A Test That’s Costing Us Real Teachers : CBEST discriminates against fine educators who aren’t white and middle class.

Are you old enough to remember poll taxes and literacy tests? The two measures combined to disenfranchise 4 million black voters in seven states for the first six decades of this century. Congress supported this exclusion of black voters by killing 18 bills introduced to end the poll tax. In 1952, there were 10 million black Southerners and not a single black representing them in Congress.

Northern liberals are fond of believing that we tolerated no such discrimination. But if we are going to deal with the racial divide in America, we must acknowledge that the playing field is no more level in California than it is in Louisiana and that the current legal barriers to equal progress look just as reasonable to many white Californians as the poll tax looked to all those Congressmen who voted to keep it.

Education has its own racial literacy test that stops 50% of the African American, Latino and Asian college graduates who would like to teach from doing so. If it is allowed to stay in place, California’s public school children, 60% of whom are non-Anglo, will soon be taught by a teaching force which is only 10% non-Anglo. The test, known as CBEST, introduced with the stated intention of “raising standards,” has had no perceptible impact on the quality of education except the negative impact of preventing nonwhites from entering the field of teaching.

Public Advocates, the law firm that sued to equalize school funding, has brought suit against the test on behalf of 50,000 Latino, African American and Asian American educators and several civil rights organizations, including the Assn. of Mexican American Educators. Lead attorney John Affeldt says that it is the largest pending education/employment class action lawsuit in the country.

The lawyer who is defending the test, Lawrence Ash, claims that it is used to avoid the “bottom of the barrel” in the pool of applicants. Calling 60% of African American and 55% of Latino and Asian college graduates the “bottom of the barrel” makes him sound like education’s own Mark Fuhrman. Unlike Ash, I believe that much of the bottom of the barrel is filled with whites who had no trouble passing CBEST but are inadequate in the classroom.

Several skinheads (neo-Nazis) earned teachers’ credentials in the Bay Area recently. They had passed CBEST and are now eligible to accept jobs in any of California’s overwhelmingly nonwhite school districts.

This state has thousands of “bilingual” teachers who speak only English but are hired by desperate urban school districts because they have passed CBEST and promise to take some language classes.

One of the best high school English and Spanish teachers I have ever observed is a Latina who was recently fired from her job because she cannot pass the math portion of the CBEST. Her students cried on the day she left, complaining, “She never taught us any math anyway. This is a high school English class.”

Do I care whether teachers can read and write? Of course. I also care whether they can teach. The state has multiple measures of teachers’ basic skills. The addition of CBEST does nothing to demonstrate whether they can communicate information to students.

The problem with CBEST, as with every standardized test, is that it discriminates against nonwhite candidates and those of lower income. It is in the nature of such tests that people are measured against a standard based on the performance of the mainstream white American male. By definition, a portion of test-takers must fail and that portion is arbitrarily decided by a test-maker or politician. The tolerance of 50% to 60% failure rates for African Americans, Latino and Asian college graduates speaks to a built-in racism in California’s education and testing establishment, and it is depriving California children of desperately needed nonwhite teachers who come from the urban communities where they are needed to teach.

To defend CBEST without implementing drastic measures to ensure an ethnically representative teaching force is to make clear the low priority that much of the state’s education establishment places on racial justice.