Valley Commentary : CLAS Test Receiving a Bad Rap : It’s simply about what happens in the classroom and preparing kids to meet tomorrow’s challenges. And that’s all.

There’s been an education witch hunt going on, with the California Learning Assessment System cast as the witch.

CLAS, the new statewide student achievement test, does not deserve the mistreatment. Notwithstanding what Gary Kreep and the United States Justice Foundation say, it isn’t a subversive attempt to delve into your child’s psyche.

Nor, despite extensive press coverage, are the first year’s scores invalid because only a handful of tests were scored. And it shouldn’t be canceled because of late delivery, nor dropped because it cost $24 million. It’s not about raising or lowering property values.

CLAS isn’t a whim. It didn’t appear overnight. Years of debate preceded its adoption. First we had to abandon the multiple-guess testing most of us grew up with. Memorizing minutia and disconnected factoids might win championships on “Jeopardy,” but multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank skills aren’t the ones our graduates need. People need to solve problems they have never seen before, make connections from various sources and communicate their ideas.

CLAS was designed to assess students’ higher-order thinking and guide teachers. It’s about what happens in the classroom. It’s about preparing kids to meet the challenges they will face when they leave school. That’s all, folks!

A test section might call for students to make a connection between what motivates a character in a story and what motivates them. CLAS, to a small degree, asks students to examine their lives at whatever level they are able.

Students are not encouraged to reveal family secrets. They have lives in the classroom, experiences with teachers and one another and thoughts of their own upon which they can reflect.

The tests require students, working in groups, to predict what they think might happen given a set of conditions, just as they might someday need to predict the outcome of a business decision before committing themselves to an action. In the language arts test, students must try to think like a character from a reading selection and then adopt an opposing point of view. A valuable skill? Of course! In the workplace one is frequently challenged to put one’s self into the mind of a customer, a co-worker, even the boss.

Because answers aren’t absolute, the tests have to be scored one at a time, by people, not Scantron machines. I never thought all the tests would be scored, and it doesn’t matter that they’re not. Teachers will teach to the test as long as any are scored.

The new tests will make teachers adjust the way they deliver information, and some are none too happy about it. It is challenging to prepare a student for a math question like the following: “A visitor from outer space has just arrived. It is confused about our number system. It asks you, ‘Is 5 + 29 equal to 529?’ Answer the visitor’s question and explain your answer.” Math teachers will have to move away from repetitious number drills into a deeper examination of how we identify a problem and then solve it.

The tests identify areas for improvement, and 1993 was only the first year. We have just completed giving the second round of tests. We hope to gain not another tool to determine where to buy a house but a better understanding of how students reason and how we educators can help them.

As schools, students and educators adjust to the new test, scores will improve.

I hope that in a few years we will be able to assess CLAS by the only criterion which really counts: Does it improve education? Until that time, forget the witch hunt and let’s get on with educating our students.