One morning, some 20 years ago, I took an anonymous phone call that stunned me. Years had passed since our decadelong federal class action discrimination lawsuit against the CBEST had ended with only partial reforms in 2000. From its origins in 1982, the California Basic Educational Skills Test, which purports to measure the universal reading, writing and math skills needed to perform in all the varied public school jobs requiring credentials, has been controversial for deterring tens of thousands of educators of color from entering the public school workforce. The horrific first-time pass rates — 38% for Blacks; 49% for Latinos, and 53% Asians vs. 80% for whites — improved, but only modestly, after 1995 changes instigated by our lawsuit.
The caller had personal knowledge that a recently deceased former employee of the defendant Commission on Teacher Credentialing had examined the CBEST for her doctoral dissertation and concluded it was racially and culturally biased. The Commission suppressed the study, including when our lawsuit specifically requested such reports. Instead of producing it or making us and our judge aware of it, the commission’s lawyers quietly procured a protective order from a state judge to keep the study out of the federal case.
From its inception, the racial and cultural bias undergirding the CBEST — like the phantom study — has been suppressed, lurking, just beneath the surface. The sickening pass rates — rather than spurring reform — have been used to support the worst kind of circular reasoning: If it’s failing that many people, especially Black and brown people who’ve been subjected to inferior public education in California, the state’s lawyer repeatedly told the court, it must be working.
Federal guidelines dictate that a test and its passing levels should correspond to “normal expectations of proficiency within the workforce.” Yet there has never been evidence that over half of all Black college graduates (or a fifth of whites, for that matter), are graduating lacking basic reading, writing and math skills.
Rather, the CBEST’s passing scores, and to some extent its math content, have always been set arbitrarily high, bent more on failing many to justify itself politically than on fairly assessing educators on the minimum level of basic skills needed for their jobs.
The CBEST ran off track from its inception. Rather than being created by employment-testing experts like a civil service exam, it was a high-profile political showpiece, divorced from critical employment testing standards and processes. When employment tests have a substantial adverse impact on diverse candidates, “job-relatedness” requires that assumptions about what skills are needed must be proven by analyzing each job tested. Likewise, untested desires for high performance on partial job elements must be scrutinized. Insisting that all your players sink 90% of their free throws may sound good, but that unexamined standard would fail legions of hall of famers.
Documents uncovered during the case acknowledged that in 1982, California chose the faster and cheaper development plan from Educational Testing Service that specifically rejected making the test “job-related.” Even so, ETS’s initial validity study undertook the most careful and extensive examination to date of where to establish passing scores, for, as required, “minimally competent” (not high or average-performing) educators. Relying on the professional judgment of some 289 educators and academics, that study recommended relatively modest passing scores. A typical employment exam process would likely have called it a day. Instead, a much smaller, politically appointed advisory board of 11 recommended substantially higher passing scores, which were further one-upped by then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig. Spurred on by “campaign promises to raise [teacher] quality,” Honig set yet higher passing scores without regard to job-relatedness. The final effect reduced Black, Latino and Asian first-time pass rates from 63%, 69% and 76% if the 289 ETS panelists had been followed to 38%, 49% and 53%, respectively.
Enter Public Advocates’ litigation 10 years later. The state defendants were blindsided when the courts held the CBEST is an employment exam for public school educators which must be “job-related.” The pre-litigation validity studies admittedly had never taken the essential first step for employment tests — a job analysis of all those educator jobs. When the commission finally attempted one in 1994, its own expert advised that most of the math test — the algebra and geometry portions used since 1982 — was not job-related, that those items should be removed and the test re-scored to pass unfairly failed candidates.
Did the state and the commission acknowledge the harm caused and right the wrong? No. They doubled down on protecting the CBEST and its racially discriminatory failure rates.
The policymakers had their expert “reconsider” and then delete that recommendation. Then, they engineered a revised CBEST that imported the difficulty level and high failure rates for people of color of the prior invalid test by removing much less of the math content than called for, swapping in relatively difficult “lower order” math items and — when test-takers still performed better — raising the math passing score.
In 2000, six judges on a deeply fractured 11-judge federal appellate panel looked the other way and accepted the “revised” CBEST. But state decision-makers don’t have to continue to do so. At its meeting this week, the commission is examining whether to renew the CBEST contract with its vendor. After 40 years, it’s time to retire the CBEST. In a post-George Floyd era of racial reckoning, we should be working to overturn the harms against people of color caused by unnecessary, biased, standardized tests. In 2015, California dropped another discriminatory, misguided “accountability” measure from a bygone era, the High School Exit Exam. The University of California and California State University have dropped the SAT from their admissions processes, and the state has essentially halted community colleges from using questionable exams to place students from marginalized communities in dead-end remedial classes disproportionately. Oregon, the only other state that used the CBEST, phased out administering it years ago, concerned with its redundancy and adverse impacts.
