BILL ANALYSIS
SB 930
Page 1
Date of Hearing: June 30, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
SB 930 (Ducheny) - As Amended: June 1, 2010
SENATE VOTE : 23-13
SUBJECT : Pupil assessments
SUMMARY : Modifies California's public school assessment and
accountability system with respect to English Learner (EL)
pupils, including expanding the number of limited English
proficient (LEP) students who are required to be tested on the
state's content standards in their primary language, and other
changes related to the testing of EL pupils and inclusion of
their test scores in accountability measures. Specifically,
this bill :
1)Makes Legislative findings and declarations regarding the
Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program, other
assessments, accountability, and the testing of EL pupils.
2)Requires that any primary language assessment developed on or
after July 1, 2013, and the results of that primary language
assessment, be included and used in any successor measure to
the state's assessment system and shall be included in any
successor measure to the state's federal and state
accountability system.
3)Requires that any successor measure to the state's assessment
system adopted on or after July 1, 2013,
a) Modify, in a manner based upon research designed to
maintain the rigor of the test, the California Standards
Test in order to eliminate linguistic complexity.
b) Include testing accommodations for English learners,
including repetition of test directions, and a glossary and
translations of test directions provided by the California
Department of Education (CDE).
4)Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to
establish an advisory committee, with a majority membership of
individuals with expertise in assessment of or research on EL
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pupils; also specifies that the purpose of the advisory
committee is to provide recommendations to the SPI and the
State Board of Education (SBE) on 2) and 3) above.
5)Requires that the state's primary language assessments satisfy
all the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001, that the test development contractor report to the
SBE on how those requirements are met, and that the primary
language assessments meet other statutory requirements placed
on the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program.
6)Adds 'expertise and experience in developing primary language
test items' to the criteria that the SBE is required to
consider when choosing a test contractor.
7)Expands the group of LEP pupils required to be tested on the
state's content standards in their primary language so as to
include those who receive instruction in their primary
language, and those who are literate in their primary language
and have been enrolled in a school in the United States for
less than three consecutive years.
8)Authorizes public schools providing dual immersion programs to
use the primary language assessments to assess enrollees who
are non-LEP, but requires the test to be administered at the
school district's expense, and only under separate agreement
with the state's testing contractor.
9)Requires primary language test results for EL pupils to be
included in the determination of Adequate Yearly Progress
(AYP) for federal purposes (excepting the scores for those
pupils to whom the high school exit examination is
administered), and the Academic Performance Index (API) for
state purposes, and commencing with the 2012-13 school year.
Also requires only the highest test results of the primary
language standards test or the English standards test to be
included for these purposes.
10)Adds the requirement that a school district report the number
of pupils to whom a primary language assessment was
administered in grades 2 to 11 to the SPI, as a condition of
receiving testing apportionments.
11)Requires a test publisher under contract to the state to
annually agree in writing to provide test scores for EL pupils
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disaggregated by program of instruction, time in the program
of instruction, and English proficiency level as determined by
the California English Language Development Test (CELDT).
12)Establishes an operative date of January 1, 2012 for these
provisions.
EXISTING STATE LAW :
1)Requires each charter school, school district, and county
office of education to administer designated achievement tests
to each pupil in grades 2 through 11, inclusive, as part of
the STAR Program until July 1, 2011.
2)Requires the SPI and SBE to undertake activities in support of
STAR testing in grades 2 through 11, inclusive, as part of the
STAR Program until July 1, 2011.
3)Requires a LEP pupil, who is enrolled in grades 2 through 11
to take a test in his or her primary language if a test is
available, and if fewer than 12 months have elapsed after his
or her initial enrollment in any public or nonpublic school in
the state or if the pupil receives instruction in his or her
primary language; the Standards-based Tests in Spanish (STS)
are currently available for this purpose.
