BIG CITY DISTRICTS OUTSCORE L.A. EIGHTH-GRADE TEST SCORES SCRAPING BOTTOM.

Byline: Helen Gao Staff Writer

Los Angeles Unified School District students perform below average in reading and writing even among urban school districts with similar demographics, according to test scores released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education.

Students in fourth and eighth grades in six of the nation's largest districts - Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. - voluntarily participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress in early 2002, resulting in the first district-by-district report card.

Overall, students in the six big urban districts scored below the national averages in reading and writing on the test, whose results were previously reported state by state.

With just 11 percent of its fourth-graders proficient in reading and 16 percent in writing, LAUSD students lagged substantially behind those in New York City and Houston but slightly ahead of the others.

LAUSD's eighth-graders fared worse, with just 10 percent proficient in reading and 11 percent in writing - putting them near the bottom, along with students in the District of Columbia and Atlanta.

LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer cautioned that the test results are merely a snapshot of the district's academic performance and do not reflect the progress made during the last four years.

``We are very low, but we were a lot lower before,'' he said during a brief interview Tuesday. ``We are making gains.''

Romer pointed to improvement in elementary schools on the Stanford 9 tests from 1998 to 2002, when many students met and exceeded the national average.

LAUSD students who participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress had not used the Open Court curriculum, a highly regimented phonics-based reading program that is credited with dramatically raising test scores in recent years, LAUSD officials said.

Officials also said the district's poor performance can be explained by its high percentage of students learning English as a second language. For example, 45 percent of LAUSD fourth-graders who participated in the test are labeled English-limited, compared with 9 percent in New York and 24 percent in Houston.

``When you look at the demographics, the impact of the English-language learners would have made the difference,'' said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent of planning, assessment and research.

A breakdown of how LAUSD students performed on the test also reveals a stubborn achievement gap among different ethnic and income groups. Achievement of Latinos, blacks and students from low-income households is much lower than achievement of Asians, whites and those from higher-income households.

Just 27 percent of low-income students in the LAUSD reached basic achievement levels in fourth-grade reading, compared with 42 percent in New York, 40 percent in Houston and 30 percent in Chicago.

While 33 percent of white students and 26 percent of Asian students in eighth grade were proficient or advanced in reading, just 8 percent of blacks and 5 percent of Latinos achieved those levels.

School board president Jose Huizar, who authored an initiative on English language learners last year, said the district has long neglected the education of poor immigrant children.

``We have so many students - thousands in English immersion - but we don't have training to reach the students,'' he said. ``The district has a long way to go understand its unique demographics and the needs of its students.''

Under his initiative, Huizar said teachers will be trained in different strategies to best teach reading and writing to students who didn't speak English as their first language.

Helen Gao, [phone]

helen.gao(at)dailynews.com

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SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education

Associated Press