K–12 | Daily Report

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The Los Angeles Unified School District has been forced to file a California Public Records Act request with the California Department of Education to get test scores of students at about 150 charter schools authorized to operate within the district's borders. 

But State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, citing the state Education Code, rebuffed the request LA schools Superintendent Ramon Cortines submitted just a day earlier. Cortines made it clear that he was seeking "depersonalized" scores – scores with students' names removed.

Overall test scores of charter schools are already available through the state's STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) program. What has not been publicly available are the test scores of individual students, even with students' names removed. 

O'Connell advised Cortines that under the Education Code, Section 60607 the state is prohibited from releasing individual test scores and that only charter schools themselves, with the written permission of parents, are authorized to release them. 

LA Unified requested the data because it has been working with Education Strategy Consulting, an East Coast consulting firm, on a study to calculate the effectiveness of district schools by tracking the progress of individual students using "value added" methodology.  It wants to include the charter schools it has authorized in the study which it hopes to release within the next few months.

On its website, LA Unified describes charter schools as being "part of the district's family and as an asset from which we can learn." It says that charter schools could, among other things, "provide data to help evaluate issues that affect quality education programs and student learning and achievement."

Los Angeles school officials are mystified by the state's refusal to provide information it has received without protest from the department for the past five years. But O'Connell has informed the district that those scores were provided "in error" in the past. The Department of Education has advised the district to request scores directly from the charter schools if it wants them.

That's what the district has begun doing. So far, according to district administrative officer Matt Hill, the district has received the depersonalized scores from about 100 of the district's  charter schools.  But he says it has been a labor intensive process so far.

The California Charter School Association has advised its members to supply LA Unified with the information, but only for the purposes of completing the one study the district is engaged in. And, reflecting some of the ongoing tensions between charters and the district, it has called on LA Unified to reciprocate by providing whatever data charters have requested of it. "This has to be a two-way street," Vicky Waters, a spokesperson for the association, told me, saying the district has not always been forthcoming with data charter schools have sought.

Deborah Sigman, deputy superintendent of the CDE's Curriculum, Learning and Accountability Branch, said the department is reviewing what charter school information it can release to the district. Anything that could result in a test score being associated with a particular student might have to be redacted, she said, including possibly the charter school he or she attends.

"We treat charters as essentially being their own district," Sigman said. "We are doing our due diligence."

But with basic information like a student's school removed, it is unclear how useful the data would be.

The state's public records law is the same tool used by the LA Times to get data from the district, which allowed the paper to link "depersonalized" student scores with actual names of teachers and in a controversial series of articles publish its own ratings of the "effectiveness" of 6,000 elementary school teachers.

As I wrote in a post last summer, the school district concluded that it had no choice but to release the data to the LA Times, despite being harshly critical of its decision to publish teachers' names.  LA Unified's Hill told me that the district is just seeking data from the state to measure the effectiveness of charter schools themselves, not of the teachers who work there.