Peabloggy

A recent article in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer online was entitled Rule lets schools not test disabled.

New No Child Left Behind Act regulations (published in April) allow up to 2 percent of students to take a modified version of the state assessment. The modifications are intended to provide a valid assessment for students who are ineligible for the alternate assessment but for whom the general assessment would not yield valid results because of a disability.

Scott Stephens, the author of the article, draws what strikes me as a glaring misconstrual of both the intended and the likely consequences of the 2 percent regs:

Whatever you call it, the change allows schools to exempt more of their hardest-to-educate children from standardized exams. Officials in school districts with high percentages of those students believe the exemption could provide a more accurate reflection of their progress.

For some special education advocates, that low-hanging fruit is more like the biblical apple, a temptation that has more to do with raising a school’s ranking than providing children with disabilities the education they need.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, this summer, researchers convened at Peabody for the second phase of a major project aimed at validating the 1 percent “alternate” assessment from seven states and modifying general assessments to satisfy the validity requirements of the “2 percent” assessment.

The primary form of modification the participating state assessment experts plan to use is to reduce the number of distractors - or wrong answers to a multiple choice question - from 4 to 3. Other common modifications are increasing the size of the text, adding pictures (e.g., if the question refers to 7 pennies, a drawing of the coins might be included to the side of the question). A third modification may involve reducing the number of items on a page for easier readability, ensuring text is written concisely and with grade-level vocabulary, increasing color contrast, implementing simple interfaces for computer-based tests, creating Braille versions for blind students, etc.

Despite Mr. Stephens’ implication, the 2 percent assessments are standardized. In fact, the questions for the modified assessment are drawn from the exact same standards as the general assessment. In other words, the material being tested in the modified assessment, if the test is valid, remains the same. To as large an extent as is possible (due to the fact that the test is being altered), the skills being assessed are not what is modified. The test is simply being filtered through a strict set of accessibility checks that ensure the test measures only what it purports to measure.

In all of the conversations I’ve heard in meetings with state administrators from Hawaii, Indiana, Idaho, Arizona, Mississippi, and Nevada, no one has ever mentioned wanting to generate a test that increases their state test scores. In fact, recent validity studies have shown that the rate of students reported as proficient is actually lower for students who took alternate assessments than for students who took the general assessments.

In short, extant evidence does not support the notion that states are designing assessments for students with disabilities with the aim of increasing their proficiency rates.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there certainly are problems to be found with No Child Left Behind. Simply hearing the word “modified” and making inaccurate assumptions as Mr. Stephens has done, however, precludes honest debate from occurring.

-Peter Beddow

Previous:
From taking tests…
NCLB: Creating a new gap?
NCLB: When in doubt, bake cookies
Investigating the validity of alternate assessments

Bindi Irwin, Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin’s precocious little daughter, just turned 9, and she remains a most remarkable young lady. I had wondered prior to her father’s death whether his arguably loony behavior with wild animals would have unhealthy effects on his daughter, and when he passed away last year, I was interested to learn how she would fare. An ordinary little girl would probably retreat into her mother’s arms and it would be a long time before things were “normal” again. To the contrary, Bindi has stunned the world with her charisma, innocence, and drive to continue her father’s legacy. Recently, she made the decision to continue with a television series that had been planned prior to her father’s passing.

According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, an estimated 24.7 million children (36.3% of the U.S. population) live absent their biological father. U.S. Census information reported that 57.7 percent of all black children, 31.8 percent of all Hispanic children, and 20.9 percent of all white children live in homes with only one parent. A literature review by Denton and Kampfe (1994) reported that children from single-parent households are at significantly increased risk of teen drug abuse. Another study reported 75 percent of teenage suicides occur in homes where at least one parent is absent (Elshtain & Bethke, 1993). McLanahan and Sandfeur (1994) reported that children growing up in single-parent homes had lower GPAs, decreased educational aspirations, poor attendance, and higher dropout rates than children living with two parents. Dafoe (1995) reported that a white adolescent girl growing up in an advantaged household is five times more likely to become a teen mother if her father is absent.

Bindi’s story should be an inspiration to anyone who is forced to grow up without a father.

Credit and sources: Father’s Love Letter and fathers.com.

By the way, as I alluded to in the title of this post, what is the definition of precocious? It’s embedded in this video:

-Peter Beddow

If you get a chance, check out the website of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI). Housed in the Wyatt Center at Peabody, NCPI has designed an enormous experiment, in the true sense of the word, to investigate the extent to which paying teachers for their performance effects change in achievement of students in their classrooms.

As I wrote a while back on Peabloggy, Dr. Dale Ballou visited our HLM class last semester and addressed the concerns of a number of doctoral students. One of the most intriguing answers he gave was in response to a question concerning whether the control group (those teachers who will not receive differential pay based on their performance) will decrease their effort because of “sour grapes”. Admittedly, it would be difficult, when some of the awards are up to $15,000 for teachers in the experimental group, not to feel even a little upset for being assigned to the control group. Dr. Ballou responded by essentially saying that this whole project is a true experiment, and the outcome is anybody’s guess at this point.

I was intrigued by this question when I was in 7th grade and my dad was on the school board of our little town of Shelburne, Vermont. At the time, he believed in the notion of pay for performance and spoke his mind about it. Now, nearly two decades later, the sole aim of this project is to provide answers to a serious question that has remained at the forefront of education for many years. Keep an eye on the NCPI website over the next few months to see what they’re up to. I suspect some of the work these researchers are doing now is going to get a hefty amount of attention in the years to come.

Update: Education Week has more coverage on the NCPI. Seems everybody’s talking about pay-for-performance again.

-Peter Beddow

Previous:
Who said we don’t need another hero?
Teaching: a quixotic endeavor
Another Ed week
The “value” in value-added