There are more than enough entry requirements to ensure credential candidates possess job-related basic skills. These include requiring a bachelor’s degree, subject matter competency, the California Teaching Performance Assessment, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment or RICA and, since 2000, transcript reviews of basic skills proficiency as an alternative to the CBEST. It’s time for the credentialing commission and the state to drop the tainted CBEST. It’s also time for some reconciliation. The commission can start by releasing that long-suppressed study of the CBEST’s racial and cultural bias.
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John Affeldt is a managing attorney at Public Advocates, a public-interest law firm in San Francisco, where he focuses on educational equity issues.
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Xavier Navarro, left, was a student ambassador while attending Santa Ana College. In this photo, he was tabling with his adviser, Hope Nguyen.
Over 50 community college students in California currently serve as resource guides for peers in need of stable housing, food access and other basic needs.
The students are part of the California Community Colleges’ Student Ambassador Program, which trains students to share information on available resources, including CalFresh and housing stipends with their fellow students. The program uses peers to share such resources in an effort to reduce the stigma around accessing basic needs services.
“They’re students on the campus, on the ground floor, knowing what students need, knowing how their campus operates, what works, what doesn’t,” said Yuriko Curiel, an ambassador program specialist.
The need is acute. According to a recent report by The Community College League of California and the RP Group, only 32% of the 66,741 students who responded to their survey felt secure in meeting all their basic needs. Over half of respondents were concerned about running out of food; 3 out of 5 students experienced housing insecurity, and 1 in 4 reported experiencing homelessness.
Anecdotes from two recent student ambassadors, Adela Gonzales and Xavier Navarro, highlighted the program’s impact.
Gonzales said in a recent interview that she spoke with a student who was on his way to a Riverside City College parking structure where other students had died by suicide. The student told her that he was heading there because he was contemplating doing the same. But on that day, he came across Gonzales, who was handing out pamphlets regarding various student services, including mental health support.
Adela Gonzales was a student ambassador for two years at Riverside City College.
“I was able to talk with him … give him a little bit of validation, and then walk him to the Student Health and Psychological Center,” said Gonzales, who is studying biochemistry and sociology. “I still message him here and there to see how he’s doing.”
She said what most stood out in her work as an ambassador was how only a few students were aware of the campus’ psychology center or their crisis text hotline. Her interest in supporting other students prompted her to join the program two school years in a row.
At Santa Ana College, Navarro was working at the campus food pantry when he met a fellow student veteran, named Louie, who didn’t have a home.
Meeting Navarro, who was a student ambassador at the time, led to Louie being quickly connected to resources, including a housing voucher to book a hotel room for about a month, food assistance via CalFresh, a free bus pass, and a job at the same food pantry where he met Navarro.
“He was hurting, and it hurts you as a person because you want to help … and now that you have the tools, why not?” said Navarro, who is now an accounting student at Cal Poly Pomona University in Southern California.
It was Navarro’s own experience as a veteran that helped facilitate the initial conversation with Louie.
“We care about the students, we want the students to succeed,” Navarro said. “Because college is hard, it’s expensive, and it can be challenging. Not having a home, not having food. … Caring goes a long way, especially for a college student.”
Students’ identities are crucial in connecting with their peers, said Curiel, the program specialist who was an ambassador before she graduated from San Bernardino Valley College.
Yuriko Curiel was a student ambassador and now works as a specialist for the programCourtesy of Yuriko Curiel
“Not only are they connecting with peers, they’re connecting with people who reflect their own community,” she said, noting that Navarro is a veteran; Gonzales, a former foster youth; Curiel was balancing work and school as a single mom during her time as an ambassador.
Ambassadors also often understand being food or housing insecure. Gonzales and Navarro, for example, both relied on CalFresh in the past. Gonzales also received a housing grant while enrolled in college because she couldn’t afford her rent after a roommate moved out of their shared apartment.
Gonzales and Navarro said that a common response they got from students was disbelief that they might qualify for CalFresh, the state’s food assistance program. Complex eligibility rules for students is a known barrier to the program.
