Language Test Samples Displayed Publicly For California Parents

By Karen Diegmueller

Did the author Maxine Hong Kingston's Chinese mother really cut her daughter's tongue to keep her from being tongue-tied or was the author's reminiscence in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts merely a literary device?

In The Horned Toad, a story about a young man's evolving relationship with his Spanish-speaking grandmother, how did the boy's or his father's thoughts and feelings change from the beginning to the end?

Those were some of the questions 10th-grade students in California public schools were asked as part of the state's controversial English/language-arts assessment that...