By Carl Irving
California educational and political leaders, alarmed by increasing signs that the state is falling behind in academic achievement, are searching for ways to improve public schools, train better teachers and develop more accurate measures of student accomplishment and readiness for college.
The evidence of academic decline has been mounting:
A survey conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress last year found that California fourth graders ranked last in reading among 39 states.
A 1990Ð91 international assessment of science and mathematics learning found that American 13-year-olds placed in the bottom quarter, when compared with 14 other countries.
Almost half of the first-time freshmen who entered the California State University system in fall 1994 required remedial instruction in either English or math. This percentage has been increasing for five years.
During the 1993Ð94 academic year, California community colleges spent $300 million on remedial instruction for 169,000 students.
California now ranks 40th among the states in per-pupil spending. The state spends $22,000 a year to house a prisoner but only $4,500 to educate a public school pupil.
California was the only major industrial state in which the college-going rate (the percentage of high school graduates who enter higher education the following year) declined between 1988 and 1992.
Educators and politicians have responded to these dismaying trends with a flurry of speeches, reports, task forces, conferences and goal setting. But whether all of this activity will yield positive results remains problematical.
Neither Governor Pete Wilson nor legislative leaders of both parties have shown much interest in the problems, and no one knows where the money can be found for a major upgrading of courses, students and teachers.
Any reform effort must cope with opposition from a large segment of public school teachers, as well as rapidly-changing school enrollments, with increasing numbers of students coming from poor immigrant families who struggle with English as their second language.
Nevertheless, the state's education establishment is making an effort to turn things around. Declaring that "education in California is at a crossroads," the California Education Round Table, which brings together State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin and the state's higher education leaders, has called for agreement on what to expect from students, and how to judge them.
Two task forces have been charged with formulating statewide standards for elementary and secondary schools in English and math. They are to report to Eastin and the Round Table by the end of September. Then an implementation task force will determine how teachers, using the new standards, can best assess what students know.
In addition, Eastin has called for expansion of the "Golden State" examinations--tests of knowledge in seven academic areas that now are taken on a voluntary basis by about 400,000 California high school students. By 2004, Eastin hopes for a "seamless" set of mandatory statewide Golden State exams that not only would determine high school graduation but also would provide the basis for admission to the California State University and the University of California.
However, educators at both the KÐ12 and college levels question whether such a dual-purpose set of exams is feasible.
A legislative proposal by Eastin, requiring students to take 19 specific high school courses and then pass Golden State exams to graduate, faltered this spring in the face of strong opposition from the California Teachers Association, which represents 90 percent of the state's 240,000 public school teachers.
CTA objected to raising standards and requiring tougher exams because that would cause already high dropout rates to soar. The teachers organization also pointed out that requiring 19 specific courses for graduation would leave little time for electives, such as art, music or theater, or vocational courses for students not interested in going on to college.
The two groups charged with developing new standards for English and math proficiency expect to meet their September deadline.
"We need to move quickly," said Jerry Hayward, chairman of the math task force and a veteran Sacramento educational consultant. "There's a need to send clear signals from CSU and UC to the high schools."
Rudy Castruita, superintendent of schools in San Diego County and chairman of the English task force, said, "my goal is to present the Round Table with a set of standards that will provide benchmarks for graduation, while simultaneously aligning with entrance criteria for higher educationÉOnce you set standards, school districts will realign or be awfully embarrassed."
"Setting reasonable standards should feature structure and performance, and not procedures," said Donald McQuade, professor of English at UC Berkeley and a member of the English task force. "It's not simply good grammar and good manners. Skill increases with practice and many students don't practice."
Learning how to discipline oneself, to re-read something until it is understood, and to revise one's writing until it is clear, are basic principles that should be incorporated into the standards, McQuade added.
Said Robert Noreen, professor of English at Cal State Northridge, "writing is something which pervades all areas and it reflects an ability not just to compose but to think and organize and be able to analyze materials."
Castruita said the first Golden State examination in reading and composition, given in January, proved to be a landmark event, pointing toward the standards that his task force hopes to set. The 90-minute test was taken by about 20,000 high school students, mostly 11th graders.
The exam required all of the students to read the same article and then respond to a single identical question by writing 700 to 1,000-word essays. This is the same format the University of California uses for its Subject A test, which screens entering freshmen for their ability in English, but the UC test lasts two hours.
There were two readers for each exam, 128 readers in all. They were drilled and pre-tested to make sure they all graded the same way, with assistance from a 100-page "training binder." George Gadda, a UCLA writing instructor, who is in charge of UC's Subject A test, was the chief reader. The tests were scored in three days at schools in Costa Mesa and Sacramento.
More than two months after the exams were given, officials in Eastin's office said they still did not have complete results. But an informed source said that about eight percent of those who took the exam showed that they could read and write at college level, which is about what was expected.
Task force members hope the composition examination will become an annual event, giving 11th graders a one-year warning if they are not prepared to do college work. They also hope it will prove useful to those who don't plan to attend college. "All high school graduates will have to read and think," Robert Noreen said, "not just to parrot the text but to come up with independent conclusions--a skill that should be required by the time a student graduates from high school."
Composition will be added to the seven existing Golden State exams--in algebra, biology, chemistry, economics, geometry, U.S. history and second-year "coordinated science." Governor Wilson's proposed 1996Ð97 budget increases the $4 million Golden State program slightly, to increase the number of students who take the examinations and to develop a new exam in civics and government.
