Study Critical of Minority High Schools Is Flawed, Panel Says

Countering a blistering study last fall that attacked the performance of minority high schools in four Southern California counties, including Orange County, a group of California education professors said Wednesday that minority pupils have made academic gains, particularly since a series of school reforms were initiated.

Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, a consortium of professors from USC, Stanford and UC Berkeley, said the University of Chicago study contained serious flaws and drew erroneous conclusions.

“Our careful re-analysis of the Chicago work either neutralizes or reverses the major conclusions of that report,” said UC Berkeley Prof. James W. Guthrie. “For policy purposes in California, the Chicago study just doesn’t hold up.”

The study was conducted by University of Chicago Prof. Gary Orfield, who directs the Metropolitan Opportunity Project, a nonprofit research group that studies minority education and employment issues.

It charged that high schools in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties were doing a worse job than they were 10 years ago. Minority high schools, particularly in the Los Angeles Unified School District, were doing worst of all, it said. This conclusion was based largely on an analysis of California Assessment Program test scores for the years 1976, 1980 and 1986.

Orfield also suggested that recent state efforts to upgrade education, such as stiffening graduation requirements and beefing up curriculum, have not helped poor minority students. Unlike other education groups--such as the National Education Assn. and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching--that have made similar arguments, the Orfield study offered statistics to back up its claim.

The study infuriated California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who feared that it would hinder state reform efforts. He argued that many minority high schools have improved, and said the years chosen for the study were inappropriate.

The PACE review of the Chicago data supports Honig’s claims. In citing a major flaw in the study’s design, it found the Chicago study compared slightly different sets of schools in the three years examined. The 1986 scores included some continuation high schools, which typically have low scores.

This discrepancy, said Stanford education Prof. Michael Kirst, amounts to “in effect comparing apples with oranges.”

Orfield said in a telephone interview Wednesday that he is in the process of reviewing the data and is aware that they included some continuation school scores.

“It is very possible there were errors in some parts of the database,” he said. “If we find mistakes, we will modify the results appropriately.”

However, he said he stood behind the portion of his study that claimed strong links between educational achievement and the race and income of students.

When the continuation school scores were excluded, PACE found a considerably brighter picture of high school performance. In some cases, it found gains where Orfield had reported declines.

In mathematics, for instance, PACE found that in comparing 1976 to 1986, scores had risen 2.4% in the four counties, whereas the Chicago study had reported a decline of 0.4%. For Los Angeles Unified, PACE showed a 1% decline, compared to the Chicago study’s report of a 2.6% drop.