States Pressured to Curb Test Exemptions for Disabled Students

[proud2BlibKansan]

Pressure from the U.S. Department of Education has led some states to curb a testing exemption that applies to only the 1 percent of students with the most severe disabilities, but districts that have long used that flexibility to win some breathing room in their accountability systems are bristling.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states are allowed to administer exams based on alternate standards to students with severe cognitive impairments and then count those scores toward their adequate yearly progress, or AYP, ratings—provided the number of scores counted as passing doesn’t exceed 1 percent of the total number of students tested. When more than 1 percent of students take the alternate tests, states or districts must count the scores from exams that exceed the cap as failing. But, for years, the Education Department allowed a handful of states to overstep the 1 percent cap.

A cap was used—rather than a strict definition of who should qualify for alternate tests—so that school districts could use their own judgment in determining which students should take the tests, which are not intended for children with moderate disabilities, said Ricki Sabia, the associate director of the policy center for the National Down Syndrome Society, based in New York City. When originally proposed, the cap was one-half of a percent, a proportion she said some research shows is much closer to the actual share of students who might be in need of tests that may hardly resemble current standardized exams.

In guidance published in 2007, the Education Department stopped allowing states overall to exceed the cap, but the department continued to let all states give districts permission to do so and count many more tests as passing without asking the federal government for permission.

more . . . http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/05/03/30disabled_ep.h30.html?tkn=QZNFXKY4z7GQcBX8xqpminFtu4APmtpYH43J&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1

[FBaggins]

1. Is the concern that there aren't enough slots for the kids who need them?

Or that the schools are "tweaking" AYP measures by selecting too many kids to take alternate tests?

Obviously there's still the issue of the validity of AYP measures in the first place, but that doesn't seem to be what the article is about.

[Recursion]

2. "some research shows"

The eternal problem of social sciences. A study somewhere declared that 1% of students nationwide would need alternate assessments due to disabilities, and the implementers ignored even the breathtakingly obvious fact that these students will not be uniformly distributed across districts.