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Special ed testing a trial for teachers

Showing progress a time-consuming, subjective ordeal

By Lori Olszewski
Tribune staff reporter

April 1, 2004

Special education student Cara Murphy of Blue Island utters only
a handful of words and her fingers can't
grasp a pencil, but federal law says she must be tested in
reading and math along with the rest of the state's
3rd graders.

In Illinois, that means her teacher spends as much as 20 to 40
hours choosing and compiling a portfolio of her
work to be scored by a test contractor. The process, called the
Illinois Alternate Assessment, is used for about
7,700 special education children with the most severe
disabilities.

There is no love lost between many teachers and the push for
more standardized tests. But rarely has a
required assessment attracted such ire from educators, who say
the IAA is too subjective to be an accurate
measure of students' ability, takes up valuable teaching time
and does nothing to improve student instruction.

Although scores on the test jumped significantly last year in
all subjects except 8th-grade math, critics say the
increase shows only that teachers are becoming more nimble at
assembling the complicated portfolios. One
teacher realized one of her students got a low score because the
teacher had failed to date a work sample.

"I truly feel that portfolios are scored on the teacher's
ability to compile and organize the material and may
not, in many cases, accurately assess actual student ability or
progress," wrote South Cook County special
education teacher Jodi Stevenson in a letter to state officials.

Everyone agrees that all children should be tested so none is
overlooked. But unearthing what goes on in the
minds of severely disabled students is no easy task, and proving
progress to the government with a uniform
reporting system is even more difficult.

With scoring of the portfolios under way, the controversy over
the test highlights the dilemma facing school
districts across the nation as they struggle to find the best
way to evaluate students like Cara.

In Illinois, most special education students take the same
standardized tests in the spring as their regular
education peers. But some have so many or such severe
disabilities that it would be pointless to make them
take the one-size-fits-all exams used to judge school
performance under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Cara almost drowned as a toddler and suffers from multiple
disabilities that have delayed her development.
One of the biggest challenges is finding a way for her to
communicate what she knows, since she cannot
speak, write or use her hands well.

The 9-year-old is a student in the Developmental Learning
Program in the Eisenhower Cooperative, which
serves students from nine south Cook County elementary
districts.

On a recent morning, a rubber band and splint provided the keys
to Cara's thoughts. Her teacher, Peggy Earll, used the materials
to
attach a thick green marker to the girl's uncooperative finger.

"Cara knows her numbers from 1 to 20, but a goal is to learn 21
to 30," Earll explained as she positioned a sheet of paper with
several
rows of the numerals 21 to 25 on a tray across Cara's
wheelchair.

"Point to 23," Earll instructed as Cara's hand stabbed the air
above the paper before it made a rough landing on the answer.
"Point to
21," she continued. "Excellent job, Cara."

Cara's marks would become part of her IAA portfolio as some of
the evidence needed to prove she can recognize numerals, a skill

linked to the same math standard required of other 3rd graders.

According to last year's test results, students like Cara are
making striking improvements. In the most dramatic example, the
percentage
of 3rd graders who were showing at least moderate progress in
reading rose by 14 percentage points from 44.7 of those tested
in 2002
to 59 percent in 2003.

But teachers question if such gains are real--or if teachers
have just learned to meet the complex technical requirements of
scoring, such
as including photos that show students performing similar skills
in different settings.

They also say that assembling the portfolios, which includes
printing photographs and constructing numerous progress graphs,
can cut
into teaching time. Some school districts even hire substitutes
so their special education teachers can have entire days to put
together the
thick black notebooks.

Such complaints are familiar to Chris Koch, director of special
education for the Illinois State Board of Education.

"Yes, I hear that all the time," Koch said. "Teachers say it is
more an assessment of `us' and not of their students. We are
trying to
develop something that will be more meaningful and less labor
intensive."

Koch and other state officials are looking to teachers to help
them build a better system. Stevenson, who wrote the critical
letter to the
state, landed on a working group co-chaired by Koch that has
been laboring since December on an overhaul of the alternate
assessment.

Parents and other advocates for the disabled argue that even
imperfect test systems push teachers to demand more progress
from their
special needs students. They cite statistics from New York and
Massachusetts that show the drive for accountability has
dramatically
increased the number of special education students who take and
pass the states' regular high school graduation exams.

"Expectations are a powerful thing. These children are
surprising us with how much they can learn," said Rachel
Quenemoen, a senior
fellow at the National Center for Educational Outcomes at the
University of Minnesota, the federally funded technical
assistance center
on alternate assessments.

The issue of testing severely disabled kids became more
complicated with the recent passage of the No Child Left Behind
law, which not
only requires all children to be tested but also mandates that
schools face consequences for the performance of student groups,
such as
minority and special education.

Although doomsayers had feared that including special education
students in the mix would drastically drive up the number of
"failing"
schools, that didn't happen in Illinois last year. Just 101 of
the state's some 4,000 schools did not meet standards solely
because of their
special education students.

Of the 82,419 special education students tested in grades 3, 5,
8 and 11 last year, about 9 percent took the alternate
assessment instead of
the regular tests. Even in that smaller group, students can
differ widely in abilities, making it hard to find ways to link
their classroom
work to the standards required of their grade-level peers,
teachers said.

In one instance, special education students with severe
cognitive delays visited a star lab, an inflatable dome that
allows youngsters to
view the night sky as a science activity. Some students might
only be able to distinguish between the words "dog" and "star"
if they have
pictures to aid them; others might read simple sentences about
stars.

In both cases, portfolio work must be produced that will show
whether the children are meeting a state science standard that
calls for
them to "understand the fundamental concepts, principles and
interconnections of the life, physical and earth/space
sciences."

"For some students it is a bit of a stretch," said Sue Ireland,
executive director of the Eisenhower Cooperative and facilitator
of the state
group making recommendations on a new alternate assessment
system.

Ireland and others said they expected the recommendations may
include making it possible to complete part of the assessment by

computer to speed the process.

In addition, federal regulations published in December are
expected to allow states to develop what are called "alternate
learning
standards" for youngsters with the most serious cognitive
disabilities. That means they can differ from the expectations
of regular
education students in the same grades.

Parents don't want the new standards to abandon academic goals,
but they say they also would like to see more emphasis on social
and
survival skills, such as the ability to dress or eat without
assistance.

Like many parents, Rosemary Murphy, Cara's mother, says she
hasn't really noticed her daughter's scores on the IAA. Parents
never
see the actual portfolios, which are no longer returned to
schools after being scored by outside teachers supervised by the
test
contractor, Measured Progress of New Hampshire.

"I am lucky enough to be in a system that is doing a good job. I
see the progress Cara has made over the years," Murphy said. "We

didn't need the federal government to come in and tell us what
to do to get that. I could see that this would be more helpful
for parents
in schools that aren't doing a good job."

Despite the problems, educators agree that even the most
severely disabled students must remain in the testing system.

"The assessment needs to be more user friendly and less
burdensome," said Jim Shriner, an associate professor in special
education at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who serves on
the state working group. "But to not include them would be to
devalue
these students."

- - -

Special education test scores higher

Scores have been rising on the Illinois Alternate Assessment
(IAA), the tool used to evaluate about 7,700 of the state's most
severely
disabled students. Instead of taking standardized tests, these
students are assessed individually using work samples collected
by their
teachers.

IAA SCORES Percent of students who show at least moderate
progress

 3  

2002

44.7%

2003

59%

+14.3

 

 Math % POINT CH.
 GRADE
 3 2002 41.9%
 2003 54.5% +12.6
 5 2002 43%
 2003 51.3% +8.3
 8 2002 44.3%
 2003 43.6% -0.7
 11 2002 32.8%
 2003 38.9% +6.1


TEST SAMPLE

The work samples in the IAA portfolios vary. One 3rd grader
answered 10 questions to test her reading and math skills after
her class
made cinnamon toast. The first two questions follow.

Sources: Illinois State Board of Education and Eisenhower
Cooperative in south suburban Cook County

Chicago Tribune/Sue-Lyn Erbeck and Phil Geib

- See microfilm for complete graphic.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune