Third Time May Be the Charm for State Tests

During his successful campaign for governor in 1990, Pete Wilson vowed to institute a statewide testing program to tell California’s parents--for the first time--whether their children were keeping up academically with their peers across the state.

Simple as that might seem, the state still--seven years later--is one of only a few in the country that doesn’t have such a test. But it can hardly be said that Wilson hasn’t tried.

His first attempt to deliver on his promise was known as the California Learning Assessment System and cost $50 million to develop--only to be dismantled after two years. Part of the problem was that it didn’t give marks for individual students despite assurances to Wilson that it would.

A second testing program began a year ago, but educators say it too does not accurately compare the students in one district against those in another--because they may be taking different tests. Again, Wilson had been assured such comparisons would be possible.

As a result, California has been without a statewide testing program since 1990, a lack that some see as the reason the state failed to recognize a decline in students’ reading and math skills.

On Tuesday, Wilson’s staff will explain to the Legislature his most extensive testing proposal yet. The plan, announced by the governor last week, would test all students in grades two through 11. And this time, Wilson wants to get back to basics.

Instead of creating a new test or allowing local school districts to choose their own, he wants the state to simply buy an existing test from a commercial publisher. While aides say the governor wants the test to be challenging, he also expects it to focus on fundamental skills--such as reading, writing and computing--and to produce scores for individual students.

Part of his motivation can be traced to that original campaign promise. There’s also the simple fact that the state’s healthy economy has provided enough money to pay for such testing.

Finally, Wilson wants to know whether the state is getting its money’s worth as it pours $1.5 billion next year into reducing the size of classes to no more than 20 students in kindergarten and grades one through three.

But the fact that the testing wouldn’t begin until next spring would limit its value in making such a cost-benefit analysis, experts said. Because the state was not testing student skills before the class-size reduction program began last fall, it would have difficulty determining whether the smaller classes are helping children learn.

Test publishers, meanwhile, are salivating over the $83-million price tag for the venture that would remove California from the list of seven states without statewide testing. The day after Wilson made his announcement, representatives of testing companies were on the telephone eager to make “meet and greet” appointments with Wilson’s office.

Though some teachers and superintendents worry that the tests would merely provide armchair critics with more ammunition to bash them for poor student performance--whether or not it has anything to do with the classroom--many school administrators welcome the proposal. It would help them see how their districts measure up, they say, even if they have to start over with a new test to get that information. It would also help determine whether the state’s efforts to overhaul math and reading instruction are working.

“As a superintendent, I’m very much in agreement that we need a state-mandated test,” said Vera Vignes, who heads the Pasadena Unified School District. “What’s important for us is showing and demonstrating improvement from year to year.”

But educators also are concerned with how the new Wilson proposal fits into an educational landscape that is already crowded with overlapping reforms and initiatives.

Teachers “have been through reform after reform after reform . . . and each one is supposed to be the panacea, the thing that’s going to make everything all right and all children learn equally,” said Tommye Hutto, a spokeswoman for the California Teachers Assn.

Just last week, for example, the state’s colleges and Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin sent every high school principal in the state a set of “standards” for what graduates should know in math and English. Eastin has a separate, though similar, set of standards she is pushing for the 56 districts so far taking part in a “Challenge” initiative, under which they agree to enact reforms such as increasing the number of classes required for graduation.

In addition, a 21-member Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards will begin holding public hearings next month on a draft document describing what the state’s students should learn at each grade in math, reading and writing.

All of those documents attempt to answer questions such as whether students should master algebra by the end of the eighth grade or the ninth grade. More concretely, what should be covered in an algebra class--factoring of simple equations or more? And, at a time when grade inflation is rampant and half of the students admitted to the California State University system must take remedial courses, how should competence be measured?

The commission was established as part of the testing program that got underway a year ago, based on a bill Wilson signed in 1995. It is supposed to recommend “world class” standards that will provide the basis for a customized statewide test to be ready sometime early in the next century--with the standards and tests designed to function as a compass for the $35-billion school system. That test, however, was not intended to produce scores for individual students.

The test Wilson now is proposing would produce such scores, measuring each student against an average, or “norm.” But some educators worry that the test runs counter to the kind they prefer--a “standards-based” test that determines whether students are meeting an objective, such as being able to “understand that numbers can be represented in different forms” including decimals, fractions and percentages.

“If he’s going to adopt a norm-referenced test, he might as well close down the standards commission,” said Judy Codding, a former Pasadena High School principal who sits on the panel.

Jerry Hayward, a co-director of the Policy Analysis for California Education think tank and one of the authors of the standards issued by Eastin and the state’s colleges, said he has “very mixed emotions” about Wilson’s plan.

On the one hand, he said, the state desperately needs more information about how its students are performing. On the other, the standards should shape the test, he said, not the other way around.

“I’m concerned that this could diminish the effectiveness of the standards in the long run,” Hayward said.

Others, however, don’t see a conflict. Instead, they see the proposed test as an interim source of information, to be used until the standards commission’s work is done. Then, the “off-the-shelf” test could be modified, replaced or even given side-by-side with the test based on California’s standards.

“It seems perfectly normal to me that the governor and the state superintendent and others would look at multiple approaches to solving our state’s problems with the goal of increasing student achievement,” said Ellen F. Wright, who chairs the standards commission.

If the Legislature goes along with Wilson’s idea, the State Board of Education would have to choose which tests to require at each grade. In addition to test publishers, school districts will be trying to influence that decision, because of the headaches involved in changing tests.

The Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County, for example, is one of four districts that have won state approval to use its own, self-designed standardized tests. Although it could continue to give those tests, in addition to the new statewide test, it would have to pick up the cost.

“If Sacramento has an open process, we think we can make a compelling case that the state should use our program,” said James A. Fleming, Capistrano’s superintendent.

The 670,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District began giving a new standardized test this spring, the Stanford 9, after committees of parents, teachers and students reviewed it and 11 others. Before giving the test, though, the district conducted 60 workshops for teachers, reprogrammed its computers to accept test scores in a new format and even ordered materials designed for pupils who are deaf or blind.

“We had to re-educate the parents, teachers and administrators . . . in terms of what the children are being tested on and what . . . the scores mean,” said Linda Lownes, the district’s testing coordinator. “We would certainly not like to have to repeat all of that immediately.”

Last year, the district adopted its own set of standards for what children should learn. If the state selects a test that does not match those, it will cause problems, said Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

“If it’s going to only approximate what is being taught, if it’s another example of testing something they didn’t teach, then first the teachers are going to be angry and then they’re going to disregard it,” Higuchi said.