The company is expected to provide corrected files to the state this week. The state last week estimated that between 230,000 and 250,000 students were misclassified. There are roughly 1.4 million LEP students in California. Across the state, news conferences pegged to the release of the test results were postponed, and officials from districts such as Oceanside Unified, which appeared to post remarkable gains in scores for LEP students on the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, announced that they would have to wait and see whether their results were affected by the error. The Oceanside district, where 21 percent of the 21,500 students are LEP, is being followed closely by people on both sides of the bilingual education debate because of its strict interpretation and implementation of Proposition 227, which California voters approved last year.
Students are then to be moved into mainstream classes.
While some districts have given parents waivers to keep their children in bilingual classes, which the law allows, Oceanside denied most of those applications and had no bilingual classes this year. Last month, district officials released their 1999 state scores, which showed increases as high as 475 percent over the 1998 results. But even with Harcourt's error, supporters of Proposition 227 expect to use the test results to show that teaching LEP children almost exclusively in English is best. With no LEP results to analyze, Ms. Eastin and local district leaders tried to turn attention toward increases for all students, which are reported as the percentage of students scoring at or above the 50th percentile. The scores were flat for 7th, 9th, and 11th graders in reading and for 9th, 10th, and 11th graders in social science.