While I am indeed accountable for what I do with my students - to my community, the kids parents, and most importantly (as I tell the kids) the young peoples future 30-something selves.... I am highly concerned about any effort at formally measuring that accountability that calls for an extension of an already highly fallible system which has proven it is ineffective in finding the truly ineffective. Of course only those students who can actually take a standardized test should be required to do so; those tests should be tailored to the appropriate student population based on their abilities, and the comparisons for those with cognitive impairments must involve true peer groups. - However, this is NOT state policy... attendance for tests must be at 95% or greater so ALL special ed kids need to take it or the school cant pass muster; special ed kids take the same test, as everyone else, with at MOST extra time and someone to read aloud the math to them; a very few qualify for someone else to physically write for them but that is highly fatiguing to the student and answers become short and vacuous. There is NO differentiation allowed by standardized testing policies for functional skill levels, endurance, etc., and no real alternative choices. IEPs reflect that because teams are only allowed to list acceptable accommodations, unless the child is profoundly disabled, and those are very few of the overall disabled population. That alternative test, also, isnt normed against peers of similar potential... they just took developmental levels and slapped norm-referenced terminology on them. It gives me the willies to see ANY call for standardized testing as the answer to the problems facing education today, because those creating those tests are concerned with their profits... and the money spent on those tests could be so valuable if used in much more constructive ways. Oh - and our special ed kids are NOT being warehoused. What kind of nonsense is that? Whoever wrote this hasnt spent any time actually observing what happens in a self-contained classroom, let alone the resource and full-inclusion levels of services.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 22:14:54 +0000
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