Schools Say Fitness Test Results Are Misleading : Education: Few L.A. students passed the state’s first fitness test. School district officials say many schools did not give the full exam last spring because of labor unrest.

Results of statewide tests which showed that few Los Angeles students are physically fit are misleading because students at many schools did not complete the exam, Los Angeles school officials said Thursday.

Teacher boycotts and a shortage of school days after a nine-day teacher strike forced many schools to skip parts of the test, resulting in the automatic failing of their students, officials said.

“This is not an honest evaluation of what our kids did,” said Diana Munatones, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Our teachers had boycotted a lot of their responsibilities, with some teachers giving the test while others didn’t. Others administered only part of the test.”

The results of the first statewide fitness tests released by the state this week indicated that Los Angeles students performed at less than half the fitness levels of other California students on the test given last spring to fifth-, seventh- and ninth-graders. Only 6% of the district’s fifth-graders, 8% of the seventh-graders and 10% of the ninth-graders passed.

Developed by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, the state test requires students to pass all four parts: flexibility, sit-ups, pull-ups and a one-mile walk/run.

Some school principals said they skipped the one-mile walk/run because by the time classes returned to normal after the strike, the weather had become too hot and smoggy for such exertion.

“In my judgment it was too hot for the run,” said Sue Beever, Cantara Street elementary school principal. “Without a strike, we’d have had time to reschedule it. But this was in June.”

That decision by Beever put her school among the more than 100 other Los Angeles schools that flunked the test.

The tests, given to nearly 800,000 students, are the newest part of the California Assessment Program, which also evaluates individual school performance in academic subjects such as reading and mathematics.

The purpose of the CAP tests is to give parents and other community members an accurate measure of how well their neighborhood schools are preparing students.

Statewide, 26% of ninth-graders passed, but only 15% of the fifth-graders and 20% of the seventh-graders passed. In Los Angeles County, 21% of the ninth-graders passed, while 17% of the seventh-graders and 13% of the fifth-graders passed.

Thirteen-year-old girls were able to pass if they did one pull-up, ran a mile in 10 1/2 minutes, did 35 sit-ups in one minute and were able to stretch 25 centimeters--about 10 inches--from a sitting position.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that regardless of Los Angeles’ results, statewide results confirm suspicions that youngsters are more inclined to sedentary activities, such as watching television, than youth in the past.

Even if the Los Angeles results are inaccurate, Honig said, “So what? It’s clear that everyone has a lot of work to do.”

State Department of Education spokesman William L. Rukeyser said Los Angeles school officials complained about having to give the fitness test during the troubled spring semester.

“But it’s not clear whether they said it was not going to be accurate or whether it was just going to be inconvenient,” Rukeyser said. “I know only that they resisted the test, which is required under state law.”