Louise Marr sent this from her book:
**********£*******
“Every spring, the Philadelphia public school students take the standardized tests, or PSSAs. (Starting in 2013, the district has switched to a different test called the Keystone Exams.) These tests are a huge part of how schools are evaluated and rated. It is from these scores that Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) is determined. There is a big push to prepare the eleventh graders for the tests from the beginning of the year to test day, usually after the first of the year. This particular year at Vaux, the students took the test over a course of several days. They were divided into several different classrooms for three to four hours in the morning, with two teacher proctors per room. All eleventh graders take the test, even the SPED students. Schools across the country take statewide tests very seriously, because of the implications that they present. In the five high schools where I have taught, there has been a common atmosphere at test time: the school is quiet and rules must be strictly enforced. In the classroom that I proctored at Vaux, it was sometimes a challenge to maintain the serious atmosphere.
There were five students in the room I proctored. Four were SPED students. One was MMR, and read at first grade level. He was given the same test. After a few minutes, he put his head down, because he did not understand the reading. Teachers are not allowed to help, only to say, “Do the best you can.” He didn’t even bother to ask.
Takierrah and Courtney were working on their tests, until Courtney looked up and caught Takierrah looking at her.
“Stop looking at me!”
“You’re ugly, I will f*** you up.” “I can’t stand your black ass.” “You’re black too!”
“No, I’m light-skinned.”
“You’re still ugly.”
“I’m cuter than you.”
“Get outta my face.”
“I’m not in your face, because if I was, I would f*** you up.”
They did manage to settle down without a physical confrontation,
but this scene made a huge impression on me. These tests would be used to evaluate the progress of our school. They were obviously way above the comprehension level of the Special Education students, yet the students were not given any accommodations at all. When I asked an administrator about this, she just shrugged, “That’s just the way it is.”
From the book, “Passed On: Public School Children in Failing American Schools”
by Louise Marr. Chapter 3: No Longer a Special Education
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No Student Left Behind?
Why did these students not have accommodations for testing written into their IEPs? I am a special ed teacher, and my students receive accommodations for state tests, such as readers or extended time.
Jamie – we’re talking about severe/profound. No accommodation can make this test reasonable.
Geaux, Louise doesn’t say the students are severe/profound–she said ONE student was MMR (meaning Mildly or Moderately Mentally Retarded-? In many states, the students are now called
Developmentally Disabled; we used to have Severe and Profound Mentally Handicapped, Moderately Mentally Handicapped, Trainable Mentally Handicapped, and Mildly or Educable Mentally Handicapped {this was Illinois–other states had different terminology}). That having been said, within the category Developmentally Disabled, there are still discernible groups, with severe/profound being one. In Illinois, at least, the Developmentally Disabled students do NOT take the state assessments but, rather, take the alternative (portfolio) assessments. No matter, though–ALL of the other special ed. kids MUST take the ISATs
(Pear$on state assessments). AND–you often have the mess that Louise so aptly describes above. Those students with behavior disorders and/or social-emotional disorders often get into the kinds of confrontations above, even right in the midst of testing. Many students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are NOT on medication, are on unregulated medication or their meds have not yet kicked in or are off (esp. in adolescents’ ever-changing bodies).
Therefore, we have children getting up & walking (or running!) around in the middle of testing, or throwing pencils into the ceiling, or annoying other students, or any other testing disturbance one might think to create. Oh–and don’t get me started on all those students who finish their tests in…FIVE minutes! “Teacher, I filled in all the bubbles! Can I leave, now?” OR–the Asperger 7th Grader
who hasn’t a CLUE as to how to answer a Reading Comprehension Extended Response about “how Jane feels when her best friend ignores her,” and, “What would YOU do/how would YOU feel if you were Jane?” Because educators all know that Asperger and spectrum students have difficulties with feelings and social situations…but, wait, we’re not the ones who designed the tests,
just that we MUST administer them AND, by golly!, get GOOD scores from these kids, or else lose our jobs!
AND–forget about how the STUDENTS feel. After I tell this nice, generally well-behaved 7th Grader who ALWAYS tries his best that I CAN’T help him, and that he should just do his best, like his smart self always does, he puts his head down on the desk, sighs, says, “I guess I’m just STUPID!” and puts his arm over his head.
He’s done for the day and, were I still teaching, I’d just be plain DONE.
