SANTA ANA : Trustees to Consider Status of CLAS Tests

At a school board meeting tonight, Santa Ana Unified trustees will consider withholding the standardized tests students took earlier this month from the state and requiring parental permission before students take the controversial tests in the future.

Tom Chaffee, a trustee who has strongly opposed the California Learning Assessment System test since it was introduced, suggested the idea of withholding the results as a form of protest against the exam, which has been a subject of growing criticism statewide. Chaffee previously led a move to allow Santa Ana parents to exempt their children from the CLAS exam, which the board passed 5 to 0; 122 district children formally opted out of the test this spring.

The plan to withhold the tests would apply to those taken this spring, while the parental permission would be required for future CLAS exams.

“I think this would be a very strong message to the state,” Chaffee said of withholding the tests. “Listening to the parents that have been calling me, I see that major problems and the major complaints, and I see that I didn’t go far enough (with the opt-out provision). I want to take it the next step further to show the state that parents are tired of these things going on in our schools.”

Chaffee has dim hopes for the proposal to withhold the tests but is more confident about the plan to require parental permission. Newport-Mesa Unified School District adopted a similar measure several weeks ago, and as a result only about one-fifth of that district’s eligible students took the tests.

CLAS is a performance-based assessment program that tests fourth-, fifth-, eighth- and 10th-graders in reading, writing, math, social studies and science. More than 1 million students in some 7,000 schools statewide were scheduled to take the exams this spring at a cost of $26 million, but mounting protests from conservative religious groups have led thousands of parents across the state to exempt their children from the tests.