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State and District Assessments as an Avenue to Equity and Excellence for English Language Learners with Disabilities

LEP Projects Report 2

Published by the National Center on Educational Outcomes

Prepared by Martha Thurlow and Kristin Liu

September 2001

This report is based on a paper presented at the Harvard Civil Rights Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 6, 2000.

Any or all portions of this document may be reproduced and distributed without prior permission, provided the source is cited as:

Thurlow, M., & Liu, K. (2001). State and District Assessments as an avenue to equity and excellence for English language learners with disabilities (LEP Projects Report 2). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes. Retrieved [today's date], from the World Wide Web: http://education.umn.edu/NCEO/OnlinePubs/LEP2.html

Executive Summary

Standards-based education has swept the country during the past decade, pushing and seeping its way into state after state across the nation. Based on the noble tenets of high standards, higher expectations, and improved instruction, politicians have taken on the battle cry for more assessments – both state and district assessments – to measure what students know and are able to do. At the same time, there are significant numbers of students for whom the educational system does not seem to be working as it should.

As in the past, the students who are most likely to fail to thrive in current educational environments are those of color, those who are poor, and those who are English language learners (ELLs), also referred to as limited English proficient (LEP) students. Why then, does the push for standards-based reform continue – even among those who are advocating for children most at risk, including those with disabilities and those who have limited English proficiency (Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, 1998)? And, why would we suggest that state and district assessments that hold schools accountable for student learning can serve as an avenue to equity and excellence for LEP students with disabilities?

It is impossible to begin a discussion of state and district assessments without raising concerns about assessments that have significant consequences for students – graduation exams and exams that determine whether students are allowed to move from one grade to the next. These high stakes assessments for students are particularly controversial whenever low student performance is directly related to poorer quality educational opportunities. For this reason, it is important for system accountability assessments – those that hold the educational system accountable and assign consequences to schools, administrators, or educators – to precede student high stake assessments. In those states and districts where high stakes assessments for students already exist, policymakers and educators must be held responsible for ensuring that the assessment system is appropriate – comprised of multiple measures (i.e., more than one kind of assessment), with accommodations policies that provide a wide range of accommodations, and appeals procedures for students who need alternative ways to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.

We want to focus our discussion on state and district assessments designed to hold the educational system accountable for the performance of students, and to demonstrate how these assessments are an important avenue to equity and excellence for English language learners with disabilities. To support our position, we first lay out some of the original ideas behind standards-based education. We indicate how current federal legislation for Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (reauthorized in 1994 as the Improving America’s Schools Act) and for special education services (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act - IDEA 97) reinforce the implementation of standards-based education for all students. After describing the characteristics of current standards-based assessment (including the important distinction between high stakes for students and high stakes for the schools), we identify some of the commonly projected benefits of standards-based assessments, particularly those in which the system is held accountable rather than the student.

Next we examine what we know about English language learners with disabilities, both in terms of their numbers across states, and in terms of their performance. We describe the information we can glean from our national report card – the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We look at information in state-level reports and on current state and district Web sites.

Finally, we look at data from a special project in which we examined, in detail, data from students with disabilities and English language learners. Based on the data that now exist and what could exist, we make several recommendations about ways to move forward to ensure that English language learners with disabilities actually reap the benefits that can be obtained from state and district level assessments.

Principles of Standards-Based Education

In the late 1980s, all 50 governors and the president convened to set the pathway for standards-based education. At the educational summit of 1989, all present agreed on the importance of a strong national education agenda focused on goals that would improve the global competitiveness of tomorrow’s workers. Chief among the goals was one that pushed for high rigorous standards, both content standards – to define what students should know and be able to do – and performance standards – to define how well students had to perform. Following quickly on the heels of standards was the recognition that it is necessary to measure progress toward meeting standards; data were needed to assist the system in recognizing whether students were meeting, or a least making progress toward meeting, the standards that had been defined for them.