In Pennsylvania, students with an IEP may be tested in a small group, have the math and science questions read to them, etc. All students may have extra time. The difficulty is with the reading test – which may not be read. ELLs may use a word to word dictionary and have questions read in math and science. Again, nothing in reading. Having high school students take a test after a student has been studying English for a year is ridiculous. In math, the key terms have to be taught so students are prepared.
Beginning in 2014, teachers in Pennsylvania will be rated partially based on test scores. Schools with few students with an IEP and ELLs will obviously have better scores. Meanwhile, magnet / special admit schools will get better scores. It isn’t the teachers…
Jamie, even with accomodations, students with IEPs and ELLs after their first year in the country take the exact same test. Extended time doesn’t change the fact that the test is way above their reading level.
I have taught as a reading interventionist in high need elementary schools since 2010. One of the major issues people who are not educators do not realize about testing is that the law requires that certified teaching staff proctor these tests for kids who have accommodations due to their special needs. Accommodations range from extended test taking time, having directions read aloud, to being provided with a Spanish-English dictionary for the duration of the test. As a reading interventionist I have often been very aware of which third graders read on a kindergarten or first grade reading level because my job is to compile progress monitoring data of the Tier 2 or Tier 3 instructional intervention time they get with my colleagues and myself. Only an extremely few students are officially exempt from this testing via their IEP and parents rarely know they have the right to opt out of testing. In Connecticut virtually the entire month of March is devoted to testing, and during that time all certified instructional support staff– special education, ELL, and literacy– are taken AWAY from their (often IEP mandated) instructional responsibilities to babysit students who we have extensive documentation will be completely incapable of reading the test in the first place. How much more improved would those students’ educational outcomes be if they didn’t lose an entire MONTH of their most essential supportive instruction? Last year I had a 3rd grader who scribbled on the page “I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” I am sure he thought I disapproved but in fact I fully respected his civil disobedience and was unable to share with him that I too knew that this was, not only a waste of his time, but a sin against the education he has a right to.
“a sin against the education he has a right to.”
Bless you, Nora.
Please, even you snarky, troll types, you “edu -entrepreneurs” out there.
Surely you will help us protect and appropriately serve this child.
Oh, wait, I went soft in the head for a moment.
Never mind.
There is money to be made.
The public schools are a socialist endeavor and must die.
Continue the testing, dictate the curriculum.
It is good for our competitiveness.
Ang: what you said.
I am sure I would have enjoyed working with you. We are on the same wavelength.
🙂
“We are on the same wavelength.!”
Agree!
What fun we could have had!
We in Louisiana also test special Ed students with the same tests. Two legislators have entered bills this session to allow parents to opt out (one bill) or opt in (the other bill). We are changing to the ACT as our high stakes test next year until the new PARCC assessment is ready to drop on our heads. In testimony in the house education committee the LDOE insisted that 1. Louisiana must administer a high stakes test because the Feds require a “consequence.” And 2. That because the Feds require a “consequence” that special Ed students who opt out must still be given a zero that will figure into the school performance score. How stupid is that.
It is an indicator of the lack of educational qualifications of the many TFAs running our department of Ed under Supt. John White when the only “consequence” they can come up with is punitive and a zero. Forget about a “consequence” that might actually serve to bring about improvement. This, of course, is the same LDOE rep who testified last year before House Ed that the only strategy to improve schools was “to hold the threat of takeover by the state recovery school district over their heads.”
I referred legislators to the U.S.Ed. Website that clearly states that no single standardized test should be used as the only measure for high stakes. I don’t suppose it will impress anyone until the issue is brought to court.
This is typical in urban environments. It is a crime! I recently became a tutor in an urban district from which I retired. What I see daily is very sad. The children are preparing for assessments or taking assessments. Most of the material is well above their level and is material that they haven’t been taught. It is a joke. The kids are burned out as well as the teachers.I recently walked into a third grade classroom where the teacher was giving a DRA assessment (1 on 1) while the rest of the classroom was to be working independently. I walked around to see how they were doing and most of them were clueless. We are failing our children and nobody seems to care except those of us who follow Diane and Deborah. We need a big paradigm shift in this country and we need it now and it is not Charter Schools!
It is the voice of the retired teachers that must be heard as the teachers can not speak for themselves..unless of course one is as brave as the I Quit teacher from Charlotte, NC.
