BILINGUAL GRADS SURPASS NATIVE PEERS ON TEST.

Byline: Terri Hardy Daily News Staff Writer

Educators asked to explain low test scores at Los Angeles schools usually provide a stock answer: immigrant children, impoverished conditions and high transiency rates.

So when bilingual graduates - the relatively small number who are mainstreamed each year - took the recent Stanford 9 achievement test, many were surprised at the strong scores they posted in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and Bakersfield districts.

Those Los Angeles students in grades two through 11 surpassed district average scores in reading and mathematics in every grade - and often posted tallies above the county average.

Maybe even more puzzling, they bested native English speakers in reading in second through fifth grades. In math, they matched or topped native English speakers by as many as 31 percentile points in all grades except ninth and 11th.

The results have officials in the state and the Los Angeles district scratching their heads. The scores are especially significant now, at a time when Californians overwhelmingly chose to dismantle bilingual programs.

``We're not sure why we're seeing that pattern, but it certainly is intriguing,'' said Brad Sales, spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Sales said the district wants to determine those students' native languages, socioeconomic status and what bilingual programs they were enrolled in before drawing any conclusions. Some Asian students, for instance, don't have bilingual teachers in their language and are placed immediately in classes conducted in English.

Great contrast

One of the greatest contrasts in results was in third-grade math scores. The redesignated students scored 66 - well above the average district score of 30 and native English speakers' 35.

However, in lower grades, the redesignated students accounted for only a small percentage of the total number of students who took the test; in second grade it was less than 1 percent. When the numbers of bilingual graduates grew larger, the differences narrowed or disappeared.

Another question is how long it has been since the students transitioned into English classes. Sales said once a student has graduated from bilingual classes, he or she is always classified as ``redesignated.''

Board of Education member David Tokofsky said he believes the results should prompt the district to reassess its view that immigrant children are a liability on tests.

``Immigrants have always been the lifeblood of this country,'' Tokofsky said. ``How the school system got into a woe-is-them mentality, rather than looking at them as a shot in the arm, I don't understand.''

Differing conclusions

Those willing to venture an opinion on why the students performed so much better have varying conclusions about what the scores say about the success of bilingual education.

For Concepcion Valadez, an associate professor in education at UCLA, the results reaffirm the benefit of the programs.

``It's just fantastic; it shows the concept is bearing fruit,'' Valadez said. ``It's very ironic that at a time when people have voted out bilingual education, this is coming up. It's one of the testing surprises that is beneficial to the public.''

The idea behind traditional bilingual education has been to allow children to develop a mastery of their native language first. Once literate, students can more easily transition into English, supporters say.

Yet the process has been frustratingly slow. At the LAUSD last year, only 8 percent of its limited-English-proficient children transitioned into traditional classes.

Outraged voters in June overwhelmingly approved Proposition 227, an initiative that would dismantle the current bilingual system and replace it by requiring nonfluent students to be placed directly in intense English instruction for a year.

Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who wrote Proposition 227, said the test results say more about the intelligence of the students and nothing about bilingual education.

Many of the children in bilingual programs are redesignated when they are able to take an achievement test in English and place in the 36th percentile - a score often above the LAUSD's average, Unz noted.

``By their very definition, these children scored well,'' he said. ``It's not surprising that they would now score well on the Stanford 9. These children are the smartest, and the hardest-working.''

All California students in second through 11th grades were required to take the Stanford 9 this year, including those in bilingual programs. Scores are listed in percentiles. A score in the 25th percentile, for example, shows a student did better than 25 percent of his or her peers nationally.

In the LAUSD results, the greatest difference between the bilingual graduates and native English students could be seen among second- and third-graders.

Redesignated students in second grade topped the district's average score for that level by a whopping 35 points in both reading and math. In reading, they bested native English speakers by 26 percentile points, and in math by 31.

While the district's composite score for all third-grade students placed them in the bottom quarter of the country at the 21st percentile, bilingual graduates scored 29 points higher. They outranked native English-speaking students by 18 percentile points.

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Chart: Bilingual success