Part of the rationale behind standards-based education is the belief that one way to drive better opportunities to learn is to ensure that the public knows how students are performing in relation to standards. For decades, states and districts relied primarily on norm-referenced tests to document student performance and growth. These tests, however, are designed to spread the scores of students and to allow for normative comparisons, not to judge whether students have met specific standards. Evidence that the improvements that had been made under the old system were not sufficient have come from several international studies in which students in the United States performed at levels comparable to many third world countries, and way below the levels of those countries with which the U.S. wanted to be economically competitive (e.g., Japan, Korea). Evidence of insufficient levels of performance also came from the business community, with anecdotal evidence that the graduates of high schools did not have the basic skills needed for entry jobs in most companies, as well as from higher education, where the need for remedial courses for incoming freshman had sky-rocketed.

In the early days of the educational reform movement, there was much discussion of authentic assessment as a way to obtain valid information about students’ knowledge and skills. Authentic assessment referred to a broad array of measurement approaches, including performance assessments and portfolio assessments. Over time, these approaches have faded considerably, and have been replaced by essay questions, certainly more performance-like than multiple-choice tests, but nowhere near the original conception of authentic assessment. This diversion, hopefully temporary, creates significant challenges for students from diverse backgrounds, particularly if they are English language learners and from diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite these challenges, we still believe that there are significant benefits to be gained from participation in state and district standards-based assessments.

Federal Education Laws

Federal education laws now support the argument that English language learners and students with disabilities will benefit from a standards-based educational system that uses large-scale assessments as accountability tools. Both Title I of the Improving America’s Schools Act (the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) and the 1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) require the participation of all students in state and district assessments. Title I, which clearly defines “all students” as including students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency, requires (1) the participation of all students in the grades being assessed (which, for Title I purposes must include at a minimum, assessments of reading and mathematics at the elementary, middle, and secondary school levels); (2) the provision of reasonable adaptations and accommodations for students with diverse learning needs; (3) the assessment of limited English proficient students in the language and form most likely to yield accurate and reliable information on what they know and can do in areas other than English; and (4) the disaggregation of results within each State, local educational agency, and school by (a) gender, (b) each major racial and ethnic group, (c) English proficiency status, (d) migrant status, (e) students with disabilities compared to nondisabled students, and (f) economically disadvantaged students compared to students who are not economically disadvantaged.

Title I does not permit states to exempt any student subgroup from their assessment systems, and states must implement an auditing and record-keeping system to document which students are not assessed. States are required to explain how they will reduce the number of exemptions, and to examine whether intended effects are achieved by policies designed to increase student participation rates. The intent of all these provisions of the law are to spur educational reform for all students, not just a select few, as is clear in the following:

The intent of these requirements is to: 1) ensure that all students are held to the same high standards and appropriately assessed against those standards; and 2) ensure that all students are part of the indicators used to hold schools accountable. (U.S. Department of Education, 1996, p. 60)

IDEA has similar requirements. Students with disabilities are to participate in state and district assessments, with appropriate accommodations as necessary. Further, states and districts are to develop and implement alternate assessments for those students with disabilities unable to participate in state and district assessments. The number of students with disabilities in the general assessment and the number in the alternate assessment are to be reported, along with information on the performance of these students in each assessment, with the same frequency and in the same detail as for other students. These requirements are reinforced in the requirements for Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), and in general performance goals and indicators submitted bi-annually to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Together, these federal laws represent a significant commitment to holding schools accountable for the performance of all students.

Benefits of Standards-Based Assessments

Besides the dramatic evidence for the need for reform, and now the requirements of education laws, many benefits of having all students in the school accountability assessment system have been identified. One benefit of an all-inclusive assessment system is that it gives us a more accurate picture of the status of the educational system. When any group of students is systematically excluded from the measurement system, we have a biased picture of education, particularly if the group that is excluded tends to be lower performing students. This issue has been highlighted in the academic literature (McGrew, Thurlow & Spiegel, 1993), in journals for school boards (Zlatos, 1994), and in the popular press (Why Johnny stayed home, 1997). First, attention was given to the exclusion of students with disabilities, then to the exclusion of English language learners (Rivera, Stansfield, Scialdone & Sharkey, 2000). Only now are we beginning to think about students who are English language learners with disabilities.