Some California school districts do not offer the Golden State exams, perhaps because they do not want to invite unfavorable comparisons with other districts. A student cannot take the exams unless his or her school district offers them, so many more high school students would like to take the tests than the 400,000 who actually do so.
Eastin hopes that eventually all high school students will take the Golden State examinations, in their present, or in a modified, form. She also hopes the exams can be used as admissions tests for UC and Cal State but the superintendent does not appear to have much support from the two higher education systems.
UC officials indicate they would prefer to keep the status quo--although they welcome better-prepared students from high school--and continue to base admissions decisions on a mixture of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and high school grade-point averages.
"To put all your marbles into one type of assessment would be a mistake," said Philip Daro, director of assessment in the UC president's office. "If a kid does well on a bunch of tests, you can be pretty sure the kid deserves what he gets."
Chuck Lindahl, Cal State associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, said, "we think the Golden State exam might have some real value for us but only with students at the upper end academically."
The increasing need for remedial instruction in California's public colleges and universities, especially in the community colleges and at the California State University, has intensified the drive for educational reform.
In the 1993Ð94 academic year, California community colleges spent $300 million--11 percent of the total budget--on remedial course work for 169,000 students--13 percent of total enrollment.
That required a lot of staff time and energy, as well as a lot of money, noted Rita Cepeda, vice chancellor for curriculum and instructional services for the California Community Colleges. "Our faculty can contribute to what should be core standards for college work," she said. "Obviously, if correct assessments are done in KÐ12, that lessens our need to assess every student."
Annette Dambrosio, a professor of English language arts at Solano College, in Suisun, said 70 percent of the students she has taught over the last 20 years have had reading problems. Solano College now offers three levels of pre-college level reading classes. (Some community colleges have five or six levels.)
"I teach less and less college course work," Dambrosio said. "I continue to assign reading but many (students) aren't reading. They buy anthologies, with snippets of information and partial texts. Students now cannot sustain long passages of reading, and do analysis and evaluate and judge."
The numbers of entering Cal State freshmen requiring remedial help in English or mathematics rose in fall 1994 for the fifth consecutive year. But first-time freshmen (25,019) accounted for less than ten percent of total Cal State enrollment (324,386) in fall 1994, and not all of those students took the placement tests in English and math. Of those who were tested, about half proved to need help.
That was enough to prompt some trustees to recommend last summer that most remedial instruction be eliminated in the 22-campus Cal State system by the year 2001, a proposal that was strongly opposed by minority student groups and by some campus presidents.
After a series of public hearings, the trustees modified their plan in January to reduce remedial coursework by ten percent by 2001 and by 50 percent by 2004. In the year 2007, only ten percent of all instruction is to be remedial.
The Cal State math placement test has been criticized as too difficult, the English test as too easy. Both will be reviewed by a remedial implementation committee that Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz appointed in the wake of the trustee action.
The committee, headed by President Marvalene Hughes of Cal State Stanislaus, also hopes to develop a system that will guarantee that high schools are informed about the progress their graduates are making on Cal State campuses; to enforce for the first time the existing requirement that students who need remedial classes should take them in their first year; and to increase the amount of direct help that Cal State students and faculty members provide for the state's elementary and secondary schools.
The Hughes committee also will seek ways to improve teacher training in the Cal State system, which provides about 60 percent of California's public school teachers. They will be looking carefully at a report released earlier this year by Gary Hart, former chairman of the State Senate education committee.
Hart's report criticized the lack of contact between KÐ12 systems around the state and the Cal State education schools. Hart also urged that students who intend to become teachers should take some education work as undergraduates and not leave all of their education courses for the fifth year, which is the current practice.
Although almost everyone agrees that KÐ12 standards need to be raised and that student testing needs to be improved, opinions differ about how these things should be done.
Bill Collins, legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association, hopes that "Delaine (Eastin) won't raise the the high jump bar and say 'OK students, jump higher,' and then find that some won't clear the bar."
Collins puts it politely, but educators and legislative aides say some teachers oppose any tougher state mandates and complain about Eastin's plan to expand use of the Golden State exams as an elitist approach that ignores students who need vocational rather than academic training.
Some urban school teachers worry that the dropout rate, already high, will increase if students face what they believe to be insurmountable barriers to graduation.
The importance of gaining teachers' support for efforts to raise standards was stressed by Mark Wilson, an education professor at UC Berkeley. "Without the official cooperation of teachers it (reform) will fail," he said. "They have to believe these tests are worthy measures of their students' achievements. It's important to make sure their judgement is involved."
California also must solve another problem if academic standards are to be increased, and that is the rapidly-changing nature of its school population. While the teaching force is overwhelmingly white, a rising majority of students is non-white and many of the students come from homes where English is not the first language and sometimes is not spoken at all.
"Our population has changed radically, but that hasn't come through" said Pat Nichols, a linguistics professor at San Jose State University and a member of the English standards task force. Forty percent of the students at her campus now have English as their second language, she said, and the percentages are similar at several other Cal State urban campuses.
Nichols stressed that many ESL students, especially those from Asia and Latin America, require a different kind of remedial English, but often pick up the language quickly and do extremely well in college.
Among those who seek change, there is a mix of hope and despair. Some believe the time is ripe, and that the public is ready to spend the money needed, to improve school performance and to send better-prepared students on to California colleges and universities. Others believe only a major crisis will shake the present public conviction that it is good social policy to spend five times more on housing prisoners than on the education of young people.