Compton Parents Sue Over Grading System

A group of Compton parents filed suit Thursday asking a judge to throw out the school district’s new grading system, which uses a writing test as the basis for 40% of a student’s grades in all subjects.

In a hearing, the judge declined to order district officials not to release grades based on the new system, but told the eight parents they could have their own children’s grades withheld.

Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs scheduled a hearing Feb. 17 to hear arguments on whether the system should be thrown out.

“We’ll be trying to have the whole system thrown out,” said the parents’ lawyer, Cheryl Turner.

Compton Unified School District officials defended the system, which is aimed at ending grade inflation. “We’re having kids going into colleges here in Compton and failing out in the remedial tests,” said spokesman Fausto Capobianco. “We don’t want to find out too late that they weren’t ready.”

The new system combines the traditional teacher’s grade in each subject with the results of the writing assessment and the district’s norm-referenced test. After the teachers report the grades, the district recalculates them with the scores on the other two measures.

The teacher’s mark is now worth only 40%. The nationally normed test counts for 20%, and the writing exam taken by all district students is worth 40% in each subject.

Many parents and teachers have complained that the universal application of the writing test to grades for all subjects is unfair and masks students’ performance in topics such as math and music that do not involve as much writing.

“You had people who had Fs who ended up with Cs and Bs, and people who deserved A’s ended up with Cs and Bs,” said math teacher Asia Edwards. “We all have complained and complained.”

In the lawsuit, Turner argued that the state education code allows teachers’ grades to be changed only in the case of “clerical or mechanical mistake, fraud, bad faith or incompetence.”

She also contended that the system denies equal protection by making it more difficult for Compton students to get into college.

One of the parents, Sherman E. Gay, said his son, who has been a consistent B+ student and scored 1040 on the SAT, had his grade-point average drop to a C when the system was applied.

“I know my kid is capable,” Gay said. “The problem is Compton has rushed and come up with some crazy grading system.”

Gay said he complained to the school principal and the Board of Education but was ignored.

Capobianco said the district is developing assessments for other subjects, but that the writing exam will continue to count for a portion of the grade in all subjects except physical education and homeroom because writing is crucial to all subjects.

“If you couldn’t write and you couldn’t read, you couldn’t do math, you couldn’t do the social sciences,” Capobianco said. “We felt this was the appropriate way to launch the program, but we are still perfecting the system.”

Capobianco said there was an urgent need to implement the system this year because so many district graduates enter college without adequate reading and writing skills.