Test Given to Teaching Job Candidates Upheld as Legal

A federal judge has upheld the legality of the test used by the state since 1983 to ensure that candidates for teaching jobs possess the equivalent of 10th-grade reading, math and writing skills, rejecting a claim that it violated the civil rights of minority test-takers.

The order issued late Tuesday by Judge William H. Orrick of the U.S. District Court of Northern California came in the nation’s largest-ever employment discrimination lawsuit, which sought damage awards for more than 50,000 minority job seekers who have failed the California Basic Educational Skills Test over the past 14 years.

The plaintiffs in the case--filed in 1992 on behalf of eight unsuccessful test-takers and three groups representing minority educators--contended that the test was partly to blame for the state’s failure to hire enough minority teachers to reflect the diversity of the state’s 5.4 million students. Forty percent of those students are white compared to 80% of their teachers.

But Orrick ruled that “the state is entitled to ensure that teachers and others who work in the public schools possess a minimal level of competency in basic reading, writing and math skills before they are entrusted with the education of our children.”

Passage of the test is one of several requirements for those seeking teaching, counseling and administrative credentials. It consists of multiple-choice questions in reading comprehension and mathematics and two essays to measure writing skills. It is given six times a year, and test-takers can take the portions they do not pass as many times as necessary. Every public schoolteacher in California must pass the CBEST before entering a classroom.

San Francisco attorney John Affeldt, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said he expects to appeal the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The state already has spent more than $2 million defending the test.

Affeldt said eliminating or reducing the scope of CBEST is even more important, now that the state is engaged in an unprecedented drive to recruit as many as 19,000 teachers to reduce the ratio of students to teachers to 20 to 1 in primary grade classrooms.

“The state . . . is going to need new teachers and if they are all monolingual, white teachers, then we’re going to have done a tremendous disservice to the students of color in the future work force,” Affeldt said.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin welcomed the ruling, saying that had the CBEST been invalidated, it would have set back the state’s efforts to improve the quality of its teaching force.

“We ought to be having a very serious discussion about how to bring more minority teachers in, but it ought not be at the expense of standards,” Eastin said.

Gov. Pete Wilson said the ruling should reassure parents. “This judgment makes a strong and prudent statement about CBEST as a fair and practical measure of teachers’ knowledge and ability to instruct our children.”

Former state Sen. Gary Hart, who authored the legislation that created the test and who testified on its behalf during the trial earlier this year, also applauded the ruling.

“If this had gone the other way . . . it sure would have sent the wrong message,” he said. “If you can’t have something as fundamental and straightforward and relatively easy as the CBEST, I don’t know where we could turn.”

A key issue in the case had been whether the CBEST, which was created amid concern in the California Legislature over the skills of the state’s teaching force, constituted an employment test.

Orrick decided, in a 1993 pretrial ruling, that the CBEST was indeed an employment test because it was required by the state only for public schoolteachers. And, as such, it had to satisfy stringent federal standards barring discrimination and had to cover material directly related to job performance.

In response, the state modified the exam last year to give test-takers more time and removed most of the algebra and geometry from the math portion of the test.

In his 71-page ruling Tuesday, Orrick said the new test met federal standards even though different ethnic groups pass it at dramatically different rates.

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Eighty percent of white applicants pass on their first try, while the rate is 38% for African Americans, 49% for Mexican Americans and 60% for Asian Americans.

Orrick acknowledged that the test had an “adverse impact” on minorities. But the judge agreed with state experts who testified that its purpose was not to predict who would make the best teacher but only to ensure that all teachers had a minimum level of basic skills in reading, writing and math.

During the trial, the state’s attorneys introduced as evidence what experience had shown to be the hardest question on the revised math test.

That question asked how many students could be served a half-pint of milk from a five-gallon container. Knowing that a gallon contains 16 half-pints, it’s a matter of simple multiplication to determine that 80 students could be served. But only two of every five test-takers answered that item correctly last year.

The plaintiffs contended that the test was too hard, citing the fact that about a quarter of recent college graduates and 45% of teachers now in the classroom who take the test while seeking promotions fail it.

“The fact that such an extraordinary number of college graduates, many of them from elite institutions, fail the CBEST is convincing evidence that the CBEST cut score is too high,” plaintiffs argued, in a post-trial brief filed with the court.

On the contrary, the state’s legal team argued, the high number of failures demonstrated that many applicants lack basic skills and that “the higher the failure rate . . . the greater the demonstrated need for the test.” Affeldt charged that CBEST was created “for symbolic political reasons and not for reasons . . . related to improving educational outcomes for kids.”

They suggest a range of remedies, such as lowering the test’s passing score, eliminating certain items they feel reflect bias or, at least temporarily, adjusting test results based on the race of the test-taker.

But Orrick rejected those alternatives, contending that college degrees, classwork and grade point averages cannot guarantee that applicants possess the knowledge essential for teachers.