Mercedes Schneider: Almost All Special Ed Students Will Be Required to Take Common Core Tests

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1. drext727 says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:04 pm

   Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.

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2. bmarshall says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:16 pm

   Yes, the talking point, regarding educating children with disabilities, is now;

   … it is only right and just that children with disabilities should be exposed to the same curriculum and the same tests as their non-disabled peers.

   There is no mention of appropriate education or learning and mastery , just ‘exposure to’

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   • john says:

     August 25, 2015 at 1:05 pm

     For me, the critical question is the effect of ESEA on the right to FAPE, as defined in federal and state law. Importantly, how does ESEA impact the development of the IEP, including parent input, goals and objectives, as well as how progress to meeting IEP goals and objectives is measure, as well as the parents right to due process protections on the entire referral, evaluation and IEP process. What happens if parents reject the iEP in part or whole, including assessments. Is the opt out from standardized testing covered?

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     • 2old2teach says:

       August 25, 2015 at 7:52 pm

       Testing accommodations are one of the things that we frequently wrote into IEPs. However, the high stakes type assessments tend to dictate what accommodations they will allow. Extended time and small group were common accommodations that were accepted by my state. Somehow they never seem to recognize that time and a half or two times allowed time requires tremendous endurance even beyond the ability of most GenEd students. How many of you have had students who do exceedingly well on the first part of a test and then bomb the last? Then you have the students who should use the extra time to review which is impossible on the computer tests that adapt according to answers. On paper tests too many students rush through and collapse. They need the review but have neither the will and/or the energy to do so. The authorities are correct that some SpEd students should be tested but if they want an honest picture of their learning and/or ability a lot more flexibility is required. When we are dealing with ESL/ELL students, what information do we expect to get that we don’t already know? When the information gained from the testing is used to punish students, schools, and teachers, how is that going to improve education?

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3. Akademos says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:17 pm

   This entire chapter in education and humanity is truly worthy of an animated motion picture. Something created in the mind of Roald Dahl, though it is our political reality.

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4. Priscilla Gutierrez says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:30 pm

   How ironic that by definition, students in special education are “behind,” per IDEA eligibility categories, and require additional supports or “specially designed instruction” in order to access the curriculum and standards. Many students will require specialized instruction throughout their education, and organically speaking, are incapable of functioning on a par with their non-disabled peers. Subjecting said students to the exact same instruction and/or testing as general education students is in direct conflict with IDEA, and of course a morally bankrupt course of action. And I haven’t even touched on how ludicrous it will be to use these invalid student test scores to “rate” the effectiveness of their teachers. Morals and ethics seem to be woefully in short supply with Arne and the so-called reformers.

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5. Lloyd Lofthouse says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:45 pm

   The Common Core Agenda to disrupt and destroy the public schools requires 100% of the children age 17/18 to be college and career ready—this must be proven with a standardized test score linked to the Common Core from a test that is opaque and untouchable that a private sector corporations profits from.

   When I was teaching in California, the state’s standardized tests required children to demonstrate a minimum standard of, I think, 9th grade for reading and math skills to be eligible to earn a high school degree. In Texas, when G. W. Bush was its governor, I read that state’s minimum standard was set at 4th grade. Every state that set a standard for HS graduation linked to a test of some kind had different minimums and none of them were set at college and career ready until NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core Crap came along with Pearson and Gates pushing the agenda with their money and lobbyists.

   If we don’t stop this RheeForm insanity then the only children who will earn HS degrees will be those who are avid readers and/or who read at the highest literacy level and probably go on to graduate from college. That means about 60% if not more of the nations citizen’s will never be allowed to earn a HS degree all becasue of a test designed to fail as many children as possible and fire teachers at every chance.

   Parents who think that we need these tests to improve the schools and their children’s educations are being fooled by the RheeFormers. These tests are not going to turn children who didn’t grow up in an envinroment that fostered a love of reading into college ready children. These parents, who are allowing themselves to be fooled, are only looking for a magic bullet that will promise to do the job they didn’t do. For most of those children, it ain’t going to happen. The key to being a lifelong learner is a high level of literacy that often comes with a love of reading. If a child doesn’t have that by the time they start school at age 5, it is too late for most of them.

   No test is going to change that.

