My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
NCLD:
What are some of the changes that need to be made to ensure these tests are administered fairly and how has DRA has been working to bring these changes about?
Sid Wolinsky:
There are safeguards already in place and DRA has been trying to make sure these safeguards are respected. They became law in 1997 as amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), with the most important of them being:
- That students with disabilities who take these tests are entitled to reasonable accommodations;
- For those students whose needs cannot be addressed through reasonable accommodations and who, for one reason or another, are disadvantaged by the very nature of the standardized test format, that they be provided with an alternate method of assessing their abilities; and
- The test must be validated, in other words, students cannot be tested on material they have not been taught. And this requirement covers mainstream students, as well as special needs students.
This sounds like plain common sense, but we've been finding that many of these test requirements are instituted by politicians trying to show that they are doing something to improve education. The tests are often put into place very hastily, without consideration for the curriculum required to teach the material being tested. Students with LD also have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and these curriculums are often different from the mainstream curriculum. And standardized tests rarely take this fact into account either.
NCLD:
Could you tell us, more specifically, about some of the disability rights cases you and DRA have litigated?
Sid Wolinsky:
We've litigated three major cases so far, involving high stakes exit exams for high school students in California, Oregon and, most recently, in Alaska.
In Oregon, the first suit, we persuaded the state to agree to the appointment of a "Blue Ribbon" panel, a group of national experts on both testing and learning disabilities. This panel addressed the problems surrounding standardized testing in the Oregon school system and made a report that served as both a roadmap to fixing the problems there and in other states as well.
The panel ultimately published a report that was not only a critique of high stakes testing, but that provided specific recommendations to fix the problems they found. The recommendations included devising an alternative means of assessment, called a juried assessment, where a student is judged on the body of work they've completed and not the results of one test. The state of Oregon also agreed to put together an appeals process to resolve grievances, and also agreed to allow us to monitor the system. By the way, the panel's report, entitled Do No Harm.
NCLD:
What can a parent do, if they have a child with a learning disability, to ensure fairness in any high stakes test administration?
Sid Wolinsky:
A parent needs to get involved even more than usual with the IEP process, especially if their child is at the high school level. They have to make sure they know the accommodations that will work best for their child and push for those accommodations.
In every school district we've been involved with, we've discovered profound misunderstandings about the accommodations a student is entitled to. For example, a parent might say, "My child needs a read-aloud option," and the school will refuse to provide it, though the parent might find out later that it's a completely permissible
accommodation. A parent can't necessarily take the word of even the most well-meaning administrator at face value. They have to, first of all, know what their child needs and what works for them, and then they really have to push for it.
View the Do No Harm report.
For more information, go to www.dralegal.org.
