CBEST or Worst?

www.iSteve.com/05FebA.htm#educational.gibberish

So you want to be a public school teacher? To teach in a California public school, you have to pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test. Somebody showed me a book of CBEST practice tests and while thumbing through the reading comprehension section, I was struck by how incomprehensible the reading samples were. For instance:

There is an importance of learning communication and meaning in language... Communication in the classroom is vital. The teacher should use communication to help students develop the capacity to make their private responses become public responses.

Huh?

If you are looking for a single sentence that combines the banal, the barbarous, and the unfathomable, it's hard to beat: "There is an importance of learning communication and meaning in language."

The clarity of other passages on the exam could be enhanced by recasting them as, say, dialogue spoken by Shaggy on Scooby-doo. For example,

In view of the current emphasis on literature-based reading instruction, a greater understanding by teachers of variance in cultural, language, and story components should assist in narrowing the gap between reader and text and improve reading comprehension. Classroom teachers should begin with students' meaning and intentions about stories before moving students to the commonalities of story meaning based on common background and culture.

makes far more sense when rendered in Shaggy-speak:

You gotta dig where these stories are coming from, man! And you gotta grok where your kids heads are at.

Clearly, the point of the CBEST is to intimidate and/or bore anybody who didn't get a degree in Ed. into not trying to become a public school teacher in order to keep the supply of teachers down and their wages up. But, think of what it does to the souls of the people we entrust our children to that they had to spend their formative college years drenched in this gibberish.

PS, Looking at some other CBEST books, the test looks much more reasonable. I suspect that this book isn't representative.