Minorities, Citing Bias, Sue Over Test of Teachers’ Skills

SAN FRANCISCO — A group of minority educators filed a federal civil rights suit Wednesday seeking to bar use of the state’s test aimed at making sure prospective teachers have basic reading, writing and mathematics skills.

The class-action suit contends that the California Basic Educational Skills Test discriminates against minority job applicants by placing too much emphasis on mastering English and too little on teaching ability.

Of 350,000 applicants for teaching, counseling and administrative posts in the past decade, 80% of Anglos passed, while only 35% of blacks, 51% of Latinos and 59% of Asian-American job-seekers passed, the suit said.

The test, implemented by the state Legislature in 1983, was born out of wide dissatisfaction with teachers’ fundamental grasp of the traditional “three Rs.” Currently, more than 30 other states employ similar basic skills tests for teaching applicants.

Officials of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which was named as a defendant, declined comment on the suit. David Wright, the commission’s director of professional services, noted that the test was designed to screen out teachers unable to set a good example for students.

“There is broad concern . . . that one of the characteristics of any good teacher is the ability to model the attributes of well-educated adults,” Wright said. “Those attributes include reading with comprehension, writing with clarity and reasoning with numbers.”

A separate test, the National Teachers Exam, is given to applicants to measure their knowledge of the subject they teach, Wright said. The state relies on colleges and school districts to ensure that teachers have classroom teaching skills, he said.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court by the Assn. of Mexican-American Educators, the California Assn. for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education, and 11 individual educators.

The plaintiffs said the test violated the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, imposing requirements that were insufficiently job-related and inflicted a disproportionate adverse impact on minorities. They asked for an injunction barring the test as a requirement for a teaching credential.

“Nobody is saying that teachers shouldn’t have the three Rs, but there’s no proof that this test measures reading, writing and math skills at all--much less predict who will succeed in the classroom,” said John T. Affeldt, an attorney for Public Advocates, the public-interest law firm representing the test’s foes.

The suit notes that while 55% of students in California’s public schools are nonwhite, the teaching force is 82% white. Although the test has been given to hundreds of thousands of applicants, it has never been shown to adequately measure basic skills or accurately predict competent job performance, the suit said.

As a result, the suit said, the test has brought absurd results. Much-needed bilingual math teachers are denied jobs because they have not fully mastered English, it said, while proven administrators who haven’t studied geometry in decades are unable to take a job because of the test’s questions on math.

The suit included a wide range of claims of unfair treatment from the 11 plaintiffs. Florence Flores said she was denied a credential for an administrative post even though she had worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District for 25 years and won an Outstanding Educator Award from the school board in 1989 for her work as a bilingual teacher.