Yes, neanderthal, you’re right! Active teachers, get a hold of a retired teachers’ group from your school(s) & ask them to help you all in some way. Believe me, THEY’ll figure out a way to do it!
Yes, WE can!!!
Ah, AYP…another manipulation by those hoping to undermine public education for fun and profit. Here’s a lovely true story from our school. We “make the grade” easily in every subject matter, but struggle with a couple of subgroups…Special Education and and Asian/Pacific students. Wow–are we underserving our Asian population? This is scandalous–we must be racist or incompetent! Well, it just so happens that we are a welcoming community with affordable housing; moreover, Catholic Charities sponsors families coming from counties with war/strife. Our Asian population thus has a very high proportion of recent refugee, many of whom had never attending a school in their country of origin. We get rewarded with a “Continuous Improvement” label and a state imposed school improvement plan that costs time and resources. Some might say “this is insane”–but that’s not the case. Insanity requires an inability to tell right from wrong. This is one tactical element of the project to dismantle public education….for fun and profit.
So many short-sighted policies and policy makers. This is more than clear from the words they use, like “achievement”, “consequence”, “performance”, and “result”.
The result of education on a person cannot be understood until generations after this person passes away. Let’s teach our children to love to learn.
“until generations after this person passes away”
Well, that’s taking the long view, but I like it.
Very few students are found to be severe/profound. These particular students receive an alternative assessment with a portfolio kept on them throughout the year. The remainder of the sped children must take the exact same test as all other students with few accommodations/modifications including more time or smaller setting. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that these students can perform like the “normal” kids. They can’t. Why subject them to this kind of torture? More stupid leaders. Please read, “Yes, We Are STUPID in America!”
Off topic–check out today’s op ed piece in the NYTimes by a TFA clone…..the last paragraph IMHO attacks Parents Across America. So for more money, I should take on more students??? And if the stress doesn’t kill me, not being able to reach each and every child will probably get me fired.
I will be giving a student with an aide who qualifies as intellectually disabled the regular California Standards Test. I teach second grade. He isn’t even going to be pulled out of my classroom.
From the NYT, speaking of Philadelphia, more evidence that TFA is a cult, or perhaps, more benignly, a variation on the mill towns of New England:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/education/philadelphia-renovating-apartments-to-lure-teachers.html?hp
It is insulting to veteran teachers, like myself, who do not need so called “subsidized” housing. Phila. housing prices are actually lower than most areas. A house can be rented in the same neighborhood for about $1000/month. Why can’t TFA live with a few friends and share a house? This is a publicity stunt for TFA and the developers. Meanwhile, the School District of Phila. is shutting down 24 more schools and laying off staff. We DO NOT need TFA and their Walton Foundation Funding!
Dr S,
I agree with you. It’s another ploy to privatize public education. Never forget the goal of the deformers.
Yes, there are accommodations, and those accommodations are written into the IEPs. However, the accommodations of extended time testing, small group or individualized testing, human readers for the non-reading tests, and passing at basic in areas of specially designed instruction are some very small help for students who are significantly below grade level. How helpful is the accommodation of reading the 5th grade level math test verbatim to a student who is only beginning to understand basic subtraction? How confusing is it that I am not allowed to help my students when they have come to expect my help. These accommodations are helpful to students with mild learning disabilities, but they are not particularly helpful to kids who are more severely impacted. What’s more, the accommodations are used for a widely diverse array of special education kids, who have little in common beyond having IEPs.
How many of us could have written the above on test days? In special ed we all know they are testing the kids’ frustration tolerance which as we know ahead of time is pretty low. This is the stuff people like Tisch and King and Cuomo need to be sat in a room to see before they gas us with one more syllable of their corporate sponsored child abuse.
As far as I am concerned this is legal child abuse. Just following orders does not cut it and “that is just the way it is” flys in the face of professional ethics and personal integrity for the teachers and administrators that would perpetrate this on helpless disabled children. In mass and with a deliberate message of correction to an inhumane act parents and professionals should be screaming in concert with each other.
But there is a divide and conquer threatening environment in our education system and most people are lemmings or frozen in fear for their livelihoods and security. So the children will continue to suffer
needlessly. IEP’s are not worth the paper they are written on if there is betrayal of real consideration to act in protection of the child.
For the masses of disabled poor children Due Process is laughable!
