Education Week - January 13, 2021 - 14

Millions of ELL Students Face In-Person,
Federal Testing During COVID-19
option for its English-proficiency test.
The consortium determined that
remote testing was not a constructive
use of " time given the pandemic circumstances, " Cathryn Still, the executive director of ELPA21, said in a statement provided to Education Week.

By Corey Mitchell

Advocates Push Officials

Brian Jenkins for Education Week

The disruption to in-school learning caused by the global pandemic
last year has hit the nation's 5 million
English-language learners especially
hard.
These students often lack access to
dependable internet and technology,
have non-English-speaking parents
who struggle to support their remote
learning, and have lost crucial access
to teachers and classmates who have
in prior years helped them develop
their language skills.
Now, millions face yet another
predicament: being asked to return
to schools to take federally required
English-language-proficiency exams
amid the national surge in coronavirus cases.
That's because WIDA, one of the
nation's largest ELL testing vendors,
has concerns about the validity of a
take-home test and students' access
to technology and the internet.
" My job as a test director is to say
that the score you get from our assessment means the same thing that
it meant last year, that gives you the
same information so that you can
make a choice and decision about a
student's proficiency, " said H. Gary
Cook, the senior director of assessment for WIDA. " I have a really hard
time understanding how we can get a
score that's comparable to the score
that's not remote. "
Advocates in at least two states, Colorado and Florida, say it is unfair and
potentially dangerous to ask Englishlearners-most of whom are Latino,
Asian, and Black-to return to school
buildings while COVID-19 cases
sweep through their communities.
In both states, groups have urged
the state education commissioners to
postpone the start of testing season,
which begins next month, until things
are safe or make the test voluntary
for families who are not yet comfortable with their children returning to
school. National organizations for
English-learner educators are also
urging states to postpone or aggressively seek testing waivers.
The reliance on in-person testing
is " far too risky and potentially life
threatening " and " raises serious discrimination concerns, " Jorge Garcia,
the chairman and chief executive officer of the Colorado Association for
Bilingual Education, wrote this month
in a letter to Colorado state Education
Commissioner Katy Anthes.
Despite the requests, the Colorado
and Florida departments of education indicated this week they will proceed with testing. States run the risk
of losing federal funding if they fail to
enforce federal standardized testing
requirements.
Under the Every Student Succeeds
Act, states must use data from the
exams to determine whether students
are English proficient. Not offering the

tests could hold back some students
who are ready to exit English-learner
status.
The push to delay or forego the
English-proficiency testing is part of
the larger debate this year over federal
standardized testing requirements
during the pandemic. Outgoing U.S.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has
declined to waive testing requirements
for the 2020-21 school year after granting states a reprieve in the spring as
schools shut down nationwide.

Taking Out the Guesswork
The English-proficiency exams are
required by state and federal law for
students in kindergarten through 12th
grade. The scores indicate what level
of English proficiency a student has
reached and help determine if students should stop receiving Englishlearner support services.
Determining whether ELL students
still need support and when they
no longer require it marks a critical
juncture in their academic careers.
Students who are deemed English
proficient and pulled out of support
services before they are ready can end
up struggling in school. Taking longer
to reclassify students as English proficient could slow their academic growth
and limit their access to higher-level
courses that can prepare them for college and career opportunities.
States use the English-proficiency
tests to take some of the guesswork
out of the process.
Both states belong to the WIDA
consortium, the organization that
oversees the ACCESS for ELLs tests,
which measure students' Englishproficiency in four domains-listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
WIDA, which provides the ACCESS

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 13, 2021 | www.edweek.org

tests to 36 states, several United States
territories, and agencies such as the
Bureau of Indian Education, decided
in September not to offer a remote option for the test. Altogether, the consortium tests 2.1 million students annually,
slightly more than 40 percent of the
nation's English-learner enrollment.
The tests will not have remote options this year because WIDA and its
member states were not confident
that all students would be able to take
the test in its current format, and that
students would have equal access to
technology at home to complete the
exam, said Cook.
There were also concerns that English-learner students' parents, some
of whom are not proficient English
speakers themselves, would be unable
to help with setting up and proctoring
the test, said Jonathan Gibson, the
director of consortium and state relations department at WIDA.
For younger students, a remote test
would have been especially difficult
to carry out: the entire test for kindergarten students is paper-only and the
writing test is paper-only for students
in 1st through 3rd grade.
TESOL International Association, an
organization for teachers who specialize in working with English-learners,
has also raised questions about the validity of tests given this year, especially
the speaking portions: with students
wearing masks in class, it could be
more difficult for teachers to hear and
understand what students are saying.
Advocates in Colorado argued that
the test results may yield little useful information, given the amount of
time that many English-learners have
been away from in-person schooling.
The English Language Proficiency
Assessment for the 21st Century
(ELPA21) consortium, which includes
eight states, also will not offer a remote

Burlington High School freshman
Sangeeta Sarki reads a book
aloud with 5th grader Srya at
the Sustainability Academy
in Burlington, Vt. in February.

I have a really hard
time understanding
how we can get
a score that's
comparable to
the score that's
not remote.
H. GARY COOK
Senior director of assessment
WIDA

While advocates in Colorado and
Florida are pushing for a reprieve,
many of the remaining states in the
WIDA consortium will forge ahead
with in-person testing, allowing for
flexibility in the testing schedule by
either delaying the start of testing or
extending the period where students
can take the exam. Testing has already begun in Montana and Department of Defense schools.
In response to concerns about
health-and-safety protocols, WIDA
developed guidelines on how to administer the ACCESS tests during the
pandemic. While having data to gauge
how students progressed or regressed
is valuable, Cook acknowledged that
requiring students to return to class
does carry risks.
In Colorado and Florida, advocates
are asking the states to communicate to parents that they can opt their
children out of taking the test. While
the state could face penalties for not
offering the test, students cannot be
punished for skipping the test.
Advocates asked in their letter to
Florida state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran to inform
parents that " those students who
elect not to take the tests will not be
disciplined, punished, or otherwise
sanctioned for opting out of the tests. "
Illinois is among the states that
pushed back the start of testing in response to community concerns. The
state's board of education this week
announced plans to delay the opening
of its spring assessment window, ensuring that no students will take a federally required assessment, including
ACCESS, until mid-March at the earliest. In previous years, the state testing
window for ACCESS typically ran from
mid-January through mid-February.
California, home to about 1.1 million
English-learners, will offer remote and
in-person testing options for its annual
English-proficiency exam, the English
Language Proficiency Assessment
for California, also known as ELPAC.
Most of California's 6 million public
school students are still learning from
home-and some school districts have
not set a timeline to resume in-person
instruction. More than 40 percent of
public school students in the state
speak a language other than English
at home.
Like California, the states of Arizona, Texas, and New York develop
and administer their own Englishproficiency exams. Officials there did
not immediately respond to requests
for comment.

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Education Week - January 13, 2021

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