Lawsuit Challenges Basic Skills Exam for State’s Teachers : Education: Plaintiff who was once denied a job says the test required for California credentials does not adequately measure classroom abilities.

A lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court seeks to invalidate the basic skills test required of all prospective teachers in California on the grounds that it does not adequately measure teaching ability.

The civil rights lawsuit asks that the state be barred from administering the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST), which aims to make sure prospective teachers have fundamental reading, writing and mathematics skills.

The plaintiff, Venetta Greene, taught for six years in Los Angeles-area schools in the 1970s, and another five years in Denver public schools. After earning a master’s degree in education, she moved back to Los Angeles in 1984 and applied to renew her California teaching credential.

But in the interim, the state had adopted a requirement that all prospective teachers pass the CBEST before being allowed to work in public schools.

Greene sought a job as an English teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District and passed the district’s English proficiency exam, but failed the mathematics portion of CBEST by 4 points, the suit alleges.

At the time she was denied employment, Greene had “over 18 years of teaching experience, a bachelor of arts degree in English, a master’s degree in education and had received outstanding teaching evaluations,” the lawsuit says.

A year later, she passed the exam and has worked since as an English teacher in the Pomona Unified School District.

She is suing the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state of California and the state Department of Education for punitive damages and wages lost during the year she was not allowed to teach, and is seeking a ban on further use of the test to deny credentials.

“If you’re going to take a test to become an English teacher, you should have a test to measure your competency in that subject, or your skills in presenting that material,” Greene’s attorney, Leo James Terrell, said. “CBEST is nothing more than a general aptitude test.

“This is not to say we’re against tests, but this particular test is not related to the job performance. We’re simply telling the state to go back and come up with a test that is related to the skills that a teacher uses in the trade.”

Defendants had not received a copy of the lawsuit Thursday and would not comment on it. But officials at the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing have defended CBEST as a way to screen out teachers who lack broad general knowledge.

“One of the characteristics of any good teacher is the ability to model the attributes of well-educated adults,” commission official David Wright told The Times last fall, when a similar lawsuit was filed in Northern California. “Those attributes include reading with comprehension, writing with clarity and reasoning with numbers.”

The test was created by legislative mandate because of widespread dissatisfaction with teachers’ fundamental grasp of writing and mathematics skills. More than 30 other states also base teaching credentials on some type of basic skills test.

The Northern California challenge is a class-action lawsuit alleging that CBEST discriminates against black and Latino 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 last decade, 80% of Anglos passed the test, while 35% of blacks, 51% of Latinos and 59% of Asian-Americans passed, according to both lawsuits.

The requirement that prospective teachers pass the test allows school districts and the state to discriminate against qualified minority teacher applicants, the lawsuits contend.

Greene’s suit also alleges that neither the overall test content nor what constitutes a passing score has ever been validated as job-related. “Alternative, less discriminatory measures exist by which defendants can ensure that (teachers) possess the requisite job-related levels of reading, writing and math skills,” the lawsuit contends.