Much has gone desperately wrong but for the learning disabled and challenged children testing has made them the destructive tool in a measuring game of numbers with an outcome to damage school systems. This is a lose lose game with the children used, no matter how it may hurt them, by all sides as fodder for the players. The parents are pretty well innocent of understanding how this is being played out on their children. Disgrace and shame on all who take part in this betrayal of education intent to do no harm!
“ust following orders does not cut it and “that is just the way it is” flys in the face of professional ethics and personal integrity for the teachers and administrators that would perpetrate this on helpless disabled children.”
Not only disabled children but all children. Go along to get along, I know who butters my bread. Or as Hannah Arendt put it “the banality of evil”.
All educators who do not speak out against and refuse to take part in the current educational malpractices are candy assed chickenshits in my book.
Many special education teachers teach IEP students across several grades. An issue is that no one seems to think about what is happening to the students who are normally served during the times the special education teachers and IAs are providing accommodations (proctoring small group/individualized testing, reading, scribing). The IEP students not being tested are not being served either through inclusion or pullout support, which is a violation for their IEPs. My district requires both the state and the MAP testing to be done in May. There’s no way around the fact that high stakes testing is very disruptive.
Yes! And at my school last year the very few students who were exempt from testing were sent to the cafeteria to do basically nothing. They can be forced to test or pulled out of testing but they generally will miss out on anything resembling valuable instruction either way.
Under the law, special education is not a place. It is a service that is provided by a highly qualified teacher. This means that general ed teachers are qualified to provide services. SOME teachers use this “violation of IEP,” because they want students w/IEPs out of their classrooms.
Gened teachers are required to modifiy instruction (differentiate) for students w/IEPs during the day regardless if there is testing going on or not. The best way to provide instruction to students w/IEPs is for gened & sped teachers to collaborate closely with one another to modify instruction during the reporting period. So when these situation occur, the classroom teacher can continue to provide instruction to student w/IEPs. What do your students w/IEPs do when they are not pulled out?
Testing is disruptive for ALL not just for student in special education.
Are you saying that he Highly Qualified Teacher is the Special Ed and the General Ed is the what?
Confused here with your definition of a General Ed teacher.
Really good for the special ed students to humiliate them and make them feel like they are not human beings by giving them material all know they do not understand. This is psychological warfare on them which is meant to destroy the persons self worth. I am sure they wanted to be born this way. Who is allowing this to happen? They should be fired. I do not mean the teachers in the classroom who are under orders or else I mean the high level administrators who give the command. Always cut off the head not the tail. How about for the people who made this decision that in order to keep their job we give them a test in a complicated field which they do not have knowledge and if they fail they lose their job? That would be fair if this is fair. I call them sociopaths.
Another story of test proctoring absurdity: I was proctoring a standardized 7th grade math test for an English Language Learner whose accomodations included having directions read aloud and access to a Spanish-English dictionary. Turns out “isosceles” wasn’t in the dictionary.
Wasn’t Isosceles the Greek god of insanity?
This is the greatest Internet comment ever.
Bottom Line is that American Schools have gone stark-raving mad in the Testing Department.
The teachers are supposed to speak well of the curriculum and speak positively about all that is going on….otherwise…bad evaluation…wow..wow…wow..
Teachers are not educating in these classes…they are being constantly harassed by the principals over covering material and negative evaas scores.
There is a county in a southern state that
1. Has a quarterly test..teachers reprimanded and flooded with action plans if scores are below expectations..made to do minute by minute lesson plans.
2.The county then decided to test the students to see how well they would do on the county quarter tests so they could reprimand a few more teachers…harass…talk loudly about in the halls of the schools so that every student walking by could hear just how bad the teacher was performing.
3. One of the principals from this county recently resigned on a Friday after a weeks vacation in a minutes notice as he had a fictitious moving company and collected 18,000 plus for a move from another state…got caught….County has been made aware than this harassing principals who did not pay teachers for other jobs they were supposed to get paid for but they have done absolutely nothing…LAWSUITS ..ON THE WAY..
What a joke!
Starve raving mad is right. And yes, it is a joke — and an evil one at that. I have been think the same, “Lawsuits…on the way.”
IQ = 70 or below.
Must be tested.
DOE said “They can do it”
DOE said..”Some have passed with flying colors”
Of course some will guess correctly..A or B or C or D..
