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Severely hampered students take special exams, others are saddled with regular age-level ones

Monday, April 08, 2002

By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer

Second of two parts. This month, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania students are taking the state PSSA tests. Yesterday, we looked at the testing of foreign-born students. In this article, we examine how the state handles the testing of disabled students, and whether those exams serve a valid purpose.

By state and federal law, all students must participate in statewide testing.

	Vinnie D'Andrea, 13, of Swissvale, gets help taking the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment test from Chris Beatty of Children's Institute of Pittsburgh. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

All means students like Allyson Ross of Bloomfield, a 14-year-old who is severely disabled, can't speak and functions on the level of a 3-year-old.

All means students like Vinnie D'Andrea, a 13-year-old who has Down syndrome, limited speech and some physical disabilities.

All means a student featured in a state training tape, who is bedridden, on a respirator and lies unresponsive while a teacher moves the child's hands and asks the child to identify which of two containers has more beads.

In Pennsylvania, these more severely retarded or physically limited children can now take a specially developed test, called the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment, or PASA.

The requirement exists partly because, years ago, some schools were accused of discouraging special education students or low achievers from taking standardized tests so they could improve their schools' test scores.

Now, federal law requires all students to be tested and the Individuals With Disabilities Act Amendments of 1997 mandate that states develop alternate assessments for students with severe disabilities.

Some have criticized the PASA test, saying it doesn't necessarily give teachers any information that's helpful.

But what has become even more controversial is Pennsylvania's policy of requiring less seriously disabled students to take the same state exam as others their age, even if they function at a much lower academic level.

The regular state test, known as the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, is given to fifth-, eighth- and 11th-graders in reading and math.

Having to take that exam at their age level rather than at their achievement level was so frustrating last year for some students at Pioneer Education Center in Brookline that they threw their test booklets at teacher Rosalie Dibert.

Test 'wasn't fair'

"What it proved to me was that this was not the appropriate test for my students to take. Unfortunately, what it proved to my students is they're dumber than they thought they were. That wasn't fair," Dibert said. "That day, they were down. They felt stupid."

J. Kaye Cupples, Pittsburgh Public Schools' coordinator of programs for students with exceptionalities, said he wants all special education students to be included in statewide assessments, but also wants those assessments to be meaningful.

"I am truly a proponent [that] if we don't include our kids with disabilities in the assessment process, people will view them as not counting," he said. "We want our kids to count."

But he is concerned about the special education students who don't qualify for the alternative test and have to take the regular PSSA.

Dibert had one student, for instance, who had to take the 11th-grade PSSA test although the student read aloud at a fourth-grade level and comprehended at a third-grade level.

"An awful lot of kids are falling in that gray gap. They aren't going to pass the PSSA," said Cupples, and the information about how they performed on the test may not help teachers figure out how to educate them better.

Sometimes, the feedback on test results borders on being ludicrous, educators said.

At the Children's Institute of Pittsburgh in Squirrel Hill, school psychologist Mary Denison said that one student who took the PSSA received a report saying he was better in trigonometry than in algebra.

"The boy can't add and subtract. But his mother got that report in the mail," she said. "The report we received was completely inappropriate. Those kids in that in-between place are really getting a disservice."

Disabled students who take the PSSA can receive some accommodations, such as help staying focused, individual or small group testing, or use of equipment such as magnifiers and portable writing devices.

Fran Warkomski, state director of special education, said the state is still working with school districts, department staff and parents to determine how best to test these students.

But for now, she said, it appears that federal officials do not want special education students to be given tests for younger students.

She also noted that for some special education students "who are not reading at grade level, we can in fact assist and get [them] to grade level or close to grade level. So [for them], we need not to give an easier test, but we need to change their instruction."

The PASA alternative

The newer PASA test, for the more seriously disabled students, was taken by about 3,000 Pennsylvania pupils last school year, or fewer than 1 percent of the 700,000 students who took the regular state test. State officials expect as many as 5,000 or 6,000 students to take the PASA exam this year.

The alternate test requires students to do two reading and two math tasks.

A reading task could involve finding a word in a newspaper ad or interpreting a series of pictures that form a party invitation.

A math task could involve counting out the number of cups, spoons and plates needed for snacks, or single-digit addition or subtraction.

A math task that teacher Chris Beatty gave to Vinnie D'Andrea at the Children's Institute of Pittsburgh recently asked him to tell the difference between a gardening chart and a book; identify which of two cups was bigger; select which cup was full; and pick which group of sticks had just one stick.

Vinnie got just about everything right, and he and his teacher gave each other high-fives.

Vinnie's mom, Rosemary Petitta D'Andrea, said she thinks it's a good idea to test disabled students because she "wouldn't want to see them lost anywhere." But she added, "On the other hand, I don't know if it's going to make much of a difference to me as a parent."

She said Vinnie's family and teacher already know him well and set challenging goals for him.

As part of the process, Beatty videotaped the test to send to the state, which will enlist teachers to score the PASA exams.

Cupples, the city school administrator, said he thinks the PASA assessments have some value but believes they are "pretty much not giving our teachers information about instruction."

It's also unclear what use the PASA exams will have for comparing schools with each other.

At the Children's Institute, Denison said that "by definition, [we] should get the lowest scores because we have the most disabled children. So what does that mean in terms of accountability?"

Warkomski acknowledged the PASA scores have little meaning so far and it may take years before they are ready to be used for accountability purposes.

Most states are using portfolio assessments -- assembling the best work by severely disabled students -- rather than a performance-based test.

Portfolios criticized

Naomi Zigmond, professor of special education at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, said she doesn't like portfolio assessments because she thinks they're hard to score reliably, often reflect the teacher's creativity rather than the student's work and put an extra burden on special education teachers.

Zigmond headed the team that developed the PASA test, beginning about four years ago.

"It took time to think of what it could possibly mean that students with very severe cognitive disabilities would participate in something parallel to the PSSA," she said. "We had to reinvent thinking about what is reading and mathematics in students with very, very severe cognitive disabilities."

She said the PASA test makes the point that schools can't spend all their time teaching feeding and dressing.

"One of the important things for children to get out of school is literacy and [number] skills," she said. "I'm finding both parents and teachers are astounded at what the kids can do that they didn't think they could do."

But at Pioneer, which serves some of the most severely disabled children in the city, Principal Pat Seibel said the PASA test wasn't valuable. The school already does its own comprehensive evaluations based on goals in individualized education plans, known as IEPs, and measures students' progress, she said.

Bernadette Studeny, whose daughter Allyson Ross took the PASA test last year at Pioneer, agreed. She said her daughter was rated at the novice level in reading and emerging level in math on the test.

"It was a complete waste of time," she said, noting teachers were taken out of the classroom for the testing and a substitute had to work with the other students.

"It didn't give me any more information than I already had. It didn't give the school any more information."