Program Testing English Fluency Faulted

School officials across California are calling for an overhaul of a new program to test English fluency, complaining that the exam is poorly designed and too time-consuming to score, and even lacks a separate answer sheet.

“That’s Testing 101: Have an answer sheet,” complained Nancy Ritter, bilingual coordinator at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, where 1,000 students took the test.

The mounting criticism of the California English Language Development Test, first given to students this summer and fall, has prompted the state’s teachers union to weigh in on the issue and led the state to concede that changes are needed.

The test is intended to provide a standard way of tracking students who are not fluent in English--a fifth of California’s public school population. It is also given to students new to a district who come from homes where the primary language spoken is not English.

About 2 million students in the state took the test this year.

“It is a well-intentioned test that is just so cumbersome and expensive as to be ridiculous,” said Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Assn., who last month wrote a letter to the State Board of Education calling for the program to be revised.

Even the legislator who sponsored the bill requiring the statewide English testing says she’s worried about the future of the ambitious program.

The level of “dissatisfaction with the CELDT is troubling, to say the least,” state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) said in an October letter to California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin. “In fact, I am gravely concerned that the problems they raise and the resulting aversion for the test--if not addressed swiftly and fully--will undermine the success” of the exam.

That aversion was obvious last week in Santa Barbara at a state-sponsored gathering of bilingual directors and coordinators. A workshop on the test was filled to capacity, with organizers turning away attendees.

“It was almost a revolt; they had to ask us to be calm many times,” said Darci Knight, language acquisition coordinator for the Pleasant Valley School District in Camarillo, who attended the workshop.

State education officials say they are studying ways to make the test easier to administer.

“We always have bumps and scrapes through the first administration of a test,” said Paul Warren, deputy superintendent of accountability, “and this is one.”

But many local school officials say that although the idea for the exam was commendable, the implementation left much to be desired.

Their complaints range from grumblings about awkward instructions and layout to concerns about the length of time it takes for the tests to be scored.

The test takes about 2 1/2 hours to complete. Students often do the written part in class but are pulled out for the one-on-one oral portion.

The results will be used to make sure students are progressing from year to year, to place them in appropriate programs and to determine certain kinds of funding.

Setup Said to Distract, Intimidate Test-Takers

For the oral section, the exam booklet opens with one page facing the student and the other the tester. As the student listens to a recording and answers questions on one side, the tester marks on the adjacent page whether the answers were correct or incorrect.

The unusual design, with the tester sitting in close and marking as the student tries to continue with the next question, distracts and intimidates students, said those who have administered the tests.

“These students are already nervous,” said Jay Heck, the Garden Grove school district’s supervisor of assessment and registration. “This only adds to the problem.”

But perhaps the most vexing issue for many districts is that they have yet to receive any scores back from the state. The test were given between May 14 and Oct. 31, and the districts shipped the completed booklets to the state to be scored.

Warren said the bulk of the tests reached the state closer to Oct. 31, creating a backlog. But even districts that finished their tests early are sitting in limbo.

Without the results, they said, they are hampered in placing some of the students in the correct classes, and cannot apply for funds that depend on test results.

Only the final grades from the publisher will count as the official scores. Districts had the option of scoring the tests themselves, but many large districts said they simply did not have the resources to do so.

Critics point out that the state spent more than $15 million on the test this year, which does not include the estimated $20 to $30 per test spent by the districts. They say schools shouldn’t have to shell out even more resources to get timely scores.

“We rushed and we spent a lot of money,” said Knight, whose district administered 600 tests by June. “And, of course, we got no results.”

CTB/McGraw-Hill, the publisher of the test, said all the scores will be ready on or before Feb. 28--more than halfway through the school year--but could not say how much of the work had been completed so far.

“We don’t make that kind of data public,” said Michael Kean, a company spokesman.

The test’s critics say that scoring it is unnecessarily complicated, because there are no separate answer sheets for the multiple-choice section.

Most standardized tests, such as the SAT, include a separate sheet on which children fill in bubbles to indicate their answers. Schools then can easily score the tests by putting the sheets through their own scanning machines.

But there is no answer sheet for the English test; instead, students mark the answers in bubbles printed next to each question throughout the booklet.

CTB/McGraw-Hill will separate the booklets into individual sheets using a giant cutting machine and feed all the loose pages through its own scanners.

Educators See Value in Assessment Program

The publisher says the state did not ask for a separate answer sheet, perhaps because of cost. Warren, the state official, said he did not know why the decision was made not to have a separate answer sheet.

“I have asked the question myself,” he said.

Warren said the state will revise the test to lessen the burden on the districts, and is considering having the districts produce the official scores so they don’t have to wait for final results from the publisher.

Despite the criticisms, many school officials say they see the value of a statewide assessment program.

“You have to have some way to account for the 2 million kids in California who are not fluent in English,” said June Tait, assistant superintendent of the Magnolia School District in Orange County.