"Testing Special Students is Tricky"

Katharine Goodloe:

When Wisconsin educators wanted to measure the progress of 10,000 of the state's public school students last fall, they didn't sit them down for the standardized tests that most schoolchildren spent hours poring over.

They just asked teachers to pencil in a score.

That's because those students are among the most severely disabled in the state, or they speak just isolated words and phrases of English. So on the back of the state's thick testing booklets, teachers marked a score for each child - saying whether a child with disabilities could comprehend text, for example, or whether one struggling to learn English knew any vocabulary words used by their classmates.

If they scored high enough, some of those children could be counted toward requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law - just like those kids who spent hours digging through multiple-choice questions.

It's a little-known process, but one that faces heightened scrutiny this year as the federal government reviews the ways states assess such students. And the stakes for school districts are growing, as consequences for failing schools continue to increase under federal law.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 6, 2006 6:01 AM
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