DATA `PROVE' EACH SIDE'S SCHOOLS CASE A TALE OF TWO SETS OF STATISTICS.

Byline: HARRISON SHEPPARD Sacramento Bureau

SACRAMENTO -- The high-stakes public relations battle over Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's bid to take over Los Angeles public schools has escalated into a duel as much over statistics as over politics.

Dropout rates, test scores and English-language proficiency, or lack of it, are just some of the data cited as evidence that the Los Angeles Unified School District is either making progress or failing its 727,000 children.

As both proponents and opponents of the proposed district-reform legislation arm themselves with a wide array of facts and figures, political analysts caution that data can be easily manipulated and presented on a selective basis.

``It's standard everyday practice in politics,'' said Jack Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College government professor who worked as a staffer for congressional Republicans in the 1980s. ``When I was working on the Hill, we had a cynical saying: We tortured the numbers until they told us what we wanted to hear.''

Experts note that there is no single statistic that can definitively summarize how well a school district is doing in all areas.

While state education officials rely most on the Academic Performance Index score, which reflects standardized tests and high school exit exams and measures year-to-year changes, a district also can be evaluated on dropout rates, English-proficiency exams, percentage of students who complete college requirements, the proportion of fully credentialed teachers and the progress of a facilities program.

``These statistics are absolutely vital,'' said Superintendent Roy Romer. ``It's (how) I hold myself accountable. It's (how) I hold the people who work for me accountable.

``The problem is ... you have a popular mayor using generalities, saying it's a status-quo district. This is far from status quo. We have more happening here than anywhere in the country.''

In frequent lobbying trips to Sacramento, LAUSD officials have armed themselves with a variety of data in dozens of color charts and graphs, depicting what they say has been the district's steady progress in recent years. That progress, they argue, means there is no need for the mayor's proposed governance structure.

District officials note that from 2002 to 2005, students who met English-proficiency criteria on the California English Language Development Test jumped from below to above the state average.

During that period, the district average increased from 26 percent to 45 percent, while the state average moved from 32 percent to 44 percent.

District officials also note that minority students in 12th grade are exceeding state averages for completion of courses to attend a state university or college. About 40 percent of Hispanic students in LAUSD completed those courses last year, compared with about 24 percent statewide.

But Villaraigosa cites statistics that 81 percent of middle-school students in the district are in schools identified by the federal or state government as failing schools.

He also cites data showing 87 percent of students are below national competency levels in the eighth grade in math and reading.

And in one of the most hotly contested statistics, Villaraigosa has cited several academic studies that have found half or more of LAUSD's students fail to graduate from high school.

``I look at the schools of Los Angeles, and I know that the Harvard study, the Manhattan Institute study, the Urban Institute study and last week the Education Week study all confirmed that the graduation rate or the dropout rate is roughly at 50 percent,'' Villaraigosa told a Senate education committee last week in the first hearing on his school-takeover legislation.

``Fifty percent: That means we're losing half of our kids. Half of the children that go to L.A. Unified don't graduate from high school.''

District officials dispute those figures, saying the studies did not accurately track students who transferred schools or moved out of the

district.

Under the state's reporting requirements, the district pegged its dropout rate at 24 percent last year, down from 33 percent the two previous years.

District officials counter the mayor's arguments with data on Academic Performance Index scores, which have shown sharp increases in the last six years.

While the entire state has shown increases -- and LAUSD still remains below the state average -- the district's rate of improvement has been more rapid than the state's overall gain.

At the elementary school level, the district's mean API scores rose 196 points since 1999 -- to 719 in 2005. During the same period, the state average moved up 125 points, to 755.

The API is on a 1,000-point scale, and the state Department of Education considers a school successful if it reaches 800 points or higher.

Still, while the state Department of Education says the API is a strong assessment tool because it looks at how school districts are improving over time -- rather than whether they meet certain set targets -- some critics say it can mask failures in selected areas.

Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence, which supports the mayor's plan, said API scores alone don't provide enough incentive to improve the success rate of some groups of students, such as ethnic minorities.

The test, for example, gives added weight to scores in districts that move students from the bottom tier of achievement to the next-to-bottom. So a district with many students who are still far from proficient can get a higher score and win praise if a number of those students move from ``far below basic'' to the ``below basic'' category, even when most students are far below grade level.

Lanich, a former LAUSD teacher who was in charge of a program in the late 1990s to improve test scores at the 100 lowest-performing schools in Los Angeles County, prefers a measuring system called Adequate Yearly Progress. Under that measurement, based on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools are evaluated on their ability to hit a set target, rather than on improvement from the previous year.

With the adequate-progress measurement, Lanich argues, it is easier to see whether a district is continuing to fail its students and whether the achievement gap between minority students and non-Latino white students is still significant.

Ultimately, Pitney said, it is fortunate that the public has more tools at its disposal than ever before, thanks to the Internet, to try to verify facts and figures being cited in the heated debate.

``It's let the buyer beware,'' he said. ``The public should be appropriately skeptical. Always ask where the numbers come from.''

harrison.sheppard(at)dailynews.com

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