Dec 7, 2006 2:15 PM
Imagine you’re 10 or 11 years old and your parents have moved the family to Lithuania (where there are ample opportunities in the amber jewelry business, your father’s trade). Soon you are enrolled in a public school where you find out that the Lithuanian Department of Education has decreed that every student must be literate. To ensure this it has ordered the public schools to administer high-stakes tests every year in Lithuanian language arts.
You’re an LLL (Lithuanian Language Learner), of course, or perhaps an LLP (Limited Lithuanian Proficient student), and the thought of having to pass the same language arts test that all the native Lithuanian children in your class will take sends unpleasant shocks up and down your nervous system. Too bad, you think, that you don’t have a learning disability. Then you could get special instruction in a special education class and not have to take that dreaded exam. Ooops, not so fast, says the LDOE. Special ed students must also take the exam.
Well, what can one expect from a country like Lithuania — except, of course, that as far as we know the Lithuanians aren’t perpetrating such silliness; it’s the U.S.A. that’s doing it.
New York State learned earlier this year that the federal DOE has changed its position and will now require ELL and LEP students who have been in the country for as little as a single year to take the same English Language Arts exam as all other students in grades 3 through 8. The feds used to allow the state to use a different test, one that was better at actually evaluating English proficiency for newcomers, but not any longer. Never mind that the alternative assessment that the state was using has been redesigned to align it more with New York’s reading standards. The feds didn’t even consider the redesigned test but made their decision based on the old one.
The state, perhaps afraid of losing federal funds, has capitulated, and students who are new in the country will just have to grit their teeth and suffer all those unpleasant shocks to their nervous systems.
So, too, special education students. The federal DOE doesn’t see any reason not to require students with disabilities to take the same exams as general ed students, and has informed the state that its special ed alternative assessment will no longer be acceptable. And that includes students with significant cognitive disabilities!
It makes one wonder whether anyone else may have significant cognitive disabilities. How absurd to lump all students together. Some, for very good educational reasons, not to mention compassionate ones, require special treatment.
The UFT and NYSUT have urged the state Education Department to try to get a waiver from the federal DOE so that it can use the more effective alternative assessments that it has devised for English language learners and the other alternative test for students with disabilities. But in any case, the unions are urging the SED to use those alternative exams with or without a waiver and if there are penalties imposed by Washington to have the state Legislature supplement the SED for any sanctions that may be imposed.
Members who are outraged over this, as they should be, can add their names to a petition to State Education Commissioner Richard Mills.
As for making the feds understand, perhaps we could try explaining it to them in Lithuanian.