“Not everybody on campus knows what’s available to them and how they can access, and even when they access that, there are still questions,” Gonzales said. “Being able to point them in the right direction and get the right information for them is very important.”
The ambassador program was launched in 2016. Students who join are expected to put in at least six to eight hours each month, for which they receive a stipend of $1,500 after completing the program.
The first cohort in 2016 included 20 students, while the current group includes 53 students. Previous groups have included over 100 ambassadors, according to Sarah London, external and executive communications director with the Foundation for California Community Colleges, which operates the program.
“The fluctuation in numbers is solely based on available funding,” said London. “Ideally, we’d have hundreds of ambassadors every year, so we strive to bring on more philanthropic funders to support and help us grow these efforts in the future.”
While student support services vary at the state’s 116 community colleges, some examples include CalFresh application assistance, low-cost auto insurance, a mental health crisis text hotline, and emergency financial aid grants, among others.
Students interested in joining the program must apply for a position and meet eligibility requirements, which include being at least 18 years old, enrolled in at least one unit for the fall and spring semesters during the school year in which they’re applying, and availability to attend a Zoom training.
Gonzales, Navarro and Curiel were all encouraged to apply for the program by staff members managing student organizations they had joined.
For example, Gonzales was part of Guardian Scholars, a chapter-based organization on college campuses that helps support former foster and homeless youth, before learning about the ambassadors program. A staff member with the group noticed that Gonzales often took the initiative by sharing basic needs information with her peers and suggested she apply to be an ambassador.
“I’ve always enjoyed providing resources for all my foster sisters,” she said, adding that joining the ambassador program felt like an extension of what she was already inclined to do in her personal life.
Student ambassadors use a variety of strategies to reach their peers, such as tabling during campus events, creating social media posts, sending out mass emails about available resources, and presenting to their classmates during class breaks.
“This is really investing in our next generation of leaders,” Curiel said. “I see our dean of student services coming out of this, our basic needs coordinators, or people doing public policy; I think that’s just the power of the program.”
Nine years ago, Analilia Gutierrez gave birth to her son, a micro preemie who needed intensive care.
At the time, Gutierrez, an immigrant from Mexico, spoke and read little English. Filling out health forms and trying to keep up with her son’s care was an overwhelming experience. Interpreters, if available, sometimes created problems with misinterpretation.
“There were so many barriers,” said Gutierrez, a resident of Tulare, in the Central San Joaquin Valley.
In California, an estimated 28% of adults have such poor literacy in English that they struggle to do anything more complicated than filling out a basic form or reading a short text, according to a survey, the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). California’s rate is worse than any other state except New Mexico, where the estimated rate is 29%.
The U.S. version of the survey was conducted only in English, and many immigrants, unsurprisingly, tend to struggle more with what is often not their home language: 19% of adults in California say they speak English “less than very well,” according to 2022 American Community Survey data.
Not being able to read English well doesn’t just make life difficult — it can be dangerous.
As the CEO of the Central San Joaquin Valley-based Clinica Sierra Vista, Dr. Olga Meave routinely sees patients who struggle to read in any language. Sometimes it’s a patient who doesn’t know how to sign their name. Other times, patients can’t read the directions. One patient ended up in the emergency room after taking the wrong dose of blood thinners, which caused their stomach to bleed.
Low literacy is particularly acute in heavily agricultural regions, such as the Central San Joaquin Valley and the Central Coast, that rely on a largely immigrant labor force that may have little formal education, even in their home languages. More than 4 out of 10 residents in Imperial, Tulare, Merced, Madera, Kings and Monterey counties struggle with basic English literacy.
But signs of adults who struggle to read are in every community in California: job seekers unable to get jobs or promotions; business owners who cannot complete paperwork for loans and grants; prisons with a disproportionate number of struggling readers and parents who cannot help their children with homework or even read bedtime stories.
No state has more immigrants than California: Over a third of adults over 25 are immigrants, according to 2022 American Community Survey data. Most are from Mexico and other Latin American countries, but an increasing number hail from Asian countries. Nearly half of children in the state have at least one parent who is an immigrant.
Immigrants make up a huge share of workers in key industries in California. While highly educated immigrants bring their in-demand skills to the tech industry, those who work in agriculture may have little or no formal education.
Experts say programs aimed at addressing poor literacy reach only a fraction of those who need help, such as courses that improve English skills, help students get a GED or their citizenship or even a basic education. In California, that is largely adult immigrants. In 2021-22, adult schools served over 480,000 students in California, while the state says more than 10,000 adults were served through library tutoring programs in 2022-23.
