District Tries Test Scoring by Outsiders

They gripped their pencils and furrowed their brows Thursday morning, hunching over the taxing essay tests.

But this group was not taking an exam. They were the scorers of nearly 400 English tests taken by Los Angeles students earlier this month.

Unlike computers that scan bubble tests or the national assessment experts who rank written exams, the four dozen reviewers represent the students’ communities: teachers, principals and even parents, neighbors and potential employers.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the first districts in the nation to try what educators call “community scorings,” a new wave in testing philosophy in which knowledgeable community representatives join academic experts to evaluate standardized tests.

The scorers gathered at the teachers union hall to grade sample examinations, which were developed by local educators and could replace the controversial California Learning Assessment System test within two years.

Richard Alvidrez, a public education manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, became a scorer because of his concerns about literacy.

“Language is the heart of everything, of understanding,” Alvidrez said as he faced a tall stack of third-grade essays about a bilingual book. “When these kids grow up, if they don’t understand what we’re looking for in space, they’re going to say, ‘Why does this cost so much?’ ”

Janis Beckford, a veteran Los Angeles Unified teacher and graduate of the urban school system, said she has long been concerned about establishing cogent standards that can be measured by an annual test.

“We’re so isolated most of the time,” said Beckford, who teaches at Washington Prep High School in south Los Angeles. “Elementary teachers don’t have a clue of what high school teachers do, what kids will be expected to know. It’s very easy to pass the buck.”

The test they scored Thursday is envisioned as the local replacement for CLAS, the statewide assessment killed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1994 after parents objected to its probing questions. Like CLAS, the three-day local exam is intended to supplement multiple-choice tests by trying to determine students’ abilities to comprehend, write and analyze.

It is part of the Language Arts Project, a Los Angeles effort to develop curriculum and testing for English instruction. The exam is funded by the district and the Stuart Foundation. Similar projects began late last year in math, science and social studies.

The uproar over CLAS, which was graded by a select group of educators, prompted project director Charlotte Higuchi to include a broader community in developing English standards and tests and, finally, in scoring the exam.

“The public didn’t know what CLAS meant,” Higuchi said. “And really they can’t, until they do it themselves.”

Some worry that the new approach may not be enough to ward off a similar controversy. Like CLAS, the new test requires students to read and evaluate literature that touches on emotional subjects, such as racism.

“This is exciting, but I’m concerned because I want to make sure we’ve covered our bases with involving all the constituencies,” said school board President Mark Slavkin. “I don’t want us to have our own backlash.”

Scoring the test means ranking a student’s essay on a scale of 1 to 6 in four categories: general quality, organization, style and mechanics, such as spelling and grammar.

The assignment may be a cinch for teachers, who have red-penciled hundreds of homework assignments. But it challenges others.

Janet Lewis, the parent of a Dodson Middle School student, sighed as she looked at the first spate of samples Thursday morning, in which seventh-graders had been asked to read “The War of the Wall” by Toni Cade Bambara. Their essays answered questions about what it would be like to be a wall whose history of grime and graffiti was covered by a painted mural.

“I don’t know what seventh-grade writing should look like,” Lewis said.

Special education teacher Mary Honeyman, who works at Riverside Drive School in Sherman Oaks, coached Lewis to be patient: “The more you read, the more you get in tune with that grade level.”

And indeed, after reading through the writings, Lewis began to notice wide disparities. “You start to see what is pretty good and what is not,” Lewis said later in the day.

Ingredients of a Perfect Paper

Scorers of the Language Arts Project test judged essays from almost 400 students on a scale of 1 (minimal) to 6 (superior) in four categories. A top-scoring paper would meet these standards:

General quality: Follows the assignment, clearly expresses ideas and conveys a distinct point of view.

Organization: Has a clear topic, makes explicit connections among ideas and has a clear sense of beginning and end.

Style: Uses a clear and consistent voice while exhibiting command of writing techniques such as vivid images and variation in sentence patterns.

Mechanics: Be completely free of errors. Should also use complex sentence structure.