In Search of Excellence in California Schools : Test results are dismaying, but we need honest assessments

Standards of excellence are not easy to meet, and they are not supposed to be. But excellence is more easily aspired to.

California did just that when it took up the new and academically rigorous state testing system dubbed the California Learning Assessment System. The first results are in. And those results are, as Acting State Superintendent of Public Instruction William D. Dawson put it in notable understatement, “not pretty.”

The tests, administered last spring to 1 million public-school students in the fourth, eighth and 10th grades, show that California students, even in affluent school districts, score abysmally low in math, demonstrating “limited mathematical thinking.” That was true of at least one-third of all students in each grade tested, and that was true of 80% of those tested in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Orange County fared better, but even in the top school districts there, two-thirds of students scored at the lowest three levels.

Reading and writing scores were better for all students statewide, but they still showed significant gaps in comprehension and the ability to express themselves clearly and cogently.

Unfortunately, news about disappointing academic performance by California students is no longer a novelty. What’s different now is that the testing system is measuring students against highly challenging state standards. No more scoring “on a curve” by comparing students to one another. Now tests are “performance-based,” allowing students to demonstrate what they have learned, and whether they understand what they have learned.

Unlike previous tests, which were scored by machines, these tests are scored by specially trained teachers. Moreover, eventually each student, not just each school, will be evaluated. That will cost about $55 million, a jump of more than $40 million over the old testing costs.

The price tag alone will make CLAS the subject of political scrutiny in Sacramento. And that virtually guarantees the test will be the object of much political heat. It’s already started, in fact. The low results are hard to swallow for many school administrators, teachers and parents. And no doubt some kinks in testing procedures are likely to be found and will need to be worked out.

But politicians who hold the purse strings to funding the new state test, still in its infancy, must not overreact to complaints about it. The CLAS test must have a chance to work. It is not a simple proposition to move the nation’s most populous and diverse state from standardized tests that stress memorization and multiple choice to a test that sets out to determine how well the state’s children are actually being educated.

California business leaders, who need literate employees able to think on their feet, solve complex problems and communicate well with their colleagues are depending on the new testing system to improve education standards. Most important, California students are depending on the CLAS test to give them an honest assessment of how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.