State’s New High School Exit Exam Challenged

Advocates for children with learning disabilities challenged California’s new high school exit exam in federal court Tuesday, saying the test violates U.S. law by discriminating against children with dyslexia and other disorders.

The class-action suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charges that the state Department of Education, among other defendants, has flagrantly violated the rights of thousands of disabled students by failing to ensure that reasonable accommodations are provided for them.

Asking learning disabled children to take the high-stakes graduation test without the extra help to which they are accustomed is like “asking a kid in a wheelchair to get up and run 10 laps,” said Monique Chapman, mother of a Fremont eighth-grader with dyslexia and a plaintiff in the case.

The fledgling exam was given for the first time in March to this year’s ninth-graders. Although this round was voluntary, the results are being used to set a passing score. This group of students and all subsequent classes must pass the test of proficiency in English and math to receive a diploma.

The lawsuit is challenging not just this year’s test but the entire high school exit exam program. Although the suit’s potential effects were not clear Tuesday, parents are seeking such remedies as having the tests read aloud to learning disabled students, printing tests in large type or allowing students to use spell-check software.

An estimated 7% of this year’s 484,000 California high school freshmen have a learning disability.

Critics of “accommodations” for disabled students have argued that the measures provide an unfair advantage and effectively invalidate the results for everyone. They also note that on at least one high-stakes exam--the SAT--there has been evidence of students improperly claiming disabilities in order to obtain accommodations.

Similar challenges to such high-stakes tests have, however, generally been successful, education law attorneys said.

In February, Oregon agreed to settle a suit brought by a group of parents, including one whose dyslexic child was denied use of a spell-check device on her writing test. That group, like the California group, was represented by an attorney from an organization called Disability Rights Advocates.

Oregon pledged to “broaden the current list of allowable accommodations” and agreed not to use test results alone to determine academic consequences for students with disabilities.

As a result of the agreement, many students with dyslexia, a reading disorder often accompanied by poor spelling, will never have to spell without help on the Oregon writing test. Students without disabilities, meanwhile, will be marked down for misspellings.

The California suit was filed on behalf of Chapman and her son, Juleus, 13; Krista Smiley of La Crescenta and her son, Ryan, 14; and Susan Lyons and her daughter, Jennifer, 13, of Magalia, Calif. It was filed by Disability Rights Advocates, an Oakland nonprofit.

Aside from the accommodations issue, the suit accused California of failing to provide an alternative means of measuring disabled students’ skills, as required under federal law. And it said many children were being tested on material that had not yet been taught.

Doug Stone, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, defended the exam program. “This is the first year of the program, and procedures are still being fine-tuned,” he said, adding that the state is working on guidelines for accommodating disabled students.

California is one of many states that rushed to assemble a system of standards, testing and accountability for public schools. The high school exit exam is the cornerstone of Gov. Gray Davis’ plan to hold students, teachers and schools accountable for learning.

A panel is expected to set a passing score on the exam later this month. Students who don’t pass this round will have multiple chances to retake the test during their high school years.

Earlier this year, Davis had urged state legislators to make the March examination a practice test after independent evaluators advised that the exam was a year or two away from being reliable enough to withstand lawsuits.

Among other concerns, the evaluators said students needed more time to learn the material and the state needed to better evaluate the test’s validity.

But Senate Republicans killed Davis’ legislation two days before students began taking the exam, ensuring it would count this year.

Under the exit exam legislation, many children with disabilities are eligible for accommodations on the test. But Sidney Wolinsky, an attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, said parents are complaining that districts did not honor requests for accommodations. In some cases, parents didn’t know what their options were.

Plaintiff Ryan Smiley, a ninth-grader with dyslexia and dysgraphia (a disorder that makes writing difficult), took the exam in March at Crescenta Valley High School. According to the complaint, he was not allowed to use all of the accommodations he was promised. He normally has exams read to him, but a reader was not provided.

“It was a miserable experience,” Ryan said. “For a while, I felt like a nobody. I thought, ‘I’m stupid.’ It was like giving a blind kid a test with no Braille.”