DOE comes back with what they call deeper thinking ..in reality it is what good teachers have been doing for years since the beginning of education….Explain-Justify..Analyze..Compare..
Pear$son owns Education in the South..
In some schools, they are really serious about these IEP’s..Must follow them to the letter…If the students are included in a regular class, the admin assigns quiz days for each subject..Makes sense so students will not have 6 quizzes in the same day..however…the teachers tell me they can not even give a pop quiz with one question as this is violating the IEP’s…
One teacher decided these little pop quizzes (that were designed to determine just what the students were retaining)..would be given anyway but the ec students quizzes would not be counted..
It’s the Feds who are dictating all these assessments. Opt out and you don’t get any funding. Coercive?
Repressive.
I have seen a lot of comments about testing of Special Needs students in regular classes. A lot depends on the ESE coordinator and the parents. Also, is the disability considered cognitive or not? Many parents are in denial about their children’s potential and insist on their placement in regular classes. If they want their children to get a regular high school diploma, then their children have to take the regular exam, although often with modifications, e.g. extended time. Emotionally disabled students may have the same cognitive abilities as their peers but may be struggling under other challenges. I have seen students with severe cognitive deficits who are not labeled as special needs because there is no one in their lives sufficiently concerned about them to do the studies and paperwork necessary to get them the help they need.
Unfortunately, there are many low-performing special ed students who get their test results back that show: Out of 100 children, you scored lower than 92 (or more). Is it really necessary to rub this in their face time and time again. I can’t help it. It just seems ridiculous. I’d like to hear someone come up with something different because the current testing is a bit sad.
I’ve commented on this before. I have seen children with severe and profound cognitive impairment, IQs less than 30, taking a state science test. Seriously, if you tell people outside of the education community that this is going on, they won’t even believe you.
All the more reason to tell the truth about what is happening.
In response to a state standardized test question about analyzing the author’s use of hyperbole, a student of mine recently responded with one brief sentence: “I don’t know what analyze means.” This student (who receives special education services) sat with his head down for most of the testing session. I was struck by the fact that he felt compelled to finally lift his pencil and scribble this when he could have easily just turned in a blank test booklet. It tells me that, even at a school that does not emphasize the importance of these tests (like ours), they are stressful and demoralizing to students. Students’ self-esteem is damaged and they feel the need to explain why they can’t produce a satisfactory answer. Mainly, it reminds me that these tests are a huge waste of time and resources that could go toward engaging students in actual learning.
But what does it tell them?
A test scorer looking at this student’s response would conclude that the student’s response is “totally incorrect or irrelevant or contains insufficient information to demonstrate comprehension (0 points).” Same for most of this student’s other answers. So, he’s got a “below basic” achievement level in “literature,” according to the test. Most people could tell you that by listening to the kid read aloud for one minute. So what else can we gather from his poor performance? He’s probably not learning anything in school? Doesn’t keep up with the assigned readings? Doesn’t finish any of his writing assignments? His teachers must not be addressing his unique learning needs by teaching him all the state instructional standards… I bet he attends one of those “corrective action” schools that have failed to meet AYP measures over and over… (Hey, we should close all those schools!) …if he even attends at all.
The reality is that he attends an alternative high school that doesn’t believe in testing their students in the traditional way. Instead, this student demonstrates his learning through the completion of a multidisciplinary project each semester. His project is based on real world learning that he engages in at his internship at a reputable local motorcycle shop. Last semester, with the guidance and support of his internship mentor, he built a “go-ped” motor scooter from scratch using technical schematics that most of us would be hopeless at deciphering. He collected data on the cost of all the materials as well as retail pricing and crunched the numbers to determine how much he could reasonably charge for his product. He researched and wrote an essay on the inadequacy of driver education programs, presenting evidence from several studies that showed that teen drivers are largely unprepared for emergencies on the road. He developed a hypothesis and and analyzed the results of a science experiment that involved taking samples of and growing bacteria in a petri dish (How “dirty” are those go-ped handlebars anyway?). Instead of a final exam, he created and delivered an exhibition where presented evidence of all of this learning to a group of his teachers, mentors, and peers. Pretty amazing accomplishments for a student who is “below basic,” I’d say.
I keep this student’s response to the “analyze” question in mind as a good example of why these tests pretty much useless.