State Near the Bottom in National School Analysis

Texas is among the most effective and California among the least in helping students at all income levels learn, according to a nationwide study released Tuesday.

The finding was immediately seized upon by aides to the Republican presidential candidate, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, as proof that school reforms are working in his home state.

But the eagerly awaited Rand Corp. analysis of state-by-state data from the early 1990s also says that what has made the biggest difference for students in Texas and nationwide is not necessarily the tough accountability measures that Bush has featured in his campaign. Rather, the report says, the most effective way to help students, especially the poor and minorities, is simply by spending more money, particularly on preschool, classroom supplies and smaller class sizes in early grades.

That finding is more in line with the campaign proposals of Bush’s rival, Vice President Al Gore, who wants to spend $115 billion over 10 years on such initiatives. And, predictably, Gore’s campaign focused on that part of the report.

“There’s something here for both campaigns, actually,” the study’s principal author, David Grissmer of Rand, said in an interview. For Bush, the study shows that setting high standards and holding schools accountable is part of the answer. For Gore, he said, “it shows resources matter. Most of the reason disadvantaged kids do worse is they get less resources.”

Grissmer and his team studied the results of seven federally sponsored tests in reading and mathematics taken by students in 44 states between 1990 and 1996.

A group of states that includes Texas as well as North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Maryland made gains at twice the national average rate during that period. When scores were adjusted to factor out the impact of students’ backgrounds, Texas also came out on top.

California was in the top third of states in terms of gains. But with large numbers of poor and minority children, it ranked near the bottom, along with Louisiana and Mississippi, in terms of raw scores.

When the researchers adjusted the scores to account for family income, California fell to the cellar--a finding that indicates not only that the state’s low-income students were not doing well, but also that students from more affluent families were not performing as well as similar students in other states. Overall, a student in California would score about 12 percentile points below a student in Texas even if both came from exactly the same background, the researchers found.

Grissmer concluded that California’s relatively large class sizes during the period studied and its low spending on preschool and on classroom resources were impeding children’s learning. The spending disparities between Texas and California account for more than two-thirds of the difference in test scores after family background is taken into account, the researchers concluded.

California has begun boosting education spending in the last few years and has adopted a major class-size reduction program for primary grades. Both initiatives began in 1996 and are therefore not reflected in the test scores studied. In the last four years, state and local spending on education in California has gone up by nearly $13 billion.

New test scores released this month show strong improvements in California’s test scores, particularly in math, in the early grades. That’s where the bulk of that money has been spent.

Gov. Gray Davis, who has made education a major theme of his administration, announced Tuesday that California will receive a $60-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to improve reading by children in the state’s poorest school districts. California was one of 10 states to receive the money and obtained the largest grant. Illinois received the second-largest sum, $37.9 million.

Also on Tuesday, Davis held a news conference to announce that Northern California developer Kenneth E. Behring is donating $7.5 million to expand an institute at UC Berkeley for educators who aspire to become principals. To be accepted, educators must be willing to work at least four years in urban public schools.

“We are making progress in California,” Davis said, again attacking Proposition 38, an initiative on the November ballot that would provide parents with $4,000 vouchers for private school tuition. Davis called the voucher proposal “a 180-degree retreat” from attempts to improve public education.

The report “gives us some guidance on what you need to spend the money on, but an equally important message is that you need to target the money toward particular groups of kids and particular schools,” said Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor who researches how student achievement is affected by culture and neighborhoods.

Spending money across the board on reforms such as smaller class sizes will have less of an impact than directing funds toward lower-income students, he said.

Grissmer calculated, for example, that $110 per pupil spent to lower class sizes for poor first- through fourth-graders would be expected to produce an achievement gain of about 3 percentile points. To achieve the same gain for affluent students, states would have to spend $260 per pupil.

Margaret L. LaMontagne, Bush’s education advisor, said the findings “set the stage for all the stuff the governor’s talked about on the campaign trail.”

But she acknowledged that Texas began lowering class sizes and investing in preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds in 1984, a decade before Bush took office. She highlighted the Grissmer finding that said Texas’ strong emphasis on test scores was the “only plausible” explanation for the fact that Texas made strong gains in the early 1990s.

“Until we did the accountability system, we weren’t seeing the gains and the closing of the gap” in scores between white and minority students, she said.

But Gore’s campaign used the Rand report to attack Bush on class-size reduction. Bush would end a Clinton administration effort to reduce class sizes nationally by providing federal support for hiring more teachers, Gore aides said. They also noted Bush has not proposed expanding preschool programs and that he would allow students at some failing schools to obtain tax funds to pay tuition at private schools.

“This report confirms that Al Gore has the right priorities to help improve our public schools,” Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway said.

The report was supported by the ExxonMobil Foundation, the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the federal education department and Rand itself. The full study is available at https://www.rand.org.

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Times staff writer Dan Morain in Sacramento contributed to this story.