SIMI VALLEY : State’s CLAS Test Comes Under Fire

About 125 Simi Valley parents attended a meeting Tuesday night to hear criticism of a new state assessment test that will be given in the city’s public schools the next few weeks.

During the meeting at the Clarion Hotel, two local elected officials attacked the California Learning Assessment System, or CLAS, for being too subjective and for questioning students about their personal beliefs.

Both Mildred Lynch, a member of the Conejo Valley school board, and Wendy Larner, a member of the Ventura County Board of Education, said some of the passages used in the test could be disturbing to students.

“They broach intimate and possibly sore and sensitive subjects,” Larner said.

“Instead of saying there is a right or wrong answer to the test, they want to know how much you feel about it or how deeply you think,” parent Coleen Ary said in an interview before the meeting, sponsored by Citizens for Truth in Education. The group was formed in the fall to fight efforts to include information about birth control in the Simi district’s curriculum on sex education.

Ary said the group, which has about 25 active members, paid to rent the room at the Clarion and passed out 600 flyers to publicize the meeting.

However, one Simi Valley math teacher called Tuesday’s presentation unbalanced. “I would have liked to have seen someone give out a well-thought-out second side to this issue,” said the teacher, who declined to give her name. “Fifty-two percent of what they said I agree with, but there were a lot of fallacious arguments too.”

State education officials have touted the CLAS exam as an innovation in testing methods that is intended to measure critical thinking skills. Unlike previous standardized tests with multiple choice questions, CLAS emphasizes writing and asks students to explain how they came up with their answer. The exam was given statewide for the first time last year.

While Ary said organizers of the Simi Valley meeting are not trying to organize a boycott of the tests next week, she said a number of parents are already planning to keep their children home.

In Thousand Oaks, about two dozen parents kept their children out of school Monday morning, the first day of the CLAS tests in several elementary schools, school officials and parents said.