New Gauge Sought for L.A. School Reforms : Education: The demise of CLAS tests leaves LEARN program without a way to measure whether students are improving.

The demise of the controversial California Learning Assessment System leaves the Los Angeles Unified School District’s LEARN campuses--the crown jewels of the school system’s reform program--without a way to measure student achievement gains that are critical to determining whether the expensive effort is succeeding.

While the district pumps money and energy into those campuses, school board members, administrators and parents say they have lost a valuable assessment tool, and the district must now develop its own methods to track student performance.

“How do we know that we’re not leading people down the primrose path with LEARN without some kind of assessment?” said school board member Barbara Boudreaux. “Without any measurement, we’re at a loss.”

After a barrage of criticism, the CLAS tests were scrapped last year when the governor vetoed legislation to fund the performance-based exams. The final set of tests in reading, writing and math were given to students in fourth, eighth and 10th grades last spring. A Times computer analysis of the results, released this week, showed that fourth-graders in the district’s first group of LEARN schools performed better than pupils districtwide, but eighth-graders at the three LEARN middle-school campuses fell below the norm for students in the system’s other 69 middle schools.

District officials say it is too early to draw any major conclusions, but they find the stronger showing among elementary schools promising.

At the time the tests were given, the schools had been formally involved with LEARN for less than a year, so little had changed in the classroom. But the school staffs were being introduced to new teaching methods, parents were becoming more actively involved and more attention was being focused on student achievement.

“These were the pioneers,” said Mike Roos, who heads the LEARN reform coalition. “You’d expect these kids to do better. . . . There is something going on at these schools.”

The LEARN program, developed by a group of business, civic and education leaders, aims to improve education by shifting power to local schools and holding their staffs accountable for student performance.

LEARN administrators had counted on CLAS to provide benchmarks against which to measure student achievement and guide the direction of reforms.

“We can’t be held accountable until we can measure ourselves,” said Howard Lapin, principal at Foshay Middle School in South-Central Los Angeles, one of 34 district schools that began implementing the reforms in 1993.

“This was authentic--we were finally telling kids they have to think and write and not just add and subtract,” he said. “Sure, it’s hard; sure, our results are low but give us a chance to do it.”

CLAS differed from traditional standardized tests because it aimed to measure critical thinking skills and embraced the kinds of updated teaching techniques used at schools undergoing reform.

The district still administers the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, a multiple-choice exam that provides individual student scores but no statewide averages. And Supt. Sid Thompson said he believes the district needs a statewide exam to measure LEARN students’ achievement.

But Roos said district officials should use this opportunity to design their own test, tailored to the goals of LEARN.

Of the district’s first group of 34 LEARN schools, students at 32 took the statewide tests--29 elementary and three middle schools.

In reading, 23.8% of the fourth-graders scored in the top three levels of the test, compared to 17% districtwide. In writing, 32.5% of the pupils made it to the top three levels, compared to 26% districtwide. In math, 23% of the students scored in the top tiers, compared to 15% districtwide.

The eighth-graders’ scores were lower than other students’ in the district, but only three middle-school LEARN campuses took the tests last year. In reading, 19.7% of the eighth-graders scored in the top three levels, compared to 24% districtwide. In writing, 21.7% scored in the top levels, compared to 28% districtwide. In math, 8.7% reached the top levels, compared to 10% districtwide.

Wonderland Avenue Elementary School Principal Rebecca Clough said she supports replacement of CLAS with a similarly progressive form of testing, but she said the LEARN schools are more inclined to train teachers and upgrade teaching methods even without the exams.

“A lot of the (non-LEARN) schools did not do well in math because the schools are not going down the path to the 21st Century,” Clough said. “We’re already down that path.”

And several parents and administrators said they believe it is too early to use the recent test scores to measure the success--or failure--of LEARN. They said it will take at least five years before test scores improve.

“This is giving us an opportunity to really plan and shoot for the things the test measures,” said Gail Predisik, whose son took the CLAS test at Wonderland and who is active in the campus’s LEARN committees.

“It showed us where we need to get going.”

* Times director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly contributed to this story.