Delaware ponders how to test special-needs kids
A stinging report from the U.S. Department of Education saying Delaware "needs intervention" in special education has put the state under pressure to exempt fewer special-needs students from national standardized tests.
While Gov. Jack Markell's administration says it is pushing to fix the problem, advocates for those students say there's more to the issue than simply getting the tests right.
Delaware was one of just three states, along with California and Texas, to receive the "needs intervention" label last week in a report that said the state has significant room to improve when it comes to educating students with disabilities.
In reading, the state has a 37 percentage-point gap in the number of special-needs students rated proficient compared to their typical classmates; in math, that gap was 36 percent.
"This is what I'm focusing on, is the figures that show how our students are actually doing," said Lt. Gov. Matt Denn. "We can do better, and we need to do better."
The feds dinged Delaware for its low participation rate among special-needs students on the reading section of the National Association of Educational Progress, a test that is given across the country to see how states compare.
More than a quarter of fourth-graders and almost a fifth of eighth-graders were excluded, among the highest rates in the country. The national average is 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively.
That means Delaware schools are either letting more students out of the test or giving them special accommodations. Some students, for example, might have had the exam questions read aloud to them, something NAEP administrators don't accept.
Not every student in each state takes the NAEP, only enough to get a representative sample. In Delaware, 12,244 students took the test last year, including 2,015 special-needs students – 223 special needs students were "excluded" in reading.
Federal officials and some national advocacy groups say the exemptions are a problem because they prevent an accurate picture of how the state's special-needs students are performing.
"When you exclude that many students, you absolutely cannot generalize the results you get," said Candace Cortiella, director of The Advocacy Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of people with disabilities.
Gov. Jack Markell's office said in a statement that his administration will work with individual schools to try to limit the number of students exempted.
"We welcome the U.S. Department of Education's new focus on participation rates and results because assessments are an important component of ensuring special-education students receive the educational services and opportunities they deserve," the statement said. "Our focus is on excluding as few students as possible and improving outcomes while ensuring that all of our special-ed students are being assessed in a manner that allows their parents and teachers to set meaningful growth goals and effectively measure their progress."
State officials point out that Delaware isn't exempting significantly more students from the math section of the NAEP or from its own statewide test, the Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System. About 88 percent of Delaware students took the statewide assessment, which more closely matches other states' participation rates.
Denn points out it's the DCAS, not the NAEP, which virtually every student takes and which teachers, students and schools use in their classrooms.
Brian Touchette, the state's director of assessment, also said that Delaware has steadily shrunk the number of students excluded from the NAEP – in 2001, 46 percent of fourth-graders and 52 percent of eighth-graders weren't counted.
Even as the feds pressure Delaware to exempt fewer students from the NAEP, the legislature has passed a bill that would allow severely handicapped students to forgo the alternative assessment currently offered on the other test, DCAS, in favor of one that is "portfolio-based."
Families of students with autism, multiple disabilities or intellectual disabilities could work with their school to set life skills or other goals for those kids to achieve by the end of the year instead of taking a test.
Sen. Nicole Poore, the bill's sponsor, says these students don't get anything useful out of these tests, so it doesn't make sense to put them through them.
"For my son, Nicholas, success is never going to be measured by what he gets on a test," said Poore, D-New Castle. "What I want for him is to be able to interact with society."
Denn, who supports the bill, said great care was taken to make sure it does not run Delaware afoul of federal rules. The students whom the bill would impact already take alternative assessments, and make up only a tiny segment of the state's student population.
Markell's administration still is reviewing the bill before he decides whether to sign it, a spokesman said.
While the bill only deals with a tiny subset of the population, Cortelia worries it will leave those students without any effective measure of how well they are learning.
"We definitely have concerns about this bill," Cortiella said. "You can't just take a group of kids, even if it's small, and take them out of the calculation altogether."
Cortelia said research suggests there are ways to measure learning and set a high bar even for students with severe disabilities. In fact, she said the federal government is spending $100 million to develop new tests for exactly this type of student that fit the rigorous new Common Core State Standards.
"If a kid is medically, physically able to get to school, they need to be assessed," Cortelia said. "There has to be some measurement of how they're doing academically."
Poore said her bill does not prevent parents who want their students to take the existing alternate asessment from doing so. But she argues it is parents, not state or national officials, who should set the expectations.
"At the end of the day, these teachers will have Nicholas for a year or so. I will have him for the rest of my life," she said. "If a parent says, you know what, I want them to take the test, there's nothing in this bill that stops them. For me, I have expectations too, but they're not designed in a textbook."
Bill Doolittle, incoming president of the Delaware PTA, is a longtime advocate for special-needs students. He said, while the state needs to make sure it has good information on how its students are doing, it's important that the question of who gets tested does not outplay a more important conversation about how to better serve these students.
"I think the real benefit of this report is that it has started people talking about what we're doing for our special-needs students in Delaware," Doolittle said. "I think it's important that we keep that conversation alive. And it's also important that we don't focus so much on who we're testing and we pay enough attention to making sure our teachers and our schools are getting what they need to help these children succeed."
Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com. or at (302) 324-2428, or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.
How Delaware stacks up
In reading, the state has a 37 percentage-point gap in the number of special-needs students rated proficient compared to their typical classmates; in math, that gap was 36 percent. More than a quarter of fourth-graders and almost a fifth of eight-graders were excluded, among the highest rates in the country. The national average is 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively.