Debate over bilingual education hits standardized tests

LOS ANGELES – California’s debate over bilingual education, still unsettled despite Proposition 227, has entered into another arena: the state-mandated standardized tests given students this year.

Students with limited English enrolled in public schools for less than a year were required to take the standard Stanford-9 test as well as a Spanish-language test known as SABE to assess their academic skills. Across the state, the four-hour test was given to 110,000 students.

But some are protesting the exam as a wasted effort and a backhanded way of keeping bilingual education in schools.

“There’s really no reason for it except to make the bilingual education establishment happy; to placate that sector,” said Sheri Annis, spokeswoman for English for the Children, the organization that sponsored Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education.

“The effort has been to delay the new language in the early years when it’s most important,” she added.

The Los Angeles school district, the nation’s second-largest, has offered a Spanish-language standardized test known as Aprenda for eight years, helping serve a student population that is 69 percent Hispanic. This year, about 8,000 students took both tests, said Ina Roth, the school district’s director of student testing and evaluation.

Mara Sherman Bommarito, principal at Woodlawn Elementary School in the city of Bell, a school where the majority of parents opted to keep their children in bilingual programs through waivers, defended the tests as a way to measure whether 227 is actually working.

The proposition was passed by California voters in 1998.

“They need to have a starting point, hard data,” the principal said. “They want to make sure everyone is assessed.”

Not offering a Spanish-language standardized test would serve no one’s interest, said Elena Soto-Chapa, the statewide education director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“It’s ludicrous for Spanish-proficient students to take a standardized test in English as it would be ludicrous for any child to take a test in a language they did not understand,” she said.

For some of the students in the Los Angeles district, three tests were simply too many – and too hard.

“I didn’t understand the reading part when I read it,” said Mexican immigrant Claudia Hernandez, an 8-year-old third-grader from Woodlawn, as tears welled up in her eyes.



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