4)Requires the SPI, with the approval of the SBE, to develop and
implement the API to measure the performance of schools, and
to include a variety of indicators, including achievement test
results, attendance rates, and graduation rates in that
measure; also requires the SPI to establish an advisory
committee to provide advice on all appropriate matters
relative to the creation of the API.
5)Requires each school district that has one or more pupils who
are EL pupils to assess each pupil's English language
development in order to determine the level of proficiency
within 30 calendar days after the pupil's initial enrollment,
and annually, thereafter, until the pupil is redesignated as
English proficient.
6)Requires the CDE with the approval of the SBE to establish
procedures for conducting English language proficiency
assessments and for the reclassification of a pupil from
English learner to proficient in English; the CELDT is the
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assessment designated for this purpose.
7)Provides, under Proposition 227, that "all children in
California public schools shall be taught English by being
taught in English," and provides for parents of pupils to
exercise informed consent to request a waiver of these
provisions in which case pupils may be placed in classes where
they are taught English and other subjects through bilingual
education techniques or other generally recognized
methodologies permitted by law.
EXISTING FEDERAL LAW, under the No Child Left Behind Act :
1)Requires all states to implement statewide accountability
systems based on state standards in reading and mathematics,
annual testing for all students in grades 3-8 including
primary language content tests as specified, and annual
statewide progress objectives ensuring that all groups of
students reach proficiency within 12 years.
2)Requires the state to annually review the performance of each
local educational agency (LEA) receiving funding under Title
I, and identify any LEA that has not met its Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP) criteria (based on test results) for two
consecutive years for Program Improvement.
3)Requires an LEA not meeting AYP criteria beyond those two
consecutive years, to provide certain types of required
services and/or corrective actions during each subsequent
year.
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Senate Appropriations
Committee, "This bill would drive new costs, some one-time and
some ongoing. This bill would result in administering the STS
to approximately 80,000 more pupils at an ongoing cost of
$960,000 for district administration, printing, and distribution
and one-time costs of $200,000 to establish new cut scores.
Utilizing the STS for federal AYP purposes would require an
alignment study to demonstrate the comparability of the primary
language exam to the English language version. This cost would
be in the range of $1 million to $2 million (one-time, unless
the tests are modified). Including the CELDT results in the
STAR reports would cost $120,000, annually. The costs for the
various modifications specified in the bill would be
approximately $135,000. Further, while districts offering dual
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immersion programs could administer the STS to non-limited
English proficient students at their own expense, the Department
of Education notes that this would require a change to their
ordering management systems at a cost of $850,000. Staff notes
that some of these costs may potentially be covered by federal
funds."
COMMENTS : According to the author, "Current law requires
English learners enrolled in grades 2 through 11, to take an
achievement test in his or her primary language if instructed in
their primary language or if enrolled in public school in the
United States for less than 12 months. The primary language
achievement test is in addition to the achievement tests in
English." The author also correctly states that under current
law and practice, "Only scores of the English achievement tests
are included in the calculation of the Academic Performance
Index and in the Adequate Yearly Performance. After 12 months of
enrollment, an English learner not instructed in their primary
language is required to take the academic test only in English.
Additionally, only minimal accommodations have been made
available to English learners taking the achievement tests in
English." The author's stated intent of this bill is to
"establish an accountability system that would provide accurate
information regarding the academic performance of students who
are English learners."
The State's Testing Program: California's state assessment
program is comprised of three major testing components, the STAR
Program, the CELDT, and a high school exit examination (the
California High School Exit Examination, CAHSEE, is currently
the designated high school exit examination). The program also
includes a number of smaller, more specialized assessments.