Those numbers are dwarfed by the need for adult education from immigrants alone: 5.9 million Californians don’t speak English “very well” and 2.9 million immigrants lack a high school education, according to 2022 American Community Survey data.
Programs that serve adult students are often plagued by long wait lists, a lack of funding or a lack of accessibility. Advocates say that one of the biggest problems is simply that adult education seems to fly under the radar in a way that TK-12 schools and colleges don’t.
“We are the best-kept secret in education,” said Carolyn Zachry, education administrator and state director of the Adult Education Office for the California Department of Education.
As a new immigrant, Gutierrez didn’t have time to take classes while she was focused on raising young children. Now that her children are school-aged, she has been able to attend Tulare Adult School, and her world has opened up.
Gutierrez has since become an American citizen and she has earned a GED. Her newfound English skills recently helped her land a job at Chipotle. She is now able to help her son and daughter with their homework and read to them in the evenings, a ritual she treasures. She thinks about how much easier it would have been to navigate the hospital during her son’s traumatic birth with the education she has now.
“I would now have the knowledge,” Gutierrez said. “It’s so much different.”
‘Their circles are small’
Research has found that an adult’s literacy skills are strongly connected to their income and civic engagement, as well as their health. The effects of low literacy are felt not just by individuals and their families but by local and national economies. That’s why researchers say adult education is a worthy investment.
Going Deeper
Unlike the data measuring students in TK-12 schools or college, surveys of adult skills in reading and math occur only sporadically in the U.S.
The most recent data comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of adults’ basic skills of literacy, as well as numeracy and digital problem-solving. In the U.S., the survey was offered only in English, although background questions were offered in Spanish.
Between 2012 and 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics administered the first cycle of the PIAAC survey to 12,330 U.S adults ages 16 to 74 in all 50 states.
The second cycle of PIAAC surveys was conducted in 2022-23, and results are expected later this year.
Level 1 is the lowest literacy level in the PIAAC survey. Adults at this level struggle to understand written material or may be functionally illiterate. Level 2 means that an adult is approaching proficiency in literacy, while Level 3 signals the minimal proficiency an adult needs to function well. It means being able to understand and interpret information across complex written texts. Levels 4 and 5 represent advanced literacy skills.
A 2020 Gallup study, conducted by economist Jonathan Rothwell, estimated that if everyone in the U.S. was minimally proficient in English literacy, according to the standards of the international PIAAC survey, it would increase the gross domestic product by 10%. This study looked at the literacy levels of both immigrants and native residents.
The Gallup study noted that areas with concentrated low literacy would see the biggest financial gains from this kind of improvement. One of those places is the Merced Metro Area, in the Central Valley. It would stand to gain an estimated 26% of its GDP, largely because 72% of its adults are not proficient readers, the report said.
The study estimated that those at the lowest level of literacy made on average $34,127 in 2020 dollars, while those who scored proficient made on average $62,997.
Immigrants tend to earn less than natives, but a Migration Policy Institute analysis of PIAAC survey data found that immigrants and native workers with similar literacy and math skills tend to earn the same amount. This report says that immigrants “need higher levels of English competency to be paid well — and on par with natives — for their work in the U.S. labor market.”
Struggling to read as an adult can be a shameful, lonely experience for those who grew up speaking English. But for immigrants, the experience of not being able to read well can be even more isolating when they cannot speak English or are not a citizen. Christine Spencer, a Tulare Adult School instructor, wishes that many more immigrants in her community were taking advantage of these classes.
“My students tell me that they have no friends,” said Spencer. “Their circles are small.”
Bringing literacy into workplaces is a ‘secret sauce’
When Marcelina Chamu emigrated from Mexico decades ago, she longed to do more than just get by. She hoped to become a citizen, learn English, all while creating a better life for her family in the U.S.
But getting the education to achieve those goals wasn’t easy. Chamu, 58, is part of a vast, largely immigrant, labor force of custodians who begin their work shifts in office buildings just as the sun is going down. For the last 25 years, she has clocked in at 6 every night. Because of her work schedule and raising four children, she put off her own education for decades.
“It is very difficult for someone who works through dawn to get up and start studying,” Chamu said, in Spanish. “But it’s not impossible.”
Advocates say that the best way to target immigrants is by reaching them wherever they are in the community — whether that’s at their child’s school or workplace.
Immigrants with low English literacy skills tend to have jobs — more so than U.S. natives with low literacy and more so than immigrants in other nations, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That means they’re busy, but it also means they are easy to reach at work.