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   • Ellen Lubic says:

     August 25, 2015 at 3:29 pm

     Today, the LA Times, now the openly and self-exposed publication supporting turning public schools into taxpayer supported charters (in league with billionaire Eli Broad who is a close associate of the Times billionaire publisher, Austin Beutner) gave figures of an ersatz poll taken by Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup. This phone poll ostensibly surveyed 1,000 people over 18, and results total of 3,499 with online surveyed, and with a remarkably high error rate of 8.7 per cent. (Normal legitimate polling generates only 3 – 5 % error rates.)

     The results, they claim, show that 31% of white public school parents think there is too much CC testing (and might opt out) and black parents reveal only 21% saying there is too much testing, and Latinos are at only.28%.

     Their assumption of this rather skewed deduction shows what we have been seeing empirically nation wide for some years. However, there does not seem to be any specific questioning regarding ELL, Special Ed, and learning disabled students, nor a question on how CC and testing, and charters, continue to segregate students.

     Is it fair to assume that many inner city parents who are black and Latino, might not be as informed (though striving for their children to succeed in school) as to the dangers of the testing to their student/children who have the highest failure rate, and to the survival of their community schools (in favor of charterizing/privatizing as investment opportunities)?

     Further, there is no indication in the report of logistical areas surveyed, such as middle to upper socio economic, to poverty level, and the breakdown of numbers contacted in each socio economic area. This seems like a poorly structured poll slanted to find answers to match pre ordained conclusions.

     Or maybe it was just fairly sloppy and convoluted reporting.

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     • Lloyd Lofthouse says:

       August 25, 2015 at 6:07 pm

       I have no doubts—NONE—that RheeFormers will use their puppet media to spin, cheery-pick or diminish the results of this 2015 PDK-Gallup Poll—totally ignoring what the public thinks. Even if an all-out bloody revolution were to explode in every major city and in towns across America with the streets and gutters flowing with rivers of blood, RheeFormers will refuse to back down from their agenda as long as they own most of the corporate media and many elected representatives who continue to follow orders blindly.

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   • West coast teacher says:

     August 25, 2015 at 6:59 pm

     I agree. When parents of learning disabled students ask about reading scores’I point out that I had read three to five hours a day which helped me score as well as friends whose parents had college degrees. It is about vocabulary and making sense. And understanding test construction.

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     • Lloyd Lofthouse says:

       August 25, 2015 at 7:34 pm

       By the time I was eight years old, I was an avid reader. The grade school I was attending didn’t have a library but the county had a library bus visit the school every week, and I’d check out the maximum number of books.

       Eventually, I was old enough to ride my bike the few miles to the town’s library and check out books. I haunted that library.

       The high school I attended had a well stocked library where I worked as a student assistant for four years with that one hour a day counted for credit toward HS graduation. The librarian even graded her student library assistants. It was the only HS class where I earned my only A’s in HS.

       In my academic classes, I sat in the back and spent more time reading the books I was checking out of the HS library than I was doing the school work or paying attention to most of my teachers.

       By the time I barely graduated from high school with a 0.95 GPA, I must have read a few thousand books. I was a horrible test taker and usually failed the tests. School work had never been important to me because I didn’t plan to go to college. That would change when I was fighting in Vietnam and a sniper came within a fraction of an inch of blowing off the left side of my head. I felt the bullet caress my ear. I thought if I’d gone to college as my mother had wanted, I wouldn’t have been there. There were several other very close calls from other snipers, rockets, mortars and grenades.

       I was 23 when I was honorably discharged from the Marines and applied to go to college on the GI Bill. The community college gave me a literary test to see what English class to put me in. They had several levels of what’s known as Bone Head English for readers who were not reading at the literacy level necessary for doing college work.

       I passed that literacy test at the highest literacy level and never took a Bone Head English class in College even with my lousy 0.95 GPA out of HS. Imagine what that GPA would have been without those A’s from the librarian.

       If we want children to read at a high literacy level, those same children should be reading every day from books they enjoy—not some crap from a David Coleman or Pearson list.

       For instance, when I was teaching 7th grade in the early 1980s, one mother came to me concerned for her daughter who was a student in the English class I taught. The mother told me that her daughter was reading five levels below grade level. She wanted to know what could be done so her daughter would catch up.

       I said, “Turn off the TV at home, and have your daughter read for at least one hour or more every night at home seven days week, 365 days a year. The more she reads books that she enjoys, the faster her literacy level will grow.” I told her to use the local county library because it was free.

       That mother was skeptical. She even said as much but she promised to do what I suggested—and she did.

       A year later, after the next standardized test to determine reading levels, the mother wrote a letter to the district commending me for my advice because her daughter had jumped five years catching up to her grade level in literacy. That letter went into my file that the district kept of me as a teacher.