The STAR Program, initially authorized in 1997, requires testing
of students in English language arts, mathematics, science and
history/social science at specified grade levels. In 2003, the
English language California Standards Tests (CST) replaced a
nationally published "off the shelf" test as the primary battery
of STAR tests; the CST include only questions written
specifically for California's content standards. Today, the
STAR Program includes the CSTs, the California Alternate
Performance Assessment (CAPA) administered to students with
significant cognitive disabilities, the California Modified
Assessment (CMA) administered to students whose disabilities
preclude them from achieving grade-level proficiency on an
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assessment of the California content standards with or without
testing accommodations, and the STS. The STS are Spanish
language tests in reading-language arts and mathematics that are
administered to Spanish speaking English learners who have been
in school in the U.S. less than 12 months or who are receiving
instruction in Spanish. Neither the high school exit exam nor
the CELDT are components of the STAR Program; each is separately
authorized in statute. Results for STAR tests are reported for
the individual pupil, but no accountability attaches to these
individual results; metrics used in the state and federal
accountability systems are primarily based on the aggregated
STAR test scores from all pupils in a school or school district.
Accountability Systems and Measures: The SPI established,
pursuant to SB 1 X1 (Alpert), Chapter 3, Statutes of 1999-2000
First Extraordinary Session, an advisory committee to advise the
SPI and the SBE on all appropriate matters relative to the
creation of the API. SB 1 X1 also requires the SPI, with the
approval of the SBE, to develop the API to measure the
performance of schools, and to include a variety of indicators
in that measure, including, but not limited to, achievement test
results, attendance rates, and graduation rates. Currently only
English language content achievement test results are
incorporated into the API, and the API is configured to produce
scores measuring a school's static performance at each grade
level, in each content area, in each year, at one point in time.
In addition the SPI also produces a "Growth API" that compares
this static performance from one year to the next by comparing
cohort or group scores.
While the API is a composite measure of school or district level
performance created for the state accountability system, AYP
composites school performance data in order to determine whether
adequate progress is made for federal accountability purposes.
Each year, schools and districts must meet four sets of
requirements to make AYP. The requirements reflect statewide
performance levels and are the same for all schools and school
districts of the same type. Those requirements include meeting
statewide performance levels on: (i) the student participation
rate on statewide tests, (ii) the percentage of students scoring
at the proficient level or above in English-language arts and
mathematics on the English language CSTs, (iii) API Growth, and
(iv) graduation rate (if high school students are enrolled).
Numerically significant (100 students or more, or at least 50
students making up 15% or more of the school's population)
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subgroups of students at a school or school district also must
meet participation rate and percent proficient requirements; the
subgroups that must be considered include African American,
American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Filipino, Hispanic or
Latino, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, Two or More
Races, Socio-economically Disadvantaged, English Learners, and
Students with Disabilities. If AYP is not met in total or for
all subgroups, then the school or district may be subject to
sanctions or interventions under federal Program Improvement.
The Language of a Test: The fundamental question posed by this
bill is whether it is appropriate to make decisions, where
educational stakes for a pupil, school or district are involved,
on the sole basis of content tests that are administered to
pupils that do not fully understand the language in which the
test is written. That question may be answered by a
hypothetical example. If there were an elementary grade level
mathematics test written in traditional Japanese kanji
(characters), that test would look very different from the
English version of that same test. There would be similarities,
since modern mathematics has developed a fairly universal set of
standard notations and most of the world has adopted Arabic
numbers and Greek letters for the purposes of mathematics, but
the test would clearly be different in terms of the test
directions and the text-based stem of any question (particularly
in word problems that frequent elementary grade mathematics).
If that test were administered to a non-Japanese reading pupil,
then that pupil would be able to engage in some parts of the
test (the numbers and symbols might be familiar) but clearly
would be unable to show the extent of depth of his or her
understanding and abilities in mathematics. Even though the
content of the test is meant to be purely mathematics and the
score is intended to reflect that, for this pupil it would be a
test of something more than mathematics; clearly this pupil's
test score would reflect both the pupil's understanding of
mathematics and the pupil's ability to read and understand the
language in which the test and test directions were written.
