Of test scores, credit card charges, and where the truth really lies...

It's not just the sexual harassment lawsuit that has MPUSD's pants in a tizzy. Opponents to naming Alain Guevara as the new superintendent for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District are citing issues with how Lake Elsinore Unified, the district where Guevara comes from, failed to count migrant students scores in years past and how that inflated their schools and district  Academic Performance Index.

Here's a story about it, courtesy of the Press-Enterprise.

I talked to my personal test scores guru, Doug McRae, to ask his take on it. First of all, he says, a change in rules for API calculations is very different than a cheating scandal, what happened in Atlanta and Washington D.C.  And second he said that "virtually all school administrators in the state pay a lot of attention to API calculation rules, and if those rules permit a district to include or exclude certain students from their calculations and those inclusion/exclusion decisions positively affect their API's, they are likely to use the rules to their own advantage."

"It's not unlike deductions on your tax returns . . . . if you can legitimately claim a deduction, most folks claim it and reduce their taxes regardless whether they think the deduction is "fair" or not, regardless whether others are claiming the deduction or not. A lot of the inclusion/exclustion rules for API calculations are pretty arbitrary [just like rules for tax deductions]."

"But, it appears that Lake Elsinore was the beneficiary of previous rules for inclusion/exclusion of migrant students, at least in terms of absolute API scores, and when the rules changed they were no longer the beneficiary. It makes Lake Elsinore look bad when folks look at absolute API scores before the rules change and after the rules change. But, since the API system is based on changes not from year to year, but rather from base to growth where the rules are the same from base to growth, Lake Elsinore's API gain scores did not benefit from the change in rules."

It could have been, McRae conceded in a conversation, that Lake Elsinore officials were taking advantage of existing rules to make their API scores look better. To find out truly what the intentions were, we probably need a time machine to be sitting at the room where the decision was made.

We likely will never know.

Just like we probably won't know if John Ramirez, superintendent for the Alisal Union School District, really used his credit card in legitimate district business to stay at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco the first weekend in December.