       I taught about 6,000 children over 30 years and suggested this to other parents, but this one mother was the only mother who did what I suggested about turning off the TV and replacing that time with reading books.

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     • West coast teacher says:

       August 26, 2015 at 12:11 am

       Lloyd

       Re: your remarks about reading

       One of my students complained that another in their college prep class was establishing too high a curve. And how was this happening? Parents allowed one hour a week for TV. The student’s favorite show? MacGyver. They also took telephone messages she could return when she finished studying.

       This student wrote a science fiction novel for her daily journal.. She also questioned my interpretation of a line in a story we were reading, horrifying the class. I believe the sentence was open to be read more than one way. Poe’s editor did not see this I guess.

       Her father was concerned about her 1200 on the SAT and wanted ideas about improving her score. I recommended The MLA’s Line by Line.

       How many Americans are this serious about literacy? And how many would follow such intense advice? I really think seriousness about advanced literacy is what some in the charter movement are trying to create, but I do not think they know it.

       And, OK. The student’s parents were from China.

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     • Lloyd Lofthouse says:

       August 26, 2015 at 12:42 pm

       The publishing industry keeps a lot of data or book sales and readers, and that industry estimated that 60 million Americans are avid readers.

       I host four Blogs of my own, and only one of them is about educatoin issues. On one of my other Blogs I wrote about Authors Finding Readers and go into the details I found through my research about avid readers, how many books they read and what genres they are.

       Authors Finding Readers – Viewed as Single Page

       I’ve also written about literacy & education levels and who votes—I’m not going to hunt for that link. I’ve written and published thousands of posts on my four blogs. But I know that the higher the literacy and education level one has, the higher the odds are that they vote compared to adults who live in poverty with little education who are functionally illiterate.

       Too many of the poor, literally (no pun intended), disenfranchise themselves by not voting or are blocked from voting by restrictive voter ID laws—-mostly in states dominated by the GOP.

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6. NYC public school parent says:

   August 25, 2015 at 12:46 pm

   Another problem is that there are very significant differences among “students with disabilities” and how they impact learning.

   My child has been in an ICT class in which nearly half the students had IEPs. Parents had no idea which kids had IEPs and they included both struggling students and extremely brilliant ones. (Just like the non-IEP students). Yes, they all need “supports”, but the ability of those students to test well depends far more on what kind of disability they have.

   It’s the same with ELL students. Certain schools have a huge % of ELL students whose parents are recent immigrants who themselves don’t speak much English or have much education. You see the students translating for their parents! Other schools have ELL students whose parents — college-educated and fluent in English — “chose” to raise them in another language to help them become bilingual. Or they are college educated professional parents who have just moved from another country and while they or their kids may not yet speak English, all of them soon will. Those are rarely the homes where the ELL student is translating for their parent.

   Somehow, more of the students with serious learning disabilities and more of the ELL students whose parents do not have much education and may never speak English are found in failing public schools, who are expected to meet all their needs.

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7. brackenkaren says:

   August 25, 2015 at 1:00 pm

   It cannot be stopped until we shut down the US Dept. of Ed. The only solution right now is to get as many kids out of public schools as possible and if enough parents stand up and do it the system will implode upon itself. Stop begging them to do the right thing because they have sold their soul to the federal government and they CANNOT get out now. So we have do what they are not willing to do. PROTECT our kids at all costs. And that means FINDING A WAY to get them out. Neighbors banning together to help each other. Stay at home moms, retirees, disabled get together and help the moms that must work. And I don’t mean the moms that CHOOSE to work I mean the moms that MUST work. For those that do not have to work and choose to work get a grip. Your kids come first!!!

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   • NYC public school parent says:

     August 25, 2015 at 1:05 pm

     I guess dads get a pass, right? I mean, we know dads don’t care about education and their kids don’t come first for them anyway, so no need to make them part of this.

     I disagree with almost everything you said. You sound much closer to the “reformers” than you do a real parent.

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     • NYC public school parent says:

       August 25, 2015 at 1:14 pm

       ^^^I apologize for this reply. I’m sure you are a parent who cares about education.

       I do disagree with your premise however — parents leaving the public education system is exactly what the reformers want. They would be thrilled to give you a voucher to use in your favorite private school. Instead, I believe parents must remain in public education but stand their ground — via “opt out” and organizing — to bring the truth to light.

