Common-Core Tests to Have Built-in Accommodations

By Nirvi Shah

Ed Week

When Michael Hock was a special education teacher, he spent hours slicing quarter-inch slits in the center of index cards so that his students could use them to isolate individual words and sentences while taking standardized tests.

When a new generation of tests—the common-core assessments—is unveiled in a few years, special education teachers should be able to put away their index cards and all the other shortcuts and homemade solutions they have created over the years to make paper-and-pencil tests accessible for many students with disabilities.

That’s because the new, computerized tests will have accommodations for most students with disabilities built right in.

Using $360 million in federal Race to the Top money, two state collaboratives are designing tests for the new common standards in mathematics and English/language arts that have been adopted by 44 states and the District of Columbia. The federal government expects the tests to be ready by the 2014-15 school year.

The two groups tasked with developing the common-core assessments have been thinking about students with disabilities from the time they first won the grants from the U.S. Department of Education to design the tests. That’s a sharp departure from what’s been the norm in standardized testing, which has been to consider accommodations for students with disabilities as an afterthought.

“We’re not even thinking about accommodations anymore” in the traditional sense, said Mr. Hock. He is now the director of educational assessment for the Vermont Department of Education and co-chair of the accessibility and accommodations work group for the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium—one of the two groups developing the new tests.

The other test consortium, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, will soon launch an accessibility-and-fairness technical working group, said Laura M. Slover, the senior vice president of Achieve and the project manager for the Washington-based nonprofit organization’s work with the consortium.

Back-End Band-Aids

For years, most states have tried retrofitting exams designed to test students’ knowledge in math, reading, science, and writing for students with special needs. But those back-end Band-Aids can create their own set of issues, not the least of which is coordinating testing so that students who need similar adaptations are grouped together and tested at the same time.

“It was a logistical nightmare,” said Carol André, the special education director at Exeter High School in Exeter, N.H. “And you still had the same issue with testing: You don’t even know if the results you’re getting are accurate.”

When making current state tests work for all students, there is inconsistency from school to school, she said. In particular, when teachers or proctors are allowed to read portions of a test aloud for students, the way that information is read can vary widely.

“We had to all but police our own people to be sure they were not giving the kids an unfair advantage or leg up. It was really hard, especially for our younger kids. The adults desperately want them to do well,” Ms. André said. “Suddenly, without even being conscious of it, you may have an adult who’s reading the question and the four answers but they’re doing a little more emphasis on choice C, or the kid is reading the adult’s expression.”

On the new generation of computerized tests, it’s likely that words that can be read aloud will be read in the same way, in the same voice, from state to state, Mr. Hock said.

“We’re not trying to provide anyone with any kind of advantage—that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” he added.

Glimpse Ahead

At Vergennes Union High School and Middle School in Vergennes, Vt., special education teacher Suzanne Buck remembers one paper test that was created for a student with vision problems.

“The test was huge. It stuck out so badly. Everyone else could read it from four rows behind,” Ms. Buck said.

Now, to test students in science, her school is using ...

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