Inquiry Into English-Only Tests Ordered

In a report likely to add to controversies already swirling around California schools, a presidential advisory commission said Wednesday that making children with limited English skills take tests written only in English and using the results to decide such pivotal questions as promotion or graduation may violate their civil rights.

The commission called on the U.S. Department of Education, which is charged with enforcing federal civil rights laws as they apply to schools, to investigate such uses of so-called English-only tests.

“State education leaders have compromised the future of Latino students by making high-stakes decisions based on inaccurate and inadequate information,” said the report by the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

The Education Department reacted cautiously to the latest news from what has become treacherous territory in both policy and political terms because it is part of the larger realm of bilingual education.

“We appreciate the attention to this area,” department spokesman Rodger Murphey said. “We will look at this report, as well as the body of information we collect, as we plan our . . . activities.”

Murphey said the department’s Office of Civil Rights Compliance has previously investigated and pursued cases involving the testing of students with limited English skills and is developing cases in Texas and Nevada. He declined to provide details on the pending investigations.

The issue of English-only tests for students with limited proficiency in the language is particularly sensitive in California. More Latino children with limited English proficiency are enrolled in schools here than in any other state. And standardized tests, many of them English-only, are likely to play important roles in new educational policies that are being formulated.

Under a new policy mandating an end to social promotion, for example, school districts are in the process of developing criteria to be applied to students in the second, third, fourth, fifth and eighth grades. English-only tests are likely to be part of such criteria.

Testing also will play a role in the state’s new accountability system for rating the performance of individual districts, though final decisions on exactly how such data will be used have not been made.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said she agrees that using English-only tests is “a serious problem for children who have been in school a short period of time.” She favors giving such tests to students with limited English proficiency only after they have attended U.S. schools at least two years.

“Some rule of reasonableness should apply,” she said, calling use of English-only tests with children new to the language “ham-handed.”

But she said that, as a result of the controversy over bilingual education, “right now California is confused. A lot of people in Sacramento are like deer in the headlights.”

Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) is the author of a bill on Gov. Gray Davis’ desk that would limit the use of English-only tests in measuring school districts’ performance.

“Testing scholastic aptitude in English when students haven’t had a chance to learn the language in which the test is written is unfair,” she said.

Critics of bilingual education, on the other hand, argue that children with limited English skills will suffer in the long term if they are permitted to continue learning and being tested in their native languages.

In Washington, the Center for Equal Opportunity, headed by former Ronald Reagan administration official Linda Chavez, has been among the leading critics of using bilingual strategies for Spanish-speaking students.

“You want to make sure kids don’t graduate with a degree that they can’t even read,” Jorge Amselle, the center’s vice president for education, told Associated Press. “The purpose of education in the United States is to prepare students to survive and succeed in this society, and that requires mastery in English.”

Echoing that view, the panel said that even children with limited English who are not troubled by poverty will fail to succeed in school if they do not learn English.

Under a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, schools are required to provide assistance to students with limited English skills. But the extent of that assistance and its duration remain matters of dispute.

The Education Department investigates language issues under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

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Times staff writer Richard Lee Colvin in Los Angeles contributed to this story.