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8. Duane Swacker says:

   August 25, 2015 at 2:56 pm

   Anyone who has worked in a public school for a decent amount of time, let’s say at least a few years will instantaneously reject this newest monstrosity from the Dipshit Dunkster. How, how in the hell does he come up with such complete insanities of policy that he does? It is truly beyond my cognitive abilities to be able to even begin to understand his supposed thought process in this policy.

   Hey, Arne go and work in the Litzinger School in the Special School District of St. Louis, MO for even a week to maybe begin to understand why your policy has no basis in good pedagogy (if you even know what that term means).

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9. Laura H.Chapman says:

   August 25, 2015 at 3:44 pm

   I have just finished reading the comments submitted to USDE by anyone who had the savvy to respond to the “proposed regulations.”

   These comments are grouped thematically without much detail. Then some anonymous official offers a response to them. This is a ritual in promulgating a new rule or regulation. It rarely produces any modification in the proposed regulation but it does require some display of the reasoning of the person or persons who think the regulation is worth forwarding for action. The reasoning at work in the case of this– almost all students will take the same tests–reflects a “theory” of teaching and learning and how to secure compliance with the regulation. Here is my deconstruction of the reasoning behind a bunch of jargon, some citations of research (not much of it relevant to the turmoil caused by RTT and the 31 waivers USDE has granted states, and the latest wave of tests…about which Mercedes has excellent comments.

   The USDE’s implicit theory begins with the proposition that all teaching is, can be, or should be test-driven.

   A related proposition is that all learning can and should be made to happen on on time, in a step-wise system identified by grade levels with each level also identified by grade level tests in specific subjects. These tests will be standardized to meet federal and state regulations.

   A third proposition is that all students, with proper supports, can master grade-level content/skills sufficient to pass the state-approved grade-level tests for subjects

   A fourth proposition is that the content and skills that students must master are determined by the state standards for general education, which (by fiat from USDE) are now to be known as college and career ready standards.

   A fifth proposition is that all states and districts and vendors of tests and instructional supports are providing more than adequate accommodations for teaching and testing special education students under the criteria for “universal design.” There is no excuse for not having the same grade-level tests for all students–except for 1% of students who have the most severe cognitive impairments.

   The sixth proposition is these federal regulations are necessary because there is no better way to prevent the negative self-fulfilling prophesy from operating: Tests do and should drive instruction. Grade-level tests prevent teachers from lowering expectations for learning, then offering below grade-level instruction, and shortchanging students with special needs.

   There is no discussion of the fact that “grade-levels” are now based on criteria bearing on age and large-scale testing designed to produce normal curves (bell-shaped) so that relatively fixed proportions of students can be classified as well above or well below the average in their performance on tests.

   Evidently, USDE officials think that these requirements are perfectly consistent with the protocols for developing IEPs and the principle of “least restrictive’ education. No more looking at the individual accomplishments of students.

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   • 2old2teach says:

     August 25, 2015 at 8:07 pm

     I used to think the least restrictive environment referred to the environment in which a particular student best learned. Over the years it seemed to become a general assumption that the least restrictive environment was automatically the general ed classroom. I don’t know about other teachers, but I know that general ed classes were far from the least restrictive for some students. They were torture.

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   • retired teacher says:

     August 25, 2015 at 8:24 pm

     The “proposed regulations” from the USDOE makes a lot of assumptions about students with their one size fits all testing regime. Students are not widgets in an assembly line, and there are many individual differences that we as educators understand. While I agree that standards should be high, they should also be achievable. For some students they are not, or in the case of many ELLs, they are not at this point in their academics ready for a grade level test. I am concerned about the collective impact of never making the mark. I am concerned about the mental stability of students facing repeated failure. Having worked with ELLs for most of my career, I have seen students with huge academic deficits. They know they are very behind their peers in academics. With enough time and quality instruction, they can achieve. Labeling students and restricting their access to opportunities only makes it more likely they will fail. We need to spend less time, energy and money pigeonholing students and more time teaching.

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10. Jerrold Meylor says:

    August 31, 2015 at 1:00 am

    High standards and high expectations for all students and an accountability system that provides teachers, parents, students, and the public with information about students academic progress are essential to ensure that students graduate from high school prepared for college and careers in the 21st century.

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11. Phil Hamlet says:

    September 2, 2015 at 2:53 am

    It’s not fair for students who have a disability. It’s such forcing them to do what they can’t do. Although the harder their attempts to pass the test, they will be failed too because it’s not suitable with their capacity.

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