Education Week - April 24, 2013 - 6

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EDUCATION WEEK

n

APRIL 24, 2013

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www.edweek.org

PARCC Proposes Common-Core Test Accommodations
ELLs, special needs
focus of release
By Lesli A. Maxwell
& Christina A. Samuels
The first of two groups of states
working to design assessments
aligned to the Common Core
State Standards has released a
draft accommodations manual
that outlines the types of test
supports that can be used to help
English-language learners and
students with disabilities demonstrate their content knowledge
and skills.
The Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers, or parcc —made
up of 22 states—will circulate
the policy for public comment
through May 13. The parcc governing board will vote on the
final document in June.
The manual’s recommendations, released last week, are
intended to expand access to
tests beyond what may be currently available for students in
some states, said Tamara Reavis,
parcc’s senior adviser for assessment, accessibility, and equity.
Its details indicate that some accommodations once linked to students with special needs—such
as repeating instructions aloud
or magnifying text—are now
among the test’s “embedded supports” available to any student,
even those who are not formally
identified as ells or students in
special education.
But advocates for Englishlearners and students with disabilities are expected to take a
close look at the proposals, both
for what they represent in terms
of accessibility and for what they
may mean for classroom instruction. Advocates in both camps
have said that even the most accessible test will be impossible to
pass if students with disabilities

and English-learners are not
given a chance to master the academic challenges that the common-core standards will bring.
For English-learners, the consortium states that accommodations must: reduce the “linguistic load” or complexity of the
language that is necessary for
students to access the content
in curriculum or on the assessment; refrain from altering what
is being measured in a test item
or altering the test itself; and help
“address the unique linguistic and
sociocultural needs of an el by
reducing the effects of Englishlanguage skills on the student’s
overall performance on the assessment.”
The proposed policy further
states that students who are

and students, among others. These
same stakeholders should also decide on and assign accommodations to English-learners early in
the academic year or upon enrollment, the recommendations say,
and no student should encounter
an accommodation for the first
time on test day.
Among the accommodations
available to English-learners
would be word-to-word translations from English into a student’s
native language and frequent
breaks during testing.
Gabriela Uro, the manager of
ell policy and research for the
Washington-based Council of the
Great City Schools, which represents 67 of the nation’s urban
systems, said that most of the
recommended accommodations

“

For kids who don’t speak English
well, or who have accents, this would
have to be worked out. But it can be
done.”
GABRIELA URO
Council of the Great City Schools

currently classified as Englishlearners under the criteria used
by their states would be eligible to
receive accommodations approved
for English-learners on parcc
tests. Students whose parents
have refused language-support
services for them would be eligible for accommodations, so long as
they are classified by their district
as an English-learner.
The manual urges that any decisions about accommodations
for English-learners be made by
more than one individual, and
may include English-as-a-secondlanguage and bilingual teachers,
content-area teachers, guidance
counselors, principals, parents,

seem to have been developed with
“a paper-and-pencil test in mind,”
even though nearly all students
will take the exams on computers.
One example, she said, would be
providing an accommodation on
the English/language arts test in
which students could speak their
answers and have them transcribed to text, as is recommended
for math.
“For kids who don’t speak English well, or who have accents, this
would have to be worked out,” she
said. “But it can be done. The technology is there.”
Ms. Uro said some of the draft
language related to federal and
case law that is central to English-

language learners having equal
access to education is vague and
could cause confusion for states
and districts. She also pointed to
language in the draft suggesting
that accommodations for Englishlearners be “individualized,” akin
to how decisions are made for students with disabilities.
“How do you operationalize something like that in a district like
Santa Ana [Calif.], where 60 percent of the students are ells?” Ms.
Uro said.

Varied Categories
For students with disabilities, the
draft manual outlines five categories of accommodations available to
students that would provide “equitable access” to the tests.
One category—known as “presentation accommodations”—would
include changes in the method or
format in which the test or test
questions are provided to the student. They may include, for example, the use of Braille or sign interpretation of test items.
Another category, “response
accommodations,” would allow
changes in the method used by the
student to provide responses to test
questions. These may include dictating responses to a scribe or using
a Braille note-taker.
Proposed timing and scheduling
accommodations include extending the amount of time allowed
for testing, letting a student take
frequent breaks, or allowing a student to take the test at a certain
time of day. “Setting” accommodations would include changes to
the location or conditions in which
the test is administered, including
a separate location or group size.
Finally, the proposal would allow
expanded access to the test for a
small number of students with disabilities in reading, writing, and
calculating who require additional
supports and meet certain criteria,
as noted in their individualized
education program.

Broad Availability
In addition, a number of accessibility features would be available
to all students, either by the student’s choice or at the discretion
of a school. Those features include
computerized pop-up glossaries,
spell-checkers, or magnification.
Some proposals may prove
controversial, including parcc’s
recommendations for how to
handle issues such as read-aloud
accommodations on English/language arts tests and the use of
calculators. The consortium has
proposed that read-aloud accommodations be provided only to
students who are blind and have
not learned Braille, or students
with “a disability that severely
limits or prevents him/her from
accessing printed text, even after
varied and repeated attempts to
teach the student to do so.”
The use of calculators would
be restricted to students with a
disability that “severely limits or
prevents the student from calculating, even after varied and re-

ASSURING ACCESS
One of the two main
consortia developing tests
aligned to the Common
Core State Standards
is recommending
accommodations that can
be used in assessments
given to students with
disabilities and those
learning English.
Among them:
STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

• Calculators
• Word-prediction software that
types an entire word using a
few keystrokes
• Read-aloud of test passages
or instructions
• Dictation or transcription
software
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS

• Word-to-word translations from
English into a student’s native
language
• Clarification of test directions
(not test items) delivered in
a student’s native language
• Oral responses on math
assessments, which would
be dictated into text
• Frequent test breaks
SOURCE: Partnership
for the Assessment of Readiness
for Colleges and Career

peated attempts to teach the student to do so.”
Parcc sought feedback on those
specific elements of the accommodations manual earlier this
year and received about 3,500 responses.
Rather than linking accommodations to particular disabilities,
some advocates have argued that
the test-makers should determine
if an accommodation will cause
a problem in an assessment. The
education task force of the Consortium of Citizens with Disabilities, a
Washington-based advocacy group,
made that point in a response to an
earlier draft.
“All access features should be
available to all students unless and
until parcc can provide evidence
that use of that feature as an accommodation fundamentally alters
what is intended to be assessed by
the test item,” the organization
wrote in a February letter.
The other group of states working on new assessments to measure how well students are mastering the common core—the Smarter
Balanced Assessment Consortium—is expected to release its
draft policy on accommodations in
late summer or early fall.
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Education Week - April 24, 2013

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