One program in California is doing just that, and it helped Chamu.
A few years ago, Chamu learned that her union, SEIU-United Service Workers West, had a partnership with a nonprofit called the Building Skills Partnership, which aims to improve the lives of property service workers in low-wage jobs along with their families.
Chamu has done her best to take advantage of all the programs she could: citizenship, English courses, free tax preparation and nutrition courses. She has become more confident going to the grocery store and filling out forms in the doctor’s office.
The California-based Building Skills Partnership estimates that it reaches 5,500 workers and community members each year through in-person courses, and another 20,000 through online classes throughout the state.
“Part of the secret sauce of why we’re so effective is that we’re able to take our programming into where workers are at,” said Building Skills Partnership executive director Luis Sandoval.
An instructor with Building Skills Partnership teaches a class of custodians in Orange County.Credit: Courtesy of Building Skills Partnership
Property workers, who tend to be clustered around large metro areas in the Bay Area and Southern California, can take part in programming before they head into work or during their lunch hour, which might be at 10 p.m.
Reaching immigrants at their workplaces isn’t just convenient, it allows these programs to cater to workers’ language and job needs, said Jeanne Batalova, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
She points to the Welcome Back Initiative, which focuses on tapping the talents of internationally trained health care workers who need help with specialized English skills or acclimating to a different type of health system to fill staffing shortages in California’s health care sector.
But work-based programs are rare in the U.S., where employers often view workers in low-skilled positions as easily replaceable. The Migration Policy Institute report says these work-based programs could be expanded through subsidies or other incentives, which exist in Canada and other European countries.
Tulare Adult School instructor Yolanda Sanchez, right, assists her student Mariana Gonzalez.EdSource/Emma Gallegos
Building Skills Partnership offers English paired with vocational training. Many workers in the program take English classes with an eye on switching to a more desirable daytime shift. Custodians who work during the daytime are expected to interact more with office workers, so their English skills matter more.
Rosa Lopez, 55, a custodian in a downtown San Diego building, is taking vocational English classes. That allows her to more easily communicate with security guards, a supervisor who only speaks English or just to direct a guest to the elevator.
Lopez said, “I’m more confident and secure in my position.”
Adult schools run on ‘dust’
Sometimes Beatrice Sanchez, 35, a stay-at-home mother of six, comes home from the store with the wrong items because she can’t read the labels in English. She is eager to take the English courses offered at her local school district, Madera Unified, but the program doesn’t currently offer child care. She said she will have to wait to take the courses until her youngest two children are in kindergarten.
Many of those most in need of adult education, like Sanchez, don’t have the time or resources to attend. Adults find it hard to squeeze in time between raising children and working. Even if they have time, transportation can be tricky — particularly in rural areas that lack an extensive public transportation system.
Some Americans used to view poor literacy as an individual’s failure to study during childhood, said Sarah Cacicio, the director of the Adult Literacy and Learning Impact Network (ALL IN), a national nonprofit focused on adult literacy. Now, she said, there is an increasing understanding that systemic factors — never-addressed learning disabilities, a chaotic home life, obligations to care for family or simply a poor education system here or abroad — may mean reaching adulthood without knowing how to read English well.
Most states rely entirely on skeletal funding from the federal government. In 2021-22, the federal government spent less than $800 per student on adult education classes aimed at English language, civics skills, and basic or high-school level education.
California provides robust additional funding. During the 2021–22 years, the state spent roughly $1,200 on each student who enrolled in adult education classes — primarily adult schools or community colleges. But adult educators say it’s not enough to meet the great needs of its students.
Adult schools, said John Werner, president-elect of the California Council for Adult Education “do it on dust. I don’t know how we pull it off.”
In California, adult education receives a fraction of the funding per pupil that TK-12 schools do. Werner said that more funding would allow programs serving adults to get rid of wait lists, improve their technology and facilities, and increase access by offering the child care so many of its potential students need.
Adult educators see the work of their field as an investment not just in individual adult students but in their families and greater communities.
“If we can pull (adult students) in,” Zachry said, “we can raise the economics of that family.”
Werner, director of the Sequoia Adult Education Consortium, said he’s proud of the work being done by the consortium that serves Tulare and Kings counties, which he calls the “Appalachia of the West.” But he is frustrated to see that adult schools are reaching just an estimated 8% of the adults in the region who need it.
“If we could just invest in this,” Werner said. “The greatness that would come out of this.”
