Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 7

EDUCATION WEEK
PARCC Gives Details
On Testing Supports
Manual covers ELLs, those with disabilities
By Christina A. Samuels
& Lesli A. Maxwell
Arlington, Va.
A group of states designing tests
to measure how well students are
mastering the common standards
last week approved a slate of testing
supports that includes readaloud
accommodations on the
English/language arts assessment
for students with disabilities and
written word-to-word translations
to some English-language learners’
native languages.
The 21-state Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for College
and Careers, or PARCC, signed off
on its first edition of an accommodations
and accessibility manual
for students with disabilities and
English-learners. The testing supports—which
also include interpreting
the English/language arts
assessment for students who use
American Sign Language—will be
field-tested in the 2013-14 school
year, and adjusted as needed before
the tests debut in 2014-15,
PARCC officials said.
Expanding Access
Overall, PARCC’s policies are
meant to expand access to tests
beyond what may be currently
available for students in some
states. 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 allowing a read-aloud accommodation
for students with disabilities
will be a major shift in testing
policy for most states in the PARCC
consortium; only Georgia, Maryland,
Massachusetts, and Tennessee
currently allow text passages
on language arts state tests to be
read aloud, though read-aloud can
be used for tests measuring other
academic areas.
That prompted state leaders
from Colorado—who said allowing
the accommodation on the English/
language arts test would not be a
true measurement of reading—to
vote against approving the manual.
It was the only dissenting vote.
Students who use the readaloud
and American Sign Language
accommodations will have
notations on their score reports
indicating that no claims can be
made about their ability to demonstrate
foundational print skills
such as decoding and fluency.
Joyce Zurkowski, the executive
director of assessment for Colorado,
told her PARCC colleagues
that she had talked with the
original writers of the English/
language arts standards, who
said “if kids can’t access that text
independently, they can’t be considered
proficient readers.”
Oklahoma’s schools chief, Janet
Barresi, voiced reservations about
allowing American Sign Language
interpretation unless it can be “literally
word-for-word” and said that
students would have need to have
already had that kind of support
leading up to the test in order for
their scores to be comparable.
The read-aloud portion of the accommodations
manual had been
one of the most-debated sections
of the document, drawing thousands
of responses to earlier policy
drafts. Some special education advocacy
groups argued in favor of a
broad use of multiple ways of accessing
text, including read-aloud,
unless the test was specifically a
measurement of decoding.
Among the groups taking
that stance is the Center for Applied
Special Technology, a Wakefield,
Mass.-based research organization
that promotes universal
design in instruction and test
development. Chuck Hitchcock,
CAST’s chief officer of policy and
technology, said the current manual
is better, from his perspective,
than earlier drafts that took a
more restrictive approach to the
use of read-aloud.
However, in an email to PARCC
leaders, he said he still had concerns
with the organization’s plan
to put a notation on student score
reports indicating that where
read-aloud is used, no claims can
be made about a student’s foundational
print skills.
English-Learners
PARCC’s policy for ELLs calls for
accommodations to be available,
in large measure, by the level of
an English-learner’s language
proficiency. Students at beginning
levels of proficiency, for example,
can have test directions “clarified”
by a test administrator in their
native language for both the math
and English/language arts exams,
though that accommodation is not
recommended for ELLs with advanced
proficiency. Beginning ELLs
will also be allowed to have their
oral responses to math test items
transcribed to text.
Written word-to-word translations
from English to an ELL’s native
language are recommended
for those with intermediate and
advanced proficiency levels. The
manual states that students at the
lowest proficiency levels generally
benefit more from oral test supports
than written ones.
Extended time will also be available
to all English-learners, regardless
of proficiency.
PARCC has not yet addressed the
issue of native language translations
of the assessments. With
member states like Arizona, an
“English-only” state, and New
York, which provides assessments
in multiple languages, PARCC staff
members said that issue will take
more time to resolve.
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JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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