Lawsuit Spotlights Battle Over Basic Skills Testing

Aaron Weingarten is taking accelerated math and advanced placement history. He’s on the A-Team for the Science Bowl. He plays trumpet, baritone sax and tuba and sings in two choirs, while earning a 3.57 grade point average. But when it came to taking Oregon’s new statewide competency test in writing, he called in sick rather than risk flunking it.

The 16-year-old high school sophomore has dysgraphia, a learning disability that, unless he’s using a computer with a spell check function, renders the words he writes woefully different from the ones he has in his head. And Oregon’s new Certificate of Initial Mastery assessment, the key item in a broad educational reform program, doesn’t tolerate bad spelling.

Flunk the “conventions”--spelling, grammar and punctuation--and you flunk the test. No more advanced placement courses. No more enhanced diploma. Aaron isn’t even sure he won’t have to repeat the 10th grade.

For more than 30,000 students with learning disabilities in Oregon, competency testing--a movement that is sweeping the nation--could prove the single greatest hurdle in a lifetime of struggling to overcome learning disabilities like dyslexia that a generation ago would have labeled some of the brightest students as slow or stupid. Last year, more than 42,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone were classified as learning disabled.

Across the country, 25 states are now or soon will be requiring competency tests for high school graduation, while five others use such “exit tests” for honors graduation or a special designation on students’ diplomas. In California, Gov. Gray Davis has called for a tough statewide testing program.

The writing tests administered last month to Oregon’s high school sophomores are the target of a lawsuit filed by a coalition of parents and students Monday in U.S. district court here. The case highlights a growing concern about the tests, which states are hoping will stem the tide of students graduating from high school without mastering the basics of reading, writing, math and history.

Push to Test May Be Too Hard

The push to test has moved faster than the availability of research on how to accommodate the needs of students who fall outside the mainstream--especially students with high intelligence and good mastery of basic content but with learning disabilities that may make them poor test takers without help, experts say.

A 1997 survey by the University of Minnesota’s National Center on Educational Outcomes found only two states that have specific guidelines allowing students with dyslexia or other similar learning disabilities to use a word processor with a spell check function during testing.

Most states permit students with diagnosed learning disabilities to use things like spell checkers in testing as long as those aids are included in an Individual Education Program for their daily classwork, said lawyers who filed the lawsuit. And Oregon--with a test described as difficult even for students without disabilities--is alone in doubling the weight of the spelling and punctuation component and failing students who don’t pass that section, they said.

Tanya Gross, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Education, emphasized that the tests are not required for obtaining high school diplomas, and said students are allowed to use dictionaries and pocket spell checkers known as Franklin Spellers. A test that is designed to measure basic skills like spelling, she said, can’t do that if a student is allowed to use a computer aid.

“One of the hallmarks of good writing is correct spelling, and something that fundamentally alters the standard of the expectations of the test can’t be considered the same test,” she said.

But Sid Wolinsky, a lawyer with Oakland-based Disability Rights Advocates, which filed the lawsuit in Portland, said Oregon has violated federal law requiring reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities.

“If some mean-spirited bureaucrat had sat down and designed a way of ruining the education of 30,000 students, they could not have done a better job than by designing a test . . . which tests those children on the one thing they have difficulty in presenting, which is the so-called convention of spelling, punctuation and grammar,” he said.

“It’s like telling everybody in a wheelchair, sorry, you can’t graduate unless you can climb the stairs. Or it’s like telling deaf students you can graduate high school if you pass a music appreciation course--and we will not allow you to wear your hearing aids.”

Nationally, developers of basic skills tests are wrestling with what those tests ought to be measuring when it comes to students with learning disabilities, said Martha Thurlow, who oversaw the research for the National Center on Educational Outcomes.

“For some, it almost gets down to belief systems about what’s fair or not fair, what gives an advantage or doesn’t, what the test says the construct being tested is,” Thurlow said.

Some Disabled Able to Excel in Classroom

Learning disabilities range from more common conditions like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder to a wide range of disabilities like dyslexia (which affects reading) and dysgraphia (which affects writing).

With dyslexia, doctors have been able to isolate a neurological defect, traceable in brain scans as early as infancy, that renders sufferers less able to process phonemes, the basic building blocks of language. Reading and writing ability suffers, although students with aids such as Books on Tape and computer spell check programs are able to excel in course work and often display high levels of intelligence and academic accomplishment.

Students’ Test Scores Can Weigh Heavily

Oregon’s Certificate of Initial Mastery assessment for high school sophomores went into effect this year, the debut of a massive educational reform effort that eventually will ask high school seniors to demonstrate mastery of algebra, geometry, statistics, oral communications, reading and writing, science, social science, the arts and a foreign language.

Only one high school in the state is using it as a requirement for graduation, but school officials say the proficiency tests could affect access to honors and advanced placement programs, acceptance at Oregon state universities and preference in hiring by major Oregon employers.

Oregon, like the vast majority of schools, universities and state licensing boards that administer standardized tests, does make some accommodations. They range from granting additional time to take the test to testing in a quiet environment, and are considered reasonable accommodations that allow a learning disabled student’s test results to be considered on the same level as other students’.

Use of a computer and spell checker also may be permitted, but these are considered “modifications” to the test, and it is not clear whether the results will be fully counted, based on conflicting statements and policies issued by the state and individual school districts, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said.

Left unanswered are many parents’ questions: Will my child be allowed to move on to the next grade if he passed only a modified test? Will he be allowed to take honors and advanced placement courses? Will he qualify for admission to state universities, which are in the process of moving to a proficiency-based admissions system?

Mary Peterson, whose daughter Tara was diagnosed with dyslexia in the 8th grade, had her take the test without the computer she normally uses for school work. “She’s been tested with superior intelligence, and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize her chances of passing it, because if she doesn’t pass it, there are just too many unknowns,” she said.

“My own view is if you want kids to be educated, you need to teach them also the tools that are available to them. I think every kid should take the test on a computer,” she said.