method is flawed, but they say they report dropouts the same way as other school systems, using a nationally accepted definition.

A March 2004 dropout study by the Harvard University-based Civil Rights Project concluded that more than half of Los Angeles Unified’s ninth-graders failed to graduate on time. Julie Mendoza, a contributing author to that study, insisted that the school system could produce a more accurate and more honest number if it wanted to.

“The district has the best data system in the state and one of the best in the country, and it doesn’t use that information,” said Mendoza, a Villaraigosa-appointed library commissioner who supports his reform plan.

Schools Supt. Roy Romer, who arrived in 2000, said he has dealt with the dropout problem by concentrating on elementary school students, starting in kindergarten. “I had a handle on the dropout issue. I took a particular approach where you really need to build the capacity of students to keep them in this system, a long-term approach.”

That tack is consistent with the advice of many experts, who believe that given limited resources, results are better when reform efforts are focused on keeping younger students caught up rather than on rescuing older ones who’ve already fallen behind.

“Much of the emphasis in school reform, across the board, in the last few years has been to focus on elementary education,” said Pete Goldschmidt, a senior researcher at the UCLA-based National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing.

“That’s the key,” he said. “You would hope that the improvements in elementary education trickle up to middle school and high school.”

But that approach, even if it ultimately pays off, writes off older students and leaves an opening for critics.

Romer has come to understand this all too well: “When I saw the dropouts used as a hatchet on the district, I obviously went back quickly and began to do things that, in the short term, needed to be done.”

Romer then ticked off a list of new initiatives intended to prevent dropouts, including expanded record keeping and counseling: “Should I have done that from Day One? Yes. If I could rerun the tape, I would have.”

The district takes particular issue with the mayor for overlooking its booming school construction program, which O’Connell, the state schools superintendent, called unprecedented.

About 6 1/2 years ago, officials in the overcrowded school system had just canceled their two major construction projects because of mismanagement and environmental issues. And it looked as though the district had virtually no hope of future funding at the state or local level. Since then, however, district administrators and the school board have overseen a turnaround: 55 schools have opened and 100 are underway, part of a $19-billion program.

“The building program affects how we teach,” said Romer, “and we have only one-third of that building program available to us. We are on a journey here. We are doing some very good things that are changing practice over time, changing it in a historic way.”

During a City Hall interview, Villaraigosa became exasperated with repeated questions about data.

“Do you have kids?” he asks.

“I’ve got four beautiful ones. You don’t send your kids to school to go from ‘very below basic’ to ‘basic.’ Is that improvement? Yes. But the object is for your kids to be ‘proficient’ and, for most of us, it’s to be ‘advanced.’ I don’t believe that’s what this district has provided.”