Eastin Names Panels to Probe Education Failure : Schools: The move is designed to find reasons for dismal showing revealed this week in CLAS scores. Fundamental approaches to teaching will be examined.

They number 40 strong--school superintendents, business leaders, experts in the teaching of reading and math--and starting soon, they will be trying to sort out what went wrong.

Knowing that this week’s round of scores on the California Learning Assessment System would show in no uncertain terms that most of the state’s students are unable to read critically, write convincingly or apply math to real-world situations, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin has appointed two task forces to analyze the problems and make recommendations for fixing them.

But those panels, whose members Eastin announced Tuesday, must first reconcile competing views of what conclusions can be drawn from the dismal results. Have California’s education reforms strayed too far from the traditional approach, or has not enough been done to make them work in the classroom?

The CLAS tests found, for example, that 77% of the state’s fourth-graders, 61% of eighth-graders and 65% of 10th-graders performed at the lowest three of six possible levels in reading. Math scores were even worse, with 72% of fourth-graders, 77% of eighth-graders and 86% of 10th-graders performing at the bottom three levels.

As the task forces get down to the hard work of re-examining curriculum, pedagogy, textbooks, teacher training and other elements of the state’s instructional system, their members acknowledge that the first thing they will have to do is make peace among themselves.

How to teach reading and math have become matters of hot debate in recent years, with educators taking hard positions on whether curriculum reforms--such as those adopted as official state policy in California--are working.

California was a leader in adopting the “whole language” approach to reading, which calls for teachers to spend more time reading good stories to children than they do on specific skills such as spelling, the sounds of letters or syllables. That approach was supposed to instill in children a love of good stories that would give them the incentive to read early and often.

The math reforms began a decade or more ago and come from the perspective that mere multiplication tables and long division do not add up to how math is used on the job. Workers are expected to solve problems and know when and how to apply a variety of math tools. But critics of that approach, which the CLAS test was designed to assess, say reformers get ahead of themselves by not first laying a foundation of skills before going on to exercises stressing “higher-order” or applied skills.

Those in favor of the reforms contend that the failure of students to do well on the CLAS tests--which ask questions modeled on the progressive curricula--show how far California’s schoolchildren have to go.

Those who say the reform movement has neglected to emphasize the importance of fundamental skills think CLAS is irrelevant, specifically because it does not measure those skills.

Phil Daro, a math and testing expert with the California Math Project, will co-chair Eastin’s math panel and said he sees his job as moderating between those strikingly different conclusions.

In his view, the CLAS results are valuable because they provide solid evidence of what educators have suspected for a long time--that most students learn little more than basic arithmetic.

“If we had given this test 10 years ago, 50 years ago or 100 years ago, it would have given similar results,” he said. “The news is not that math scores have suddenly gone down, it’s that we’re facing for the first time, with this assessment, what we haven’t been doing for 100 years.”

UCLA psychology professor and panel member James Stigler said the test results do not necessarily indicate that the curriculum guidelines are not working, but only that they have not been implemented in the state’s schools.

Stigler has written a highly regarded study showing how the math abilities of American students lag far behind those of students in Eastern Europe, Japan and China. He said the state’s math curriculum has many strengths and incorporates much of how the subject is taught in Japan, which is considered by experts to have the preeminent system of math instruction in the world.

But, he said, “there is absolutely no research to indicate that the framework has been implemented” in California classrooms. . . . We go to all the trouble to develop and adopt as policy a framework, but we don’t find out if it has been implemented.”

The reading panel will focus on children learning to read in the early years--a key platform of Eastin’s education agenda.

San Diego businessman William Lynch, co-chairman of the reading panel, said the test scores showing that most California students cannot draw conclusions or analyze what they read comes as no surprise.

Unless children get a better foundation for reading in kindergarten through third grade, “you might as well turn out the lights and turn the keys over to the Japanese and the Germans down the road,” said Lynch, who started a foundation that helps school districts pay to train reading teachers.

The CLAS scores in reading “indicate that . . . California is at a real crisis point,” said Marian Joseph, a retired education official from the Bay Area who also sits on the reading panel.

She believes the state’s progressive reading curriculum went too far, and hopes the task force can help teachers strike a balance that restores systematic introduction of the elements of reading.

Eastin said her only direction to the panels will be to focus on how to make sure that children learn to read and to use essential math skills in the early grades. “I want them to say what’s wrong, what’s right and what’s to be done,” Eastin said of the panel members.

Eastin has asked the two panels to come back in four months with recommendations that can be acted on.

Complete CLAS Scores

* Complete scores for California Learning Assessment System testing of fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders at schools in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties are available on the TimesLink on-line service. Click on “Special Reports” in the State & Local section. Results are also available by mail from Times on Demand.

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