A Test of Resolve

State law requires all of California’s public school pupils in grades 2 through 11 to take a standardized basic skills test in English, regardless of their proficiency in the language, to indicate how well our schools and education reforms like class-size reduction are working. Yet the Los Angeles Unified School District is sending out notices in effect encouraging parents to exempt their children from the testing. In parts of Orange County and San Diego, educators are telling children not to take the test if they don’t understand it. It’s rank cowardice for school officials to have limited-English-speaking students skip the test. Without testing this year, how can school districts measure improvement? Unless, of course, they don’t expect to see any.

Though the LAUSD has taken no formal position on who should be tested in English, school board member Victoria Castro and others are encouraging community groups to spread the word to parents about their right to refuse testing for their children. There is nothing illegal in this approach, but it’s wrong. The children whom Castro says she wants to protect are the very children whose educations and job futures are most jeopardized by this shortsighted approach.

In San Francisco, Supt. Bill Rojas, with the backing of the school board, is exempting the district’s limited-English students from the test unless the parents or teachers explicitly request that the pupils be tested. Delaine Eastin, the state superintendent of public education, vows to sue the school district if San Francisco persists with this illegal policy. Eastin, no fan of universal standardized testing in English, believes the law is the law. She is right.

The Los Angeles and San Diego districts have repeatedly asked the state to separate out from the overall results the test scores of children who are not proficient in English. Current law doesn’t allow that, but a bill, AB 1763, sponsored by Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni (D-San Rafael), would require test results to be reported on the basis of such factors as income, gender, district size, years of enrollment and language skills. This method would provide useful information to educators.

Another bill, AB 1815, introduced by Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) on behalf of the San Francisco school district, would exempt limited-English children who had been in the school district less than 30 months and also calls for fairer reporting of the results. That too is an educationally sound approach. Breaking the law, as the San Francisco district plans to do, is not.

Some administrators and teachers worry about the self-esteem of youngsters who do poorly on the test. They will have to answer an obvious question for the parents who want the results of testing to serve as a public hammer for improvement: How much self-esteem will a child have if he or she leaves the public schools unable to read and write English?