Geoff Decker in Chalkbeat New York reports that the Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents said that if she had a child with special needs, she would think twice about letting the child take the state tests.
“New York’s top education official, who sharply criticized parents who might keep their children from taking state tests a few months ago, offered a different message for parents of some students with special needs on Monday.
“Personally, I would say that if I was the mother of a student with a certain type of disability, I would think twice before I allowed my child to sit through an exam that was incomprehensible to them,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said in Albany.
Tisch’s remarks came after federal education officials rejected New York’s request to loosen testing requirements for some high-needs students in June. The waiver would have exempted English language learners who have attended U.S. schools for less than two years from taking the tests, and assessed students with severe disabilities based on their instructional level, rather than their age-based grade…
Never before has Tisch supported opting out as a reasonable response to unreasonable demands.
The state’s “request to exempt certain high-need students from some testing requirements was denied. Assistant Secretary of Education Deborah Delisle wrote that the current testing requirements were necessary to ensure that academic progress of all students is properly tracked.”
This is the height of absurdity. If a child has cognitive impairments so severe that he or she cannot understand the test, what exactly is the point of forcing the child to take the test. If the teacher knows that the child is certain to fail because of his or her disabilities, requiring the test is akin to child abuse.
Last year in Florida, the state compelled a dying child to take the state tests. At what point does a society come to realize that policymakers who impose such draconian mandates don’t care about children? When common sense and common decency are gone, what is left but an empty bureaucratic shell?
Where are the lawyers?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In a previous incarnation, I worked with mulitplidisabled kids. They were tested individually. In some circumstances, I was the administrator and a teacher
aide was the scribe. One boy in particular enjoyed bubbling. He would bubble randomly down a whole page and I would turn the booklet to the next page. When he was finished, I would congratulate him on a job well done and he would give me his beautiful smile. The bureaucrats have no clue.
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As recently as 7-8 years ago, lots of districts in NJ did not use the state adopted alternate assessment for students with significant cognitive disabilities that have been available since about 1999. There’s no bubbling. Demonstrations of learning are more performance based. The two alternate assessments available for states were developed by universities and are really pretty good. New Jersey is using Dynamic Learning Maps.
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Only 1% of students with IEP’s can utilize the alternate assessment. (Federal law) Those who have experience with the DLM tell me it’s no better. Is not aligned to the IEP.
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SAY ONE THNG: Quaint to say this after putting special needs kids through this torture already for years. Tisch has a track record of saying what she thinks people want to hear, but when it comes time for action, comply with everything Cuomo asks for. It’s not just disabled kids, it’s kids that don’t speak English, or are so far behind grade level that the tests are meaningless to them from cover to cover.
If Tisch really meant this, she would have fought against the tests long ago. Instead, she has been doubling down.
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Decency, common sense, basic morality — these are indeed lacking in what has been going on in the schools — and not just when it comes to the testing mania, although that has been a great curse.
The basic problem is that there are no robust feedback and correction mechanisms in the K-12 education hierarchy. Students, parents, teachers have little or no voice. Little wrongs escalate into atrocities, but not a peep seems to travel in the reverse direction (up the command chain) to the “policy makers.” The “bad news” is filtered out at every step in the educational and political hierarchies.
This has sadly always been the case, but the current punitive “reform” madness has made this ever-present fundamental defect of the system into a fatal flaw.
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Absolutely true. It is a fatal flaw and a tragedy.
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Having a background in Sp. Ed. it must be made clear that the IEP is a legal document. The IEP must drive the child’s curriculum, not Common Core or any other suggestions made by state or federal. That is why I support a legal IEP ( I call it the MAP, My Action Plan) for all.
You are right, where are the lawyers! http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-personal-map-to-success.html
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Students with disabilities have the right to access to the general education curriculum. The IEP does not drive the curriculum, but rather it drives the instruction, modifications, assistive technology, related services and other supports that a student needs in order to access the curriculum, whether it’s language arts, math, phys. ed., ceramics or . . . .
Also standards, like the common core, are not curriculum. The curricula are supposed to be designed and implemented to help students achieve the standards. The Conspiracy of the Common core is that they were pushed out, adopted and used to design tests, and the funding, time and resources for curriculum, instruction and student supports were never there.
