Zacarias Seeks to Defy Wilson on Tests in English

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias recommended Monday that the school system break with Gov. Pete Wilson’s English-only testing program and continue to administer tests to tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking students in their native language.

A majority of Board of Education members said they endorsed Zacarias’ recommendation, adding the Los Angeles school district to a growing list of large urban school systems across California that call Wilson’s testing program unfair and misdirected.

Echoing complaints lodged by other school systems, board members said that such a mandatory test would place non-English-speaking students at a disadvantage and skew statewide results.

“We have a hard time understanding why the state would have hundreds of thousands of children take a test they don’t understand,” said Board of Education President Julie Korenstein. “Many of the board members are very concerned about testing children in a language they cannot read.”

Other school board members lodged their own complaints. “It’s a useless test,” said board member Jeff Horton. “It doesn’t help in analyzing a district’s progress.”

Wilson’s press secretary, Sean Walsh, said Zacarias’ recommendation was of grave concern to the governor, who believes comprehensive testing in English is necessary to measure the success of educational reforms, including class-size reduction and phonics-based instruction.

“It appears the L.A. Unified District wishes to avoid accountability,” Walsh said. “They assume that every child who is limited English-proficient fits into one little barrel, meaning that they don’t understand any English at all. They seem to ignore the fact that by testing the students in English and Spanish, that they can compare what school sites and classrooms are doing a better job at mainstreaming limited English speakers into English competency.”

It remains unclear what sanction, if any, the school district might face for defying the testing mandate. The state law requiring the tests does not specify a particular penalty.

Doug Stone, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, urged the district to follow the law. The department had lobbied against the testing bill.

Zacarias recommended that the district stay with its existing testing policy--administering the Stanford Nine exam to students fluent in English but giving the Spanish-language Aprenda test to an estimated 150,000 Spanish speakers who are not proficient enough in English to take the English-language test.

The board will consider Zacarias’ proposal next Tuesday. It also directed its staff Monday to sign a contract with Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement, the publisher of the Stanford Nine exam.

The district’s efforts follow action taken by the San Diego Unified School District last week. The San Diego school board reluctantly agreed to administer the test to all of its students--including an estimated 20,000 who do not speak English--on the condition that the state report the results separately for English speakers.

If the state refuses to report the results separately, the district will not administer the test to students who do not understand English, the board decided.

Officials in the San Francisco Unified School District have also expressed opposition to the state’s testing plans.

During a state legislative hearing last week on school accountability, San Francisco Supt. Bill Rojas threatened a lawsuit against the state, saying that the English-only test would discriminate against Spanish-speaking students.

San Francisco district spokeswoman Gail Kaufman said the requirement that every student take the exam in English is inherently unfair in a district in which 32% of the 66,000 students in kindergarten through high school do not speak English as their primary language.

“That is like giving everybody in the country a test in Chinese and saying that will test your subject mastery,” she said.

Wilson pushed particularly hard to get the testing bill passed by the Legislature last fall. A standardized test, he and others argued, would make it possible to compare the performance of school districts, schools and even individual students across the state. One of the main objections raised by many educators at the time was his insistence on finding out how well children can read and comprehend English.

According to the law, all students in second through 11th grade must be tested in English. For students who attended California schools for less than a year, districts are also required to give a test in the student’s primary language, if such a test exists. The law gives districts the option of providing non-English tests--in addition to the mandated English-language exams--for students who have been in the country for more than a year.

The state reimburses districts for the required test. It is unclear whether the state would reimburse districts for giving students who have been in the country than a year a native-language test, but not the English one.

In other action Monday, the school board:

* Voted to cover nearly $1 million in first-year costs of a plan to plant thousands of trees in place of asphalt on playgrounds across the district. The proposal’s ongoing costs--estimated at $2.5 million annually--will also be funded and 62 gardener positions will be restored over five years after being eliminated by budget cuts.

* Introduced a proposal to equip Los Angeles school police cars with shotguns. The plan will return to the board for a vote at its next meeting Feb. 23.

* Directed two board committees to examine a proposal for creating a task force that would link staff accountability to student performance. District employees would be evaluated based on student achievement under the proposal, which is expected back at the board Feb. 23.

Times staff writers Richard Colvin, Doug Smith and Mary Curtius contributed to this story.