Up to $20 Million Lost as L.A. Schools’ Gamble Fails

Students in hundreds of low-performing Los Angeles schools lost out on up to $20 million in state aid this summer when school district officials lost a gamble on how to manipulate the state’s lottery-like selection process, according to state officials.

Repeating a familiar pattern in the competition for state funds, the Los Angeles Unified School District was a day late in filing hundreds of applications for state grants to low-performing schools.

Rather than applying for funds for all its eligible schools, the district submitted only 61 applications the first day, hoping to improve the odds that those schools would get funds and guessing that money would be available for later applicants.

Instead, with interest in the grants running unexpectedly high, other districts flooded the state Department of Education with applications, and all 430 grants were handed out on the first day--only 25 of them to Los Angeles schools. The district’s 250 later applications were all turned away.

“I was just astounded we had that many schools,” said Pat McCabe, an administrator in the education department.

The state parceled out $96 million in state and federal funds to help schools plan and implement educational reforms. The schools had to volunteer and, by accepting the money, face sanctions or takeover by the state if their student achievement fails to improve. Those state sanctions would take effect in July 2001.

Los Angeles district officials say that they decided to stagger the applications to give preference to a group of Los Angeles schools that have already embarked on the state reform program.

“Because all 61 schools had worked so hard, we tried to make sure they would get the priority,” said Judy Burton, assistant superintendent for school reform.

Board member David Tokofsky said he believes that the district decided not to include the poorest schools for fear that officials would be embarrassed if the schools failed to improve.

“We picked the top of our bottom schools,” Tokofsky said. “The bottom of the bottom didn’t get sent in.”

Burton denied that there was any screening. She said the district sent a form to every eligible school and filed applications for each one that volunteered.

“Some of the very lowest schools are on the list,” she said.

Legislation creating the program as part of Gov. Gray Davis’s educational reform package opened the competition for 430 grants to schools whose Stanford 9 test scores this year fell in the state’s bottom half.

The Los Angeles district had 440 eligible schools, Burton said. McCabe said he received applications for 319 schools from the district.

Another urban district, San Francisco Unified, applied for all 39 eligible schools and won 16 grants, state officials said.

To choose the winners, state officials separated all the applicants into 30 pools depending on their scores, grade levels and whether they were urban or rural. Names were drawn randomly for each pool until it was full.

Statewide, 42% of all applicants were accepted, a ratio very close to the 41% of successful applications from Los Angeles.

Based on probability, the Los Angeles district should have received about 111 grants had it turned in all 319 applications the first day when 1,023 applications arrived. Had it filed applications for all 440 schools that were eligible, the district probably would have had 135 winners.

The value of those grants cannot be calculated precisely because the money is apportioned per pupil. Based on an average school enrollment of more than 850 students, the district might reasonably have received $145,000 per school.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) this week criticized the state’s intervention plan for letting down inner-city schools.

“That’s not much school reform for the state’s largest and most troubled district,” Hayden said.