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Opting out should be an option for all students, period. This whole well-at-least-let-the-poor-little-“high-needs”-students-opt-out rhetoric is political pandering. Students with disabilities that have severe cognitive challenges are already able to opt out of the standard assessments and be assessed using the alternate assessments selected by the state. Other students with disabilities should have accommodations and modifications for testing outlined in their IEP and actually implemented. If they are not, parents and teachers and advocates need to say something. If these tests are bad for some students, they are bad for all, not just students with disabilities.
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Sick and Outrageous!
No other profession would allow a total take-over, nor would a client or a patient stand by and accept the results from politicians/corporate swines …as we have, as parents have.
What is the ‘final straw’?
What will be the last demand that will tip this publicly supported CHILD ABUSE?
How long?
Do we have to wait until Tisch, Gates, Duncan, Obama or ALL OTHER CorpShysters have a PERSONAL EXPERIENCE with a child who ends up in a coma, with TBI, seizures, broken neck….the only difference between our kids and theirs COULD BE AN ACCIDENT ON THE WAY HOME.
Where is our HUMANITY? Our DECENCY?
All we care about is $B from Gates? We are in BIG TROUBLE Folks!
Our canaries are dying and we keep breeding new ones without doing something about the air quality.
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Even two years exemption for ELLs is inadequate and contradicts the research that states it takes five to seven years to learn a language. For some SIFE (little or no education) students, it may take even longer. I don’t understand the motive for such zeal to fail this population. They have already been through a lot, and most of them will be great assets to this country if we just give them a fair chance. I challenge any of you to take a bubble test in a foreign language after two years of study. In fact, let’s start with Governor Cuomo.
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I immigrated to the US during 11th grade in high school, and had to attend ESOL for one semester. I was then placed in all regular education classes, used my fat 4″ dictionary to translate everything, spent hours doing my homework, made general progress learning English…but not enough to pass the college entrance exam. Someone, somewhere came to my rescue and persuaded the state university to accept me and to give me a chance.
My English improved in time.
I graduated, went to grad schools and became a career educator, and retired after 40 glorious years in our noble profession.
This is not rocket science.
Many foreigners do well in time. Time! Time!
Americans in other countries, typically, attend English-speaking schools and have little experience in becoming bilingual, or…become proficient enough to score exceptionally high on standardized tests. I could bot imagine if I was told that my teachers’ careers depended on my scores.
Absolutely obsurd and WRONG!
But, none of this has EVER been about educating children.
Politics and wealth!
That’s all, and we are at the bottom of the political ladder.
Will this ever change?
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I totally agree after working with ELLs for 36 years. I have seen former students accomplish remarkable things with time, but time is in short order with rigid rules and regulations.
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You are exactly right H.A. Hurley. ELL Students need TIME. I received a Masters Degree in TESOL from Hunter College, CUNY. We studied Prof. Cummins whose theory of second language acquisition posits that it takes a child FIVE – SEVEN YEARS to learn academic language (separate from conversational language).
http://esl.fis.edu/teachers/support/cummin.htm
“CALP is Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, and, as the name suggests, is the basis for a child’s ability to cope with the academic demands placed upon her in the various subjects. Cummins states that while many children develop native speaker fluency (i.e. BICS) within two years of immersion in the target language, it takes between 5-7 years for a child to be working on a level with native speakers as far as academic language is concerned.”
Imagine my surprise when I began teaching in a NYC high school and was told the only thing that mattered was the FOUR graduation rate. Many of my students arrived in this country at the beginning of ninth grade. Ask yourself, if you moved to Haiti, China, Russia, Pakistan or the Dominican Republic, could you pass their exams in four years. Frankly, I think my students are outstanding for doing as well as they do.
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Is Tisch suffering from dissociative identity disorder?
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NYS has compelled hospitalized and dying children to take these tests as well. It just has not made the media in the way that the story in FL did.
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Jeanine, hear hear! You have said everything I wanted to say, especially the part about the IEP driving a kid’s schooling–it is only PART of a kid’s schooling (an important part, but not the only part!)
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