BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 532
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Date of Hearing: March 30, 2011
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
AB 532 (V. Manuel Perez) - As Introduced: February 15, 2011
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 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, state and federal accountability requirements,
and the testing of EL pupils.
2)Requires any primary language assessment developed and
administered pursuant to current law, and the results of that
primary language assessment be included in the state
assessment system, the federal and state accountability
system, and any successor assessment or accountability
systems, for all LEP students who receive instruction in their
primary language, are identified as literate by the primary
language assessment and have been enrolled in U.S. schools for
less than three consecutive years, or are enrolled in dual
language immersion programs.
3)Requires that any successor to the state assessment system
adopted on or after the effective date of these provisions,
include modifications, based upon research designed to
maintain the rigor of the test, to the California Standards
Test (CST) in order to eliminate linguistic complexity to the
extent practicable, and include test accommodations for LEP
students, including repetition of test directions, and a
glossary and translations of test directions provided by the
California Department of Education (CDE), as specified.
4)Requires that any advisory committee, work group, task force
or technical assistance group required by the Legislature or
Governor, or established by the Superintendent of Public
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Instruction (SPI) for the purposes of providing
recommendations on future state assessment, or state or
federal accountability systems, determine how to accomplish
specified tasks related to 2) and 3) above, as well as to
reporting and disaggregating comprehensive EL data. Also
specifies that any group specified above includes persons with
demonstrated expertise in assessment of or research on EL
pupils.
5)Requires California's state assessments to be valid, reliable,
and comparable for LEP students and students with
disabilities, and that accommodations for those students be
provided pursuant to the core state assurances provided by the
state under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of
2009; also requires these assessments to be aligned with the
state's newly adopted common core standards.
6)Requires that the state's primary language assessments meet
the technical requirements, with respect to validity,
reliability and comparability, in the standards jointly
developed by the American Psychological Association, American
Educational Research Association, and National Council on
Measurement in Education; also requires the test development
contractor to report to the SBE in writing as to how those
technical requirements are met.
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, 2013.
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, 2013.
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.
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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 California
English Language Development Test (CELDT) is the 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.
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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 an Assembly Appropriations
Committee analysis of a substantially similar bill in 2010:
1)"Annual General Fund Proposition 98 (GF/98) state assessment
apportionment costs ?of approximately $200,000 to school
districts to administer a primary language assessment."
2)"? Annual GF/98 administrative costs, likely less than
$100,000, to CDE to provide school districts with bilingual
glossaries and translated test directions, as specified."
COMMENTS : According to the author, "Current law requires ŬELs]
enrolled in grades 2 through 11, to take an achievement test in
their primary language if they are instructed in their primary
language or if the pupil has been in the United States for less
than 12 months. The primary language achievement test must be
taken in addition to the achievement tests in English." The
author also correctly states that under current law and
practice, "However, only the 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, ŬELs] not instructed in their primary
language only take academic tests in English." The author's
stated intent of this bill is to "develop an accountability
system that is fair, reliable and provides accurate information
regarding the academic progress and performance of ŬELs]."
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
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of STAR tests; the CST include only questions written
specifically for California's former content standards, which
were approved in the 1990s. 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 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
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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)
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 who 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 or 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.
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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
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 proposes to address the language-of-assessment issue
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 tests, 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.
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Committee amendments: Committee staff recommends the following
amendments to the bill:
1)Delete the requirement that, "California's state assessments
shall also be aligned to the common core academic content
standards approved by the state board pursuant to Section
60605.8." While this should be a goal for the state, this
requirement is both much broader than other subject matter in
this bill (in that it applies to all of the state's
assessments), and premature. If passed and signed into law
this Legislative year, the provisions of this bill would have
an effective date of January 1, 2012; none of the state's
assessments would meet this alignment standard by that time or
by the next round of test administrations in the winter and
spring of 2012, thus those tests, if administered, would most
likely violate this requirement. Committee staff recommends
that this provision be deleted. Other bills being considered
by the Legislature propose transitioning to the common core
standards in the areas of professional development,
instructional materials and assessment over time.
2)Delete the requirement for reporting primary language test
results in the current or successor assessment and
accountability systems. Given the sunset of the state's
assessment system in 2013, federal reauthorization of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and national efforts
to develop common state assessments, this requirement would
simply be premature.
3)Correct a factual misstatement in subdivision (b) of Section 1
of the bill to say that the current assessment system will
become inoperative in 2013, instead of stating that the
current assessment and accountability system will sunset in
2012.
4)Establish an operative date of July 1 in the year of
enactment, rather than upon enactment of the bill on January
1, so as to enact these provisions at the start of the fiscal,
school, and testing year; also clarify that these provisions
apply to all testing administered commencing with that fiscal
year.
Previous legislation: SB 930 (Ducheny), vetoed in 2010, was
substantially similar to this bill. SB 1 X5 (Steinberg),
Chapter 2, Statutes of 2009-10, Fifth Extraordinary Session,
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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. 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 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. 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.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
California Association of Bilingual Education (Sponsor)
Californians Together (Sponsor)
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087
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