There are other benefits of including all students in standards-based assessments. Among them are that participation in the measurement system is a critical piece of benefiting from reforms that are implemented. If groups of students with specific kinds of needs are excluded when assessments are given and results reported, the unique needs reflected in their performance will not be evident when reformers look at assessment results. A concrete example of this occurred in Kentucky during the beginning years of its reform. Kentucky started with principles that pushed forward the inclusion of all students in assessments. When the first set of results came back, they found that students with disabilities had basically zeroed out on the Science test. Students did not even know what a microscope was. With only a little exploring, they found that their students with disabilities had been systematically taken out of science to go to resource rooms! Science opportunity to learn changed dramatically for these youngsters as a result – they were put back into science classes and taught science!

Directly linked to the benefit of being a part of standards-based reforms, and having reforms designed for the students’ needs, is the avoidance of unintended consequences of exclusion from school accountability measures. Researchers have demonstrated, for example, that if a group of students is excluded from an assessment system (such as students with disabilities or English language learners), there is a likely increase in placements in those groups so that more and more low-performing students will not count. Allington and McGill-Franzen dramatically demonstrated this in New York, where a third grade test was used to determine rewards and sanctions for schools (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1992). Evidence was clear that before the third grade test, there was a dramatic increase in the rate of referral to special education. Also, there was increased retention of students in second grade, probably based on the unfounded belief that giving low performing students one more year in second grade would ensure that their performance would be better when they did make it into the third grade test.

Perhaps even more important than these reasons is the finding that the inclusion of students in standards-based assessments increases expectations for these students; it forces a recognition that all children are expected to learn, which often gets lost when dealing with the challenges of disabilities and non-English background. Intertwined with the higher expectations for students is the recognition that educators working with these students really do have an important role in the education system. Their role is being elevated through the discussion of standards and assessments for all.

The Nature of Standards-Based Assessments: One of the Challenges

Two factors have complicated the notion of standards-based assessments. First, there has been a backslide from the initial educational reform notion of standards-based authentic assessments. Second, there has been increasing pressure to have high stakes for students (e.g., graduation exams, promotion exams), rather than (or in addition to) high stakes for schools.

Authentic assessments have been seen as one way to equalize the assessment situation for all students. In their purest form, authentic assessments maximize the performance of students, in part, by reducing the language load of the assessment process. Yet, authentic assessments are quite difficult to implement, and even more difficult to score in a way that is both reliable and valid.

Similar complications have arisen with respect to standards-based criterion-referenced assessments, which are designed to assess performance relative to standards rather than other students. Criterion-referenced assessments enabled states and districts to better align their assessments with their standards. Yet, over time, there has remained a political interest in being able to compare performance in a state, district, or school to a national norm; thus, states have either retained, gone back to, or added back in a norm-referenced assessment.

With all this shifting, states and districts find themselves in a situation where their assessments are constraining their ability to include all students. Part of this is due to the standardized nature of the assessments being used. When most of these tests were developed, particularly the norm-referenced tests, few English language learners or students with disabilities were included in the assessment development process. Without their presence during development, there was little need for accommodations, thus few accommodations are allowed by the test developers. Several other factors that also impinge on the inclusiveness of assessments were highlighted by the General Accounting Office, which called for states to expand their data collection as well as to “improve the completeness and quality of existing data” (General Accounting Office, 2000).

At the same time that standards-based reform was being pushed, there grew within states a concern about whether students were motivated to do the best that they could do. This concern seemed to have mingled with concerns about students not knowing enough when they graduated from high school. As a result, many states have upped the stakes for students; nearly half require that students pass an exam before they can receive a standard high school diploma (Guy, Shin, Lee & Thurlow, 1999; Heubert & Hauser, 1999), and several states (and many districts) are about to implement exams that determine whether a student is ready to move from one grade to the next (Quenemoen, Lehr, Thurlow, Thompson & Bolt, 2000).

Imposing high stakes for students at the same time that the educational system is still grappling with how to best provide standards-based instruction to all students makes for a very muddy system. It also makes for a system that is not exactly what we think it should be or the way we would like it to be.

