A Touch of CLASs

Wednesday, April 5, 1995

When I first started teaching, way back when, the state of California used to have what was called the CAP (California Assessment Program) test, which was given to students at various grades; this combination reading, writing, and mathematics test was used to measure the achievement of California's students and to compare the students of individual counties, districts, and schools. It was kind of a public report card, something onto which the media could cling when discussing the state of the state’s educational system.

In those years, schools, PeeVee included, used to make attempts to "beat the CAP." PeeVee used to do intensive training in the senior English classes, then offered pizza parties to raise the number of students taking the test (until of course it was learned that sometimes it is better for the school if some students continued to be truant on test days, allowing for an "acceptable" absence percentage while testing a stronger student demographic). "CAP crap," as it was called, was vital to the school since this was one of those all-important report-cards. If one did well on the CAP, then the heat--public, county, district heat--was off until the next big report card.

In the past few years, in an attempt to remove the "multiple-guess" aspect and onus from the CAP, the state's educator/legislators made wholesale changes in the test, creating a whole new animal... the CLAS (California Learning Assessment System) test. The state-ed purpose was to raise to a "demanding" level the expectations of and for our students to be "top students." This new test would not be graded simply pass/fail, but rather on a continuum from 1 to 6, thus showing higher levels of achievement. A score of one demonstrated little or no understanding, a six advanced mastery of the material (the kind of mastery that species, the mythical "top student," would have), with a three showing a basic and general understanding. Scorers the first year, including Lisa, were instructed that threes would be a pass on an old-style pass/fail test.

Most teachers I know found the change very positive. Now the test would be looking at the process of student learning, what students do (and what they've been taught to do) when they are reading, writing, and making mathematical computations. Each area tested would include a written essay by the student, explain her/his responses. Thus, the end product answer was only part of the student response, and the process of finding that answer, of attacking the question, now became part of the student response and could be analyzed.

This new slant on compositional support of the students’ answers created the first problems last year. Analyzing and scoring written responses is not easy--ask any writing teacher--and it is definitely more time-consuming (the tests administered one spring would have their results released the following spring). Econ 101: Time = Money. Thus, grading the new CLAS test was expensive. So, in a brilliant cost-cutting measure, the state decided to grade only "sample" student tests from two years ago and attempted to predict school, district, and county results from their sampling. WRONG. Bad idea. Some schools’ scores were based on as few as only three tests, and anybody who has taken a statistics course can tell that this is horrible methodology. An outcry arose and last year the state decided to grade all the student responses in upcoming years.

Because of the new emphasis on student response, the items on the English sections of the test became of crucial importance. The students must have something to which they can respond. It’s easier to respond if the material grabs the reader emotionally as well was intellectually. Safe stories with little or no conflict, used in years before to test comprehension, were of little or no value now. Newly selected stories were filled with provocative concepts and conflicts, ones which would evoke and provoke responses from the students. Violence and it repercussions entered the stories. So did abuse. Internal ethical conflict. And therein lay the second major problem.

Ask a student who killed whom, and that's okay. Ask a student to respond to a selection that involves an act of violence as s/he is reading it, commenting upon it, adding personal relevance and opinion to the act, possibly discussing its ethical justification or depravity, and suddenly the test is in trouble. Conservative and religious parent groups voiced concern over the test, calling it classroom psychology, values clarification, even brainwashing. How this could be brainwashing--having students comment upon acts, writing comments that could come down in harsh criticism of said acts--is beyond me. But so be it. Cries arose of how depraved the new story selections were, filled with concepts from which we should be protecting our children, not to which we should be exposing them in a state-mandated test.

And so many affluent (read white and rich) districts and schools made the exam a voluntary one last year (Conejo Valley, home of Simi Valley and the first Rodney King trial, had more than 40% of the students [parents] refuse to take the test.). This completely gutted the integrity of the test. It may also have had repercussions on results, or so we hoped. We thought if many students from advantaged, high socio-economic areas boycotted the exam, then maybe our students, whose parents did not raise a fuss over the brewing media storm--too busy working two jobs to notice, or too lazy to care--then maybe our students could score well. Or so we thought last year.

Last night, while taking a walking-wild Kyle over to visit grandma and grandpa, we caught a section of a news story outlining the "disastrous" CLAS test results. Even the Superintendent of Public Education for the state called the results "abysmal." Only ten percent of L.A. Unified's tenth grade students were achieving at grade level on the math section of the exam. L.A. Unified's response to the "incredibly disappointing" results was that over fifty percent of their clientele has only limited English proficiency, thus the test scores were bound to be lower than hoped.

Lisa had heard positive rumors of test scores from her school, but we had not heard anything about Chumash yet. Hearing L.A.U.S.D. bemoan the scores and blame them on LEP students was disturbing to say the least, however. We have over a third limited English proficient. This could be very bad for us, if the L.A.U.S.D. trend was true and moved up the coast to us.

When I arrived on my new bike to campus this morning, I found taped to the table in the staff lounge a copy of an article from the Ventura County edition of the L.A. Times (not those guys again). County CLAS scores are announced. Fourth- and eighth- grade scores in the county were above the state average. Tenth-graders were scoring at near the state average. Our county superintendent of schools is quoted as stating that the scores at the high school level are skewed because the schools in the Conejo district and other campuses (like our own district’s lily-white AcadHigh) did not take the exam, depriving our county of higher scores.

There is more on scoring. And the paper keeps on about "passing" scores, ignoring the basic premise of the exam--assessing progress along a continuum--instead focusing on a basic "score." Again, process versus product. And here is where it gets even more interesting: the Times has a score of three as a "fail," not a "pass." This is not what the scorers had been told and taught (though maybe this is another raising of the "demanding" standards for "top students"--a "pass" is no longer good enough to pass).

But there is even more: a table off to the side. Some stats are highlighted. The first section that had some highlighting regards the writing section. Top ten schools in the county. And we're there. The next highlighted section...reading. Top ten schools in the county. And we're there. Next highlighted section... math. Bottom ten schools. We're there, too.

Well, how 'bout that?

The irony is incredible. When WASC left us in their wake two weeks ago, the math department had been lauded for its innovation and assessment techniques. No mention had been made of the English department, only that it was/ we were slow in incorporating portfolio assessment. But we've scored fairly well in the CLAS. It raises our spirits some. The irony is fun. (Maybe these stats need to go into Aimee's letter to our area's WASC chief. Aimee's letter is personal, passionate, and more than a little pissed-off, outlining what we had been told about how to create our report versus what we faced when the Committee arrived. It discusses the despair the Committee's response has caused on our campus. And it delivers a stinging blow against the seemingly hypocritical dichotomy between the process dictated and the product expected. It sets the groundwork for our rebuttal, if one is necessary following the announcement of the accreditation term in May or June.)