All Students Deserve a Level Playing Field

When California this spring reinstituted standardized exams in reading, math and other skills, San Francisco schools set off a court battle by refusing to go along with one portion of the program pushed by Gov. Pete Wilson. They refused to administer the tests to 6,000 immigrant students attending schools here for less than 30 months and having limited English skills. Though the legal fight is far from resolved, San Francisco won the first round last week when a judge ruled that the state cannot force school districts to test--in English--immigrant students not fluent in the language. The state had wanted to exempt only students who had been in the country less than 12 months. San Francisco school Supt. Bill Rojas explains why he refused to test many immigrant students, and why he believes the new test is bad for others as well.

H.L. Mencken, in “Prejudices: Second Series” (1920), wrote, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.” This year, the hype and ballyhoo are focused on bilingual education and testing. The proposals presented are certainly neat, plausible and sadly wrong. Last fall, to great fanfare, Gov. Pete Wilson signed a $35.4-million mistake (which really costs $235 million when you consider the staff time devoted to administering the test), known as the Statewide Testing and Reporting program (STAR). Now the governor has thrown his weight behind another simplistic solution, Proposition 227, known as the Unz initiative. Unfortunately, such “one-size-fits-all” solutions to complex educational problems have not worked.

The governor believes the STAR program will hold schools accountable to the public. To quote the governor, “We must assure that every school meets a basic test of accountability.”

San Francisco Unified School District also believes in a strong accountability system. The primary objective is to support data-driven decision-making by school administrators and teachers to improve teaching and learning. A good accountability system includes a comprehensive testing program to measure student learning, a technology infrastructure to support data collection and analysis, strategies for recognizing success and solving problems, and a plan to educate administrators and teachers on the use of data to guide their planning, instruction and organization.

STAR is not an accountability system. It is simply a test. The STAR program mandated a single test, the Stanford 9 or SAT-9, that was given this spring to students in grades two through 11 in reading, writing and math. Ninth- through 12th-graders were also tested in science and history/social science. Will the test measure what students have been taught and have learned? No, it cannot.

California regretfully had not yet adopted and sanctioned standards when the State Board of Education mandated the test. It is premature and illogical to develop or select tests to measure student achievement on standards which do not exist. Common sense dictates that what you want to measure should be clearly defined prior to developing an instrument to measure it. As a result, SAT-9 will be an invalid measure of what children have learned.

People might say, “a test is a test,” and at least it tells us how our children are doing. Not so. A test only tells you what the test was designed to measure. There are major issues that pave the way for disaster with the SAT-9 test. For starters, if your child’s school focuses on one set of skills and the test the state chooses assesses problem-solving skills, your child will likely perform poorly--not because the child is not capable, but because the test is not testing what your child is being taught.

Another major flaw is the negative impact this test will have on California’s 1.3-million English-language learners. For them, this was not a test of their reading and math knowledge, but a test of their English language proficiency. If I were given a third-grade test in Russian, how would I do? I would fail. Does that mean I have not mastered third-grade academic skills? No. It means I do not know Russian. How could this distinction have been completely ignored by our governor and his appointed State Board of Education? If the state wants to measure language acquisition, there are tests designed for just that purpose. Students and their families should not be humiliated, and taxpayers should not waste their money on a testing plan that is designed to fail.

The nation’s leading research associations, such as the American Psychological Assn. and the National Council on Measurement in Education, agree that, “if English-language learners do not understand test questions due to unfamiliarity with the language of the test, interpretations of their scores as showing their actual achievement will not be valid. . . . Therefore, it becomes a difficult challenge for test users, educators, parents and the media to interpret the scores and make high-stakes decisions.”

Testing students in English who have no knowledge of English causes harm to students, as already experienced by some Los Angeles Unified School District students and reported in their declarations to a state court. Psychological research indicates that providing students with extremely negative and inaccurate feedback--feedback that underestimates their achievement--may result in less interest in academic-related tasks and lower academic performance in the future.

The State Board of Education and the governor still don’t get what it took the California Superior Court only two days of deliberation to figure out: It’s wrong to test students in a language in which they can’t even read the test.