SCHOOLS PLAN CALLS FOR HIGHER STANDARDS; STATE SUPERINTENDENT WANTS FOCUS ON RESULTS.

Byline: Paul Hefner Daily News Sacramento Bureau

California would rate schools by academic performance, pay $2,500 bonuses to teachers at top-scoring campuses and give state officials the power to close failing schools under a blueprint for school accountability proposed Monday.

The plan calls for using student test scores to judge school performance - measuring results against the goal of having nine out of every 10 students in the state meeting standards for their grade within a decade.

As part of the plan, the state would reward employees at campuses that meet the goals with cash bonuses, while putting increasing pressure on schools with chronically low scores.

Students themselves would be subject to the plan's ``carrot and stick'' approach. Poor performers would be forced to attend summer school. Top students would be guaranteed admission to state colleges and would receive scholarships to cover university tuition and books.

A 40-member panel appointed by state schools chief Delaine Eastin produced the plan, which would need approval from the state Board of Education and the Legislature to take effect.

``What was good enough yesterday is no longer satisfactory,'' the committee found. ``California's students must be motivated to reach higher levels of academic achievement. . . . In simple terms, the bar must be moved higher.''

Their recommendations won an early endorsement from Eastin, who acknowledged that the state's current role in assessing schools has far too little emphasis on student performance.

``We measure seat time, we measure the number of days we teach, we measure lots of things that don't tell us how kids are performing,'' Eastin said. ``I frankly don't care if a student sits in class 55 minutes for six periods a day as much as I care whether they learn something. I think that the failure to focus on results is the single biggest problem in public education.''

Even some officials who questioned elements of the plan said its adoption would represent a marked step forward for California's schools, which increasingly have lost the confidence of parents and the public.

``Measurement itself is a breakthrough,'' said David Tokofsky, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District. ``There's no question this is an improvement. This is measurement, and any measurement is improvement.''

He said officials should use more than one test result to gauge school performance, and the state should move more rapidly to identify failing schools.

``It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know they've been sitting at the bottom for 30 years,'' Tokofsky said.

Board member Julie Korenstein questioned the plan's time line.

``Ten years seems like an awfully long time,'' she said.

But she said she welcomed the idea of increased state support for summer school and for the idea of rewarding schools for high achievement.

Specifically, the plan calls for:

Developing a school performance index for each campus based on statewide test results.

Setting a long-term goal of having 90 percent of students score at grade level.

Requiring schools falling below the standard to show regular improvement.

Paying cash bonuses to teachers, administrators and other employees working at schools with high or steadily improving scores.

Setting up an intervention process for low-scoring schools. Schools would have to develop an improvement plan and would receive funds to hire outside experts to help.

Where such efforts fail, schools would be placed under jurisdiction of the state board, which could close the school or transfer its entire staff.

The plan would carry significant costs. Paying for mandatory summer school for low-achieving students would cost $600 million next year, the report estimated. Total first-year costs of the plan would be $771 million.

The committee's report estimates that costs would increase to $828 million by the third year, as costs of student scholarships and bringing in advisers for low-achieving schools mounted.

Some of the recommendations were bound to be controversial with education representatives.

United Teachers Los Angeles President Day Higuchi questioned many of the panel's proposals, including the offer to pay bonuses to some teachers and other employees.

``Most of my colleagues went into teaching not to make money, they went into it because they wanted to do a good job,'' he said. ``This idea of working for a cash bonus is in some ways kind of insulting. It's as if you don't have a commitment already in becoming a teacher.''

He also said that having state authorities take over troubled schools hasn't worked elsewhere. Neither has ``reconstitution'' - transferring an entire school's staff to a new campus, he said.

``It's the sort of meat-ax approach that doesn't work,'' Higuchi said. ``Things often get worse instead of better.''

But Eastin noted the state already has the ability to inject itself into local school operations when districts run into financial trouble. The same standard should apply when schools fail to perform academically, she said.

``We do intervene when schools are financially bankrupt, we just don't intervene when you're educationally bankrupt,'' she said.

Eastin said she sees the move for better accountability as the third necessary ingredient in reforming public education, along with setting new academic standards and devising new tests based on those standards.

State officials are nearly finished with the new standards, which are set to be adopted by Jan. 1. A new statewide testing program will be in place in the spring.

The state move to embrace accountability also comes as Los Angeles school officials have taken similar - though less concrete - steps. LAUSD Superintendent Reuben Zacarias has called for all schools to improve their performance, and in particular has focused on 100 of the district's lowest-performing schools.

But Tokofsky and others have criticized those efforts as too abstract.

``I don't know what the superintendent is doing with the 100 schools,'' Tokofsky said. ``There's no explicit formula, no agreed-upon tools and measurements. It's a black box.''

Brad Sales, a spokesman for Zacarias, said he wants schools to improve on a number of fronts, including test scores, attendance and reducing the number of dropouts.

Eastin said she's already received several calls from lawmakers interested in carrying legislation needed to put the state plan in place.

But state Sen. Leroy F. Greene, D-Sacramento, who sponsored the legislation that established the state committee, didn't know himself whether he would support the plan, which he hadn't yet seen.

``I'm rather cynical about these things,'' Greene said. ``I'm not sure that any of these magical formulas produce anything but magical formulas.''

He took issue with parts of the plan, including the school performance index based on test results. Greene said the goal should be to spotlight schools that are showing achievement gains.

Ranking schools by performance will simply make the same schools from well-to-do areas look best year after year, he said.

``I'm not interested in who did best, I'm interested in who improved the most,'' Greene said. ``That says to those who are at the bottom of the pile, let's see how far you can jump.''

But he acknowledged that state and local officials must act to try to improve student performance - which was his goal in writing the legislation in the first place.

``The mystery is that California educationally does very poorly compared with other states,'' he said. ``How the hell come, year after year after year, we're on the bottom of the pile?''

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Photo, box

PHOTO (color) Teacher Patricia Douglas works with her third-grade students Monday at Welby Way Elementary School.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News

Box: School standards