Followup on Oceanside: Communications with Ron Unz

by Kenji Hakuta

Sept. 1, 2001

A few days after I posted my quick commentary on Oceanside's SAT-9 scores on August 18, I received communications from Ron Unz both on voice mail and e-mail responding to my comments about his silence. He asserted that Oceanside had redesignated "something like 20% of all their most successful LEPs. Surely you must realize that removing the most successful 20% of the students in any group would tend to depress the average test scores of the remaining 80%." He also asked to have lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club, which I obliged (and even paid for) on August 29. He then hurriedly posted an e-mail to his distribution list that included an opportunitistic reference to our lunch in which he states: "The extraordinary hunger of these bilingual activists for even the smallest shred of hope is shown by the recent reaction to a short note which Prof. Hakuta added to his personal web page while on vacation in Hawaii: without closely checking the facts, he mistakenly suggested that pro-"English" Oceanside had performed poorly on this year's test scores.  Within just 48 hours, that casual and mistaken internet posting was being distributed by bilingual activists throughout Arizona and the rest of America as formal research conclusively "proving" the failure of Proposition 227, a development that astonished and horrified the good professor when we recently had lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club." Click here for the full e-mail he circulated on Aug. 31.

Here are some observations about that lunch, etc. from my perspective:

• He acknowledged that he had not written anything about the 2001 SAT-9 scores until my piece had come to his attention, and so he felt compelled to post the (general) piece on his website (which still does not acknowledge the stalled scores at Oceanside).
• On the point about the effect of redesignation on LEP performance, I said that surely if a high redesignation rate this year depressed scores, a low redesignation rate in the previous years had inflated Oceanside scores when the "miracle at Oceanside" was being touted. I said that I would accept his argument about a high redesignation rate lowering scores if he accepted the argument that a low redesignation rate would increase scores. He responded that the redesignation concept is silly to begin with.
• I suggested that if he agreed, I could go seek funding to do a careful and objective analysis of Oceanside and a few other selected school districts in which we could effectively control for the redesignation issue by analyzing scores for language minority students who at some point in their educational careers had been designated English Learner, regardless of their current status. I said that we would need his involvement in order to get Oceanside to buy into the idea. He was not interested and said that all the necessary evidence on the success of bilingual education is already available.
• Contrary to his e-mail in which he indicated my astonishment and horror at the evidence regarding Oceanside, the only data that he showed me when we had lunch were numbers that did not include this year's data; in addition, the data reported bogus statistics averaging LEP percentile scores across Grades 2-6, and also reporting percentage increase in a completely flawed use of statistics. Click here for a photoimage of the table that he showed me to argue that Oceanside was a success.
• He clearly had not seen the numbers associated with my comments on Oceanside, which he dismisses as something that I quickly wrote while on vacation in Hawaii (the Hawaii part is true, but the page also links to an Excel table with the numbers). The results and conclusions are far from "casual and mistaken" as Ron Unz charges. I have taken the same numbers from the Excel table, for 2nd and 3rd graders since those grades are where the effects of Proposition 227 might be most readily seen, and graphed them. The results should now be much more obvious, even to those who would like to believe in the Oceanside miracle. So, please click here for the Powerpoint slides showing that Oceanside scores for LEP students have hit a wall. The story that these pictures tell is categorical in supporting my contention that "the real story of interest is that after three years, Oceanside finally managed to drag its test scores from rock bottom up to the statewide average for EL students. This is not a story about excellence, hardly a miracle."

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