Fair and Unfair Testing Accommodations

School Administrator, Nov, 1999 by Lynn S. Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs

What's considered appropriate when assessing the academic performance of students with disabilities?

Is it fair for an individual with a disability to take a nonstandard administration of a standardized achievement test when students without disabilities don't have this option?

This is just one of the concerns facing schools as they work to assess students with disabilities. Among others: Should all students with the same disability receive the same accommodation? How do we know we are choosing the right accommodation for any one student with a disability?

Two prominent policy initiatives lend critical significance to these questions. First, strengthening academic performance and accountability have become bywords at the federal, state and district levels. At the same time, the 1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act require states and districts to include students with disabilities in accountability programs.

The rationale for the IDEA amendments is based on the fact that performance of students with disabilities has not always counted in accountability programs. "Too often, in the past," explain Judith Heumann and Norma Cantu, both assistant secretaries in the U. S. Department of Education, "students with disabilities have not fully participated in state and district assessments, only to be shortchanged by the low expectations and less challenging curriculum that may result from exclusion."

Jim Ysseldyke and Martha Thurlow of the National Center on Educational Outcomes document similar problems. These researchers found that statewide accountability programs prior to 1998 excluded many students with disabilities. According to a 1997 National Academy of Sciences panel, even when students with disabilities completed assessments, some states or districts removed their scores from public reports.

What Accommodations?

Test accommodations are changes in standardized test conditions designed to level the playing field between students with and without disabilities. The purpose of identifying appropriate accommodations is to achieve valid, not optimal, scores. On one hand, disallowing appropriate, or valid, accommodations prevents students with disabilities from demonstrating their competence. On the other hand, overly permissive accommodation policies inflate scores and thereby reduce pressure on schools to increase learning opportunities for students with disabilities.

For example, if an adult reads a reading test to a student with disabilities, the student will score unrealistically high. With this high score, the school will experience less pressure to provide appropriate, quality reading instruction to the student.

Unfortunately, policymakers and test experts do not agree on methods for determining which accommodations are indeed valid. According to the Council of Chief State School Officers, some states prohibit the same accommodations that other states recommend. Without consensus on appropriate criteria, comparisons among states or districts can become unfair and meaningless. This is one reason why states and districts have excluded students with disabilities from their accountability programs.

The IDEA amendments, however, deny states and districts that latitude. Although a small proportion of students (for example, some with severe cognitive deficits) may participate in alternate assessments, districts now must test all students with disabilities. To accomplish this, they must develop test accommodation policies.

Key Assumptions

For some disabilities, accommodations that level the playing field can be identified easily using logical analysis. For example, a large-print version of a mathematics applications test permits many students with visual disabilities to demonstrate their competence, while the meaningfulness of the test construct is preserved.

Moreover, although this accommodation makes the test more accessible to many students with disabilities, it would not increase the scores of children without disabilities. This notion of "differential boost," which Susan Phillips of Michigan State University's Institute for Social Research describes as an accommodation that increases the performance of students with disabilities more than it increases the scores of students without disabilities, is critical to the concept of leveling the playing field.

Of course, logical analysis of test accommodations is not always so straightforward. For example, students with learning disabilities (who constitute more than half the population of students in special education) present a particular challenge for two reasons. First, this group is dramatically heterogeneous. As shown by researchers Deborah Speece and David Cooper of the University of Maryland, students with learning disabilities can be subtyped into clusters with varying underlying problems, thus making conceptual analysis of meaningful test accommodations impossible.

A second concern is the nature of the cognitive problems that students with LD present. Their most distinguishing characteristics are reading and math deficits, while most large-scale assessments directly measure or rely heavily on these same skills.