How new tools meant to help special education students take standardized tests actually made it harder
Special education teacher Julia Kim now teaches at George Moscone Elementary School. Last year, she administered the state's new standardized tests at a different school in San Francisco, Fairmount Elementary. (Gloria Searle)
st spring, Julia Kim’s students with disabilities at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco were ready to take a new standardized test. They were excited that it had been built especially for them.
In past years, students with visual perception disorders had test questions read out loud. This time, the students sat in front of their computers awaiting the new technology designed to help them complete the test on their own for the first time.
But as soon as the first question appeared, students complained that the print was too small.
The color contrast tool, which used a background to minimize visual distortions, had been developed for the Common Core test to make it easier for special education students to see. But in practice, the tool prevented the one student in Kim’s class who used it from reading questions and marking answers. “I can’t see it,” he told Kim. It was too dark to read.
The Common Core tests, which are based on learning goals adopted in 43 states and the District of Columbia, offer many state-of-the-art technological tools to level the playing field for special education students. But Kim’s students were not alone. School employees across California have reported glitches in the tests’ enhancements for students with disabilities.
A field test administered in 2014 was meant to iron out the kinks. As a result, a noise buffer and closed captioning were added, according to an email sent last April on behalf of Michelle Center, who is now the California Department of Education’s director of the Assessment Development & Administration Division.
Still, according to teachers and administrators, special education students across California spent days last spring toiling over computerized tests that their teachers say often made it more difficult, not easier, for them to access the material.
“The majority of my students weren’t able to process any of the tests,” Kim said.
In San Francisco, one school found that text-to-speech tools read passages too quickly for students to follow, so teachers had to jump in and read the text out loud — distracting other students. The California School for the Blind found that different accessibility tools,
By the time students with disabilities sat down to take California's standardized tests last spring, they had been promised a set of new tools to help them better access the questions. But some teachers and administrators across the state have reported that this didn't exactly happen.
The California Department of Education says it did not track issues related to the tools created for disabled students using the new tests, which were tied to the Common Core State Standards. Here are some examples of technological problems that popped up.
- An overly robotic text-to-speech voice. Gabriela Aguirre, a curriculum specialist for special education in the Santa Ana Unified School District, said she was concerned that students using a text-to-speech tool could be distracted by the voice, which she described as “a bit robotic.”
- Text-to-speech tools that read passages too quickly for students to follow.For students in Los Angeles, the problem occurred on their iPads. The district had