Tuesday, August 31, 1999
Schools can raise scores by exclusion
Special-ed students left out
BY ANDREA TORTORA and RICHARD WHITMIRE
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — The temptation for schools to boost test scores by excluding special-education students from testing might prove stronger than the federal law passed to stop the practice.
“Everyone is trying to keep the low-scoring kids out of the testing, even when it is not high-stakes,” said Jim Ysseldyke, former director of the National Center on Educational Outcomes at the University of Minnesota.
The center monitors participation of students with disabilities in national and state assessments.
Behind the dilemma for education officials are the “high-stakes” tests that states adopt as part of school reforms.
For students, the stakes can mean repeating a grade. A string of sub-par academic profiles can cost principals their jobs.
When Kentucky students posted impressive gains this year on the National Assessment for Educational Progress reading test, the results immediately were questioned because 10 percent of the test takers were exempted — one of the highest rates in the nation. The exemptions came because the state had given special accommodations to many special-ed students.
The result was a public -relations nightmare for state education officials.
In Texas this year, the number of special-ed students excluded from the state test soared after the schools commissioner ruled school districts must count the scores of all but the severely handicapped.
In 1998, Texas tested 62 percent of special-education students. One year later, the rate fell to 48 percent.
That means that in a single year, Texas schools found an additional 38,000 special-ed students they decided needed to be exempted from the test — a trend Texas Commissioner Mike Moses called “troubling, but not unexpected.”
In San Antonio, for example, the exemption rate soared from 39 percent to 65 percent. The payoff for San Antonio: Scores rose on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills-TAAS.
A June press release from the San Antonio superintendent called the results “the greatest victory yet” in the city's fight to improve student performance.
Houston, by contrast, decided to test as many special-education children as possible. The consequence: Scores fell.
Houston Superintendent Rod Paige has no regrets.
While other schools treated the TAAS as a rating system and exempted as many special-ed children as possible, Houston used the test as a diagnostic tool.
Said Mr. Paige, “We decided it would give us good information even if the results damaged our accountability rating.”
There have been improvements in the two years since Congress changed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the law overseeing special education children. States were told to include most special ed children in testing.
Maryland and Kentucky, for example, include nearly all their special education children in state assessments.
“I don't think the temptation is there anymore,” said Kathy Rosenberger, director of test security for the Maryland Assessment, referring to the enticing possibility of juggling exemptions to improve school scores.
Only about 5 percent of Maryland special education students are exempted.
“We audit schools, and if there are large numbers of children exempted, we audit the records,” said Rosenberger.
Special-ed exclusion
The problem with excluding more students is summarized in the adage repeated by many special-ed activists: If you don't test them, you don't have to teach them.
Texas hardly is the only state to have problems with this.
North Carolina and Florida, for example, don't include special-education students in their state assessments.
A June report from Common Sense Foundation in Raleigh faulted North Carolina's ABCs of Public Education school reform program. Both remedial and special education students are excluded from testing, said the report, and many schools intentionally place some students in slower classes to inflate scores.
At Burns High in Cleveland County near Charlotte, N.C., almost one in five ninth graders did not take the end-of-course test for English I. Most excluded were the school's lowest performers, said researcher MaryBe McMillan.
Yet Burns earned an “exemplary” designation for improvement on the tests.
State officials said the practices were unintended consequences of a testing system that is putting needed pressure on schools to improve.
“State officials aren't tracking a lot of these unintended effects of the program and I'm not convinced they know how widespread this problem is,” Ms. McMillan said. “An education reform should not allow for such exclusions.”
So long as high-stakes tests are used to rank schools rather than diagnose how students learn, the temptation to fudge scores will remain, said Dan Koretz, a Rand Corporation testing expert.
There will be pressure to label slow learners as special-education students, he said. And that will only hurt the slow learners.
Straining ethics
A veteran of this controversy is Richard Allington, a professor at the State University of New York in Albany. In the late 1980s, Allington received permission to track the records of six New York schools that suddenly had jumped in state rankings.
Allington found the schools had siphoned more and more children into special-education exemptions. One school received the federal “blue ribbon” designation as a national success story.
“This strained my ethics when I saw the article about the principal receiving the blue ribbon,” said Mr. Allington, who debated whether to break his promise of confidentiality and accuse the school of cheating.
He remained silent.
Mr. Allington has little confidence the new federal law will make much difference.
“It's problematic when you have governors and districts giving cash incentives to schools with high achievers,” said Mr. Allington.
The federal solution to this controversy is laid out in the same law that told states to test most special education students. Those students who cannot take regular tests, even with accommodations such as extra time, should take an “alternate assessment.”
Those alternate assessments must be ready by July 2000, says the Department of Education.
"Dumbed-down' version
But what sounds like a solution may only raise more problems.
Texas, for example, is field testing an alternate test to the TAAS, described by some as a “dumbed-down” TAAS. Interviews with Texas special-education coordinators indicate they plan to give the special test to far more than just the tiny percentage envisioned by the Department of Education.
“The low-functioning kids are being separated out,” said Mr. Ysseldyke about Texas.
But Texas is not alone. “States are creating completely separate systems for them,” he said.
Although it is too soon to point a finger at any state for misusing alternate assessments, there is plenty of worry about the alternate assessments in the works.
“Our expectation is, if there is an alternate assessment there should be a very small number of children in it,” said Lou Danielson from the Office of Special Education Programs at the Department of Education in Washington.
The intent of the law, said Mr. Danielson, is to reserve the alternate test for a very small group, primarily the severely disabled — not children with mild learning disabilities.
A separate and less challenging assessment could lead to lower academic expectations for children with mild learning disabilities, say special education activists.
“We don't want a dual system of assessment,” said Mr. Danielson. “The risk is it would be separate and unequal.”
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