Judge Backs Schools in Fight Over Test

A San Francisco judge ruled Friday that the state cannot force 6,000 immigrant students there to participate in a statewide test of reading, math and other skills.

The decision by Superior Court Judge David Garcia is a major victory for the San Francisco Unified School District, which had refused to abide by the rules of the state’s new STAR test, given for the first time this spring.

Garcia’s one-sentence order did not explain his reasoning. A spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson, who pushed for testing a maximum number of students, vowed to appeal. But attorneys for the state said an appeal could not be heard in time to force the San Francisco students to be tested before the school year ends in two weeks.

More than 4 million students around the state have been tested.

The dispute with San Francisco began when it and other urban school systems, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, protested having to test students in a language they may not understand, calling it a waste of money that would do nothing but embarrass the students.

The state threatened to take millions of dollars in aid away from districts that did not comply with the requirements and test all of their students, except for those who had been studying in the United States for less than 12 months.

Although the threats caused others to back down, San Francisco school officials stood their ground, prompting the state to file a lawsuit to compel the district to follow the law.

Arguments in that case were heard by Garcia on Wednesday and, on Friday, he denied the state’s request for an order compelling the testing to go forward.

“We had a lot of experts, and we had the right law on our side,” said Waldemar Rojas, San Francisco’s school superintendent. “It took the judge just two days to understand what the governor and the State Board of Education members refuse to want to understand: that it doesn’t make sense to administer an English-only test to non-English-speaking children.”

Sean Walsh, Wilson’s spokesman, called Garcia’s decision “truly a shame” and said it would enable the school district to avoid accountability for student performance.

“In our view, every student in the state should be tested--that’s the law,” Walsh said.

He said the state will appeal the decision in hopes of overturning it before the test is given next year. If the ruling is upheld, tens of thousands of immigrant students will be exempted.

The first results from this year’s STAR test are to be made public June 30, giving the scores of students in grades two through 11 in reading, writing, math, science and social studies.

Representatives of education groups representing teachers, administrators, school board members and others have been meeting to prepare for what they fear will be very poor results.

One reason they expect the scores to be low is that, in some grades, the students are being tested on subjects they do not study. California fourth-graders, for example, study California history, but the test covers American history.

That point prompted Rojas, the San Francisco schools chief, to bring a separate lawsuit against the state, alleging that the entire testing program is legally flawed because it tests students on subjects outside their course work.

“It’s just as crazy to have a test for English-dominant kids that doesn’t measure what they’ve been taught,” he said.

The language factor is another reason low scores are expected. In the past, students had to be tested in English only if they had been studying in the United States for 30 months, not just 12.

The 6,000 students at issue in San Francisco were those who fell between those two time periods.

Now that San Francisco will not have to test them, other districts will probably seek to have their own results reported in two categories--scores for English-speakers apart from scores for those with limited English skills.

“It’s going to be unfair to all the districts up and down the state that made every attempt to abide by the law . . . even though they knew it was a bad law,” said Julie Korenstein, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.

California last had a statewide test of reading, writing and math in 1993 and 1994. But it only produced scores for schools and districts--not individual students.

Wilson vowed to institute a test that would allow parents to know how well their children were doing compared to their peers, something that had not been possible in California since the 1960s.

With time in his second term running out, Wilson proposed a year ago to do just that by going directly to commercial test publishers and buying a set of exams.

Next year, the test is to be augmented to align it with new statewide curriculum standards, which outline what students should learn in each grade.