A federal class-action lawsuit against Alaska's exit exam was filed yesterday:
The lawsuit charges that Alaska's exit exam discriminates against students with disabilities, making it difficult -- or impossible -- for them to receive a diploma. The complaint said the state has created widespread confusion by repeatedly changing its regulations for disabled students and what modifications in testing conditions they can receive.
Under the current rules, the lawsuit argues, more than two-thirds of the state's disabled high school seniors will not graduate in June.
I agree that the accommodations issue needs to be resolved. If I were a parent whose child had to have items read to them all through their schooling, I'd be upset if that accommodation was not included on the exit exam. But one key point being left out here is whether accommodations change the nature of what's being tested.
A student who is visually disabled cannot read printed material no matter how smart she is, and it's not changing the nature of a reading test to have someone read the items to her. But when the disabilities become more amorphous, like ADD and learning disabilities, I no longer have confidence that the accommodated form of the test, such as a test read aloud, is measuring the same thing as it would be in its unaccommodated format. Thus, one can argue that student with non-physical disabilities are not being held to the same standards as non-disabled students; this makes me wonder how on earth we can claim that a high school diploma is meaningful if we're willing to different set of standards for it for different students.
And I'm very suspicious about such lawsuits when I read things like this:
But many parents and advocacy groups say such exams illegally discriminate against special education students, immigrants and minorities, who have disproportionately low passing rates.
This tendency to lump together special education students (who presumably cannot learn more than a certain amount), immigrants (who presumably have just not had enough time to show what they can learn), and minorities (who tend to have problems learning, but there's no consensus as to why), and then present these charges in an article about disabled students, is a real problem. The issue of accommodations can, and should, be discussed without random charges of discriminations being introduced; the fact that special ed students, immigrants, and minorities may do worse on these exams has nothing to do with the accommodations issue.
A printed test would discriminate against a blind student, because no matter how smart that student is, she can't read the material. But a test does not "discriminate" against test takers who have not mastered the material but have the physical capability of doing so.
Posted by kswygert at March 17, 2004 04:35 PM