Heubert and Hauser (1999) have made an excellent case for holding the education system accountable for student performance before imposing high stakes for students. We agree totally with that viewpoint. Still, we believe that opting out of existing assessment systems wholesale is not a good choice, and that doing so will actually diminish the opportunity for equity and excellence in education for many groups of students. The maxim that we treasure what and who we measure has been verified time and again. It is clearly the case that if you have no data on how students are doing, it is easy to forget their needs, even if the assessment has high stakes for students. This is particularly the case when so much attention is being given to the performance of students on state and district assessments. The critical element in any assessment system is to use data to make good educational choices, to provide a full range of supports to students when they are not doing well so that they are able to show improvements and not be forced to simply give up. Among the critical supports are both curriculum supports and assessment supports (e.g., multiple measures, accommodations, appeals procedures).

Data on English Language Learners with Disabilities

We attempted to cull information on what we know about the participation and performance of English language learners with disabilities from the vast array of national, state, and district level data collection programs. We looked for data that would give us a sense of how many students there are as well as how they are performing. We examined data from the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), data from state reports and Web sites, and data from selected districts. To present a full picture, we looked at both students with disabilities on IEPs, students with limited English proficiency (LEP), and LEP/IEP students. We looked for these with the realization that both terminology and definitional issues would confuse any attempt to make comparisons. Thus, while we are using the labels IEP, LEP, and LEP/IEP here, we know that sometimes a “student with disabilities” label includes both students on 504 plans and students who have IEPs. Similarly, students we refer to as LEP may in different places include students with a non-English language background who have varying degrees of English proficiency, or they may be only those students receiving English as a Second Language (ESL) or Bilingual services.

NAEP Data

NAEP became interested in the extent to which students with disabilities and English language learners participate in its assessments as a result of meetings held in 1994 (August & McArthur, 1996; Ysseldyke, Thurlow, McGrew & Vanderwood, 1994). Following these meetings, NAEP began a series of studies on its exclusion/inclusion criteria and allowing accommodations (Anderson, Jenkins & Miller, 1996; Mazzeo, Carlson, Voekl & Lutkus, 2000; McLaughlin, Vergun, Godlewski & Allen, 1996). A consistent finding of all the NAEP research to date has been that allowing students to use accommodations is a primary way in which to increase their participation rates. This finding, combined with similar findings from other data sources, confirm for educators the importance of accommodations, for students with disabilities, for students with limited English proficiency, and most likely for English language learners with disabilities.

The 1996 NAEP reports were the first to recognize English language learners with disabilities within their sampling plans (O’Sullivan, Reese & Mazzeo, 1997). The numbers of “IEP/LEP” students showing up in NAEP samples were small in most states, with the national average at less than 1% and the states with the highest percentages showing about 2% of students in the sample as being IEP/LEP students. These percentages seem unusually small, given the percentages of IEP and LEP students. For example, according to NAEP, Texas has 11% of its sample in the IEP group and 6% in the LEP group. This is similar to the Office of Special Education Programs estimate of 10.73% IEP students, but in contrast to the National Clearinghouse on Bilingual Education estimate of 12.7% LEP students. Even so, given these kinds of percentages, one might expect to find a greater percentage of students considered to be IEP/LEP students. Those IEP/LEP students who did show up in the NAEP sample were excluded from participating in NAEP, so we know nothing about whether these students could have been included.

State Data

States regularly report on the performance of students in their state assessments. In 1998 we examined state reports for information on the participation and performance of LEP students with disabilities. Table 1 summarizes our findings. While 16 states provided data on the participation or performance of students with disabilities, and 6 provided data on the participation or performance of students with limited English proficiency, only 1 state presented data on IEP/LEP students. However, the state presented only information on the number of such students taking the state test, not on their performance. The numbers were quite small (e.g., 37 IEP/LEP, compared to 8,300 IEP and 1,986 LEP testing in reading; 38 IEP/LEP, compared to 8,260 IEP and 1,994 LEP in math).

Table 1.  Data on IEP, LEP, and IEP/LEP Students Provided in State Reports