District Plans Legal Challenge to Tests in English

The Los Angeles Unified School District on Tuesday became the first California school system to head to court rather than comply with the new state mandate to test foreign-language-speaking children in English this spring.

Although specifics of the district’s legal challenge to the law remain to be determined in the coming weeks, attorneys said they will probably rely on laws protecting civil rights and equal opportunities.

However, school board members--voting 6 to 1 in favor of a proposal by Los Angeles Supt. Ruben Zacarias--made it clear that they want to change the law, not break it. The superintendent of San Francisco’s school district has threatened to take the more extreme measure of civil disobedience, while San Diego city schools are lobbying the state to report the scores of the non-English speakers separately.

“It’s important to note that this motion does not advocate that we violate any laws,” said board member Jeff Horton. “‘It’s unconstitutional and illegal to give a test to students in a language they cannot read.”

Board President Julie Korenstein asked: “Can you imagine a little child, a second-, third-, fourth-grader, who’s . . . taken the test and their parents get the results back and they’re zero?”

The new statewide testing law, with its English-only provision, was passed by the Legislature last year in a compromise to win Gov. Pete Wilson’s release of other education funding, including a cost-of-living increase. The state intends to post the test results on the Internet, increasing the sensitivity of some districts about how they will compare.

Principal Jose Velasquez, who runs the largest elementary school in the nation--Miles Elementary on the Eastside--accused the governor of acting in the interest of politics, not educational pedagogy. Wilson, he said, is “an unfriendly, unbending, openly hostile governor, whose battlefield for this confrontation is a Latino child’s education.”

Dan Edwards, spokesman for Wilson’s child development and education office, accused the district of using the court battle as a last-minute delaying tactic.

“Quite frankly, we see it as a very clear indicator that in this era when everyone says they are willing and ready to have more accountability, that certain people and certain educators will go to any length to avoid that,” Edwards said.

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Edwards said the governor wants to test all students to make it clear that “every kid matters.” He described as unfounded the concerns of some urban districts that testing non-English-speaking children in English will drag down their test results and make them appear less competitive with their suburban counterparts.

“There’s an assumption of insensitivity to that, that people don’t know that San Diego and L.A. and San Francisco have some specific populations that are going to score differently,” he said. “That’s a wrong assumption. . . . Everybody knows.”

Lone school board dissenter David Tokofsky echoed Edwards’ words in part, adding that the district should have launched its court challenge long ago if it intended to change the testing law.

“I don’t think tests hurt kids,” he said. “I think adults get hurt when their school and their district’s not doing as well as they should be.”

Tokofsky represents a heavily Latino district that stretches from the Eastside to Pacoima. He said he knew his opposing vote would be seized upon by his critics.

Until the court battle is resolved, the district intends to follow its past practice, which last year resulted in testing more than 330,000 English speakers in English and 90,000 Spanish speakers in Spanish. An additional 4,300 students were not tested, many because they speak languages for which there are no standardized tests.

But the board left open the possibility that it would eventually have to test all of the foreign language speakers in English as well.

“It might be we have to test them [in English],” Zacarias said after the early evening hearing. “I will respect the law.”