CALIFORNIA STUDENTS RANK 39TH AMONG STATES IN SCIENCE.

Byline: Associated Press 

California students got the equivalent of a D on a tough new national science test, ranking 39th among the states and territories.

California students were outperformed by 65 percent of other states' eighth-graders, according to figures released Friday by U.S. Education officials in Washington.

The national average for eighth-graders was 148 on a 300-point scale. California's score was 138.

Out of 43 states, the District of Columbia and Guam participating in the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only five ranked lower than California - Hawaii, Mississippi, Louisiana, Guam and the District of Columbia.

``The children who are doing poorly are doing especially poorly in California, which is a serious problem,'' said Lawrence Feinberg, assistant director of the government-supported National Assessment Governing Board.

The results are ``very disappointing,'' said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.

It was only the latest in a series of poor test results for California schools and students. The state has ranked near the bottom in federal analyses of math and reading ability since 1995.

No breakdown was available to show how Los Angeles Unified School District students did on the science test, but school board member David Tokofsky said Saturday he expected that LAUSD students probably fared even worse than the state averages.

``I'm sure ours are a drop lower,'' Tokofsky said.

Tokofsky said the district could request the scores from the assessment board, but chooses not to, which he said is a mistake.

``It is avoiding reality therapy,'' he said.

He said he believes the district avoids learning discouraging news, particularly if the data are of the kind that suggest that high minority enrollment leads to lower scores, to avoid a ``woe is me'' sense of despair. But hard data are needed to measure progress, he said.

``We don't have to only measure ourselves against suburban, homogenized districts,'' he said. ``We could measure against ourselves, measure our progress. Right now we're a ship afloat without any landmarks.''

California officials said the state's problems are caused by a lack of high, uniform standards for learning, inadequate training of science teachers and an absence of statewide testing.

The report provided some clues as to why California's performance was so low. It has more students who are not fluent in English than any other state and is tied with Utah for the largest average class size.

The results also showed that the poor and Latinos - who historically have had lower scores - did worse in California than in most other places tested.

The test was given last year to 123,000 fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders. Friday's results provided some general information, but the test results were incomplete because the board has yet to agree on standards: what children should know to be considered as having basic, proficient or advanced knowledge.

State-by-state comparisons were based on the performance of eighth-graders alone.

Overall, students in only 19 states performed better than the national mean of 150.

Youngsters in the Northeast and Central states outperformed those in the West and Southeast. Whites outperformed African-Americans and Latinos. The poor did poorly.

Boys slightly outperformed girls in the 12th grade, but not in the earlier grades, suggesting as other tests have done that the gender gap is closing.

The testing found that most U.S. high school graduates know only enough science to read a graph and follow directions to carry out a simple experiment. But the majority cannot apply scientific facts and principles or explain their reasoning clearly.

Their performance amounts to another serious form of illiteracy - the inability to read and compute, scientists said.

``We are confronted by a paradox of the first order,'' said U.S. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. ``We Americans are fascinated by technology. Yet, at the same time, some Americans remain profoundly ignorant.''

This ignorance - of scientific advances and principles that influence daily living - can lead, he said, to ``confusion, suspicion, even hostility.''

Among other things, eighth-graders were asked to explain how people may have gotten food poisoning at a summer picnic from eating potato salad with mayonnaise and how to prevent food poisoning. Only 10 percent could do so.

The test - which cost $11 million and was administered last spring - was more difficult than previous science assessments, which were dominated by multiple-choice questions.

In the 1996 exam, about two-thirds of the questions required students to write out an answer that could be a paragraph or more.