Tuesday, August 31, 1999
Ky. leads special-ed test efforts
BY ANDREA TORTORA
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — Kentucky makes some of the best efforts in the nation to include special-education students in its testing and accountability program.
All but 1 percent of special-education students are able to take the state's assessment test with the aid of “accommodations,” such as using a calculator, giving answers orally rather than in writing, or receiving help with reading questions.
Yet this effort to include more students in the tests backfired when a large number of Kentucky's students were excluded from a national reading exam because they had received such special accommodations.
The problem lies in how tests are given. The national exam does not allow students with accommodations to take the test. Yet that is the cornerstone of Kentucky's assessment system.
“We've taken away the temptation for exemptions by having no exemption policy,” said Jim Parks, Kentucky Education Department spokesman. “It's an equal opportunity issue. If you begin excluding people you are, in effect, denying them the opportunity to learn and to demonstrate what they know and can do.”
Kentucky's education reform requires nearly 100 percent participation, so
schools excluding special-ed students from the testing receive a zero score for that child. This motivates principals to seek accommodations to allow more children to be tested.
For those children too profoundly disabled to take the regular exams, Kentucky developed an alternative assessment that allows them to demonstrate what they know through a body of work called a portfolio.
Kentucky classrooms include a mix of regular and special education students, a system that increases social and academic skills, said Mike Nachazel, special education teacher at R.C. Hinsdale Elementary in Edgewood. Hinsdale is recognized for its inventive inclusion strategies.
In one classroom, four special education students — one autistic, two learning-disabled and one who is hyperactive — work with classmates on reading, science and other projects.
The interaction among students “definitely makes them better prepared for the tests,” Mr. Nachazel said. And students who need accommodations get them.
“With the extra help, sometimes the special education students exceed the (regular education) kids,” Mr. Nachazel said.
A study by University of Kentucky researchers looked at school districts around the state and found that 15 percent to 40 percent of students with mild disabilities participated in state tests with no accommodations.
Such efforts are touted by testing experts as a model for other states to follow.
What remains to be seen is the fairness of the accommodations, said Monty Neill, director of FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass., center that monitors state testing.
“The question becomes, what kind of attention are you paying them and are you actually helping them — and that's a much thornier issue,” Mr. Neill said.
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