The psychometric property known as validity, which we
statutorily require of tests in the state's assessment system,
is not so much a quality of a test as it is a property of a test
score and its use; thus it could be argued, based on generally
accepted testing standards such as those issued by the American
Psychological Association, that using a test score from the
hypothetical Japanese language test of mathematics administered
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to a non-Japanese reader in order to make judgments about that
pupil's understanding of mathematics would very likely not meet
a standard of validity. This example is analogous to the
situation faced by an EL student who is administered a
content-based test written in English; the score may have some
information about the pupil's understanding or abilities with
respect to the content of the test, but that information is
confounded by the fact that the test score will also reflect the
pupil's lack of understanding of the language in which the test
was written. If the testing was not explicitly designed to
separate out a content score from a language score (to the
extent that would be possible), then it would not be possible to
determine what the student knows and can do in the content area.
Thus decisions, including those concerning instruction,
retention, promotion or graduation, made about that pupil using
judgments about the pupil's knowledge and ability in that
content area derived from a content test written in a language
in which the pupil has limited fluency may very well be flawed.
This problem follows the pupil's test score as it is aggregated
up into scores at the school, district and other levels, and
will also be present in any other metric that includes the test
score (e.g., API, AYP). This would particularly present
problems for aggregate scores and measures in schools or
districts with very high proportions of EL pupils, and for any
educational decisions that involve high stakes (e.g., graduation
for the individual, or sanctions and interventions for the
school or district).
This bill addresses the language-of-the-assessment problem by
improving the state's primary language tests and expanding the
number students to whom the tests are administered, increasing
the information composited into the API and AYP by including
primary language content test results, and reducing linguistic
complexity and requiring testing accommodations on English
language content tests so as to reduce the effect of language
differences on the test scores of EL students.
Committee amendments: Committee staff recommends the following
amendments to the bill:
1)Technical amendments to clarify terminology and simplify
statutory structure.
2)Clarify the author's intent with respect to successor
assessment systems and accountability measures.
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3)Change the operative date to July 1, 2001, rather than January
1, 2012, so as to enact these provisions at the start of a
fiscal and school year; also clarify that these provisions
apply to all testing administered commencing with the 2011-12
fiscal year.
Previous legislation: SB 385 (Ducheny), vetoed in 2005, would
have required the development and administration of primary
language achievement tests for pupils literate in or receiving
instruction in their primary language and who have attended
school in the United States for less than three years, and
required the CDE to eliminate unnecessary linguistic complexity
in state tests. SB 1580 (Ducheny), vetoed in 2006, would have
required English learners, who are either literate in their
primary language or receive instruction in their primary
language, to take standards-aligned tests in the primary
language as soon as such tests are available. AB 252 (Coto),
vetoed in 2007, would have authorized the administration of a
primary language assessment to native English speaking pupils
enrolled in dual immersion programs. SB 305 (Ducheny), held in
the Assembly Appropriations Committee in 2007, would have
required commencing in the 2008-09 fiscal year, an EL pupil, who
receives instruction in his or her primary language and has been
enrolled in a school in the United States (U.S.) for no more
than the maximum time allowable under NCLB, to take a
standards-aligned assessment in the pupil's primary language.
SB 1 X5 (Steinberg), Chapter 2, Statutes of 2009-10, Fifth
Extraordinary Session, provides for the statewide pupil
assessment program (which includes the STAR program) to become
inoperative on July 1, 2013, and expresses the intent of the
Legislature that the reauthorization of the statewide pupil
assessment system include specified elements, including a plan
for transitioning to a system of high-quality assessments; SB 1
X5 also establishes an Academic Content Standards Commission to
develop academic content standards in language arts and
mathematics that will be internationally benchmarked and at
least 85 percent the same as the national standards being
developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
Alameda County Board of Education
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Alameda County Superintendent of Schools
Association of California School Administrators
California Communities United Institute
California Council on Teacher Education
California School Boards Association
California State PTA
California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
Californians Together (Sponsor)
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
Los Angeles Unified School District
San Francisco Unified School District
Teel Consulting Services
Numerous individuals
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087