Video - NYC Principal Jamaal Bowman Defies Gag Rule on Opt Out - High Stakes Testing and the Black Community: Just Say No!

Ed Notes Online: Video - NYC Principal Jamaal Bowman Defies Gag Rule on Opt Out - High Stakes Testing and the Black Community: Just Say No!:

Video - NYC Principal Jamaal Bowman Defies Gag Rule on Opt Out - High Stakes Testing and the Black Community: Just Say No!

Jamaal Bowman has become a leading voice, for the opt out movement, along with MORE UFT Presidential candidate Jia Lee, who often partners with him. See the video below.

Here is the blurb posted on the Your Black Education (YBE) network on you tube

Standardized tests? Principal Jamaal Bowman says 'Know your rights'. President Obama recently spoke out against excessive standardized testing. The POTUS claimed that this issue, "takes the joy out of teaching and learning, both for them (teachers) and for the students". Long before Obama's declaration, Jamaal Bowman, Founding Principal of CASA (Cornerstone Academy for Social Action) in Bronx, NY, has been advocate for student and parent rights and the movement to opt out of standardized tests to promote more holistic approaches to assessment of student learning. Bowman speaks with YBE about the impact of standardized tests on Black and Brown students and offers his advice to their parents.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kNcUDwjE8&feature=youtu.be

Ed Notes Online: Video - NYC Principal Jamaal Bowman Defies Gag Rule on Opt Out - High Stakes Testing and the Black Community: Just Say No!:

Malloy and Dems take giant step backwards as World Leaders negotiate effort to save the Earth from Climate Change (updated) - Wait What?

Malloy and Dems take giant step backwards as World Leaders negotiate effort to save the Earth from Climate Change (updated) - Wait What?:

Malloy and Dems take giant step backwards as World Leaders negotiate effort to save the Earth from Climate Change (updated)

NOTE:  Updated with responses from Malloy administration agencies

Heralded as ground breaking legislation designed to promote energy efficiency and reduce Greenhouse gasses, in 2007, Republican Governor Jodi Rell signed legislation that “permanently” exempted weatherization products and energy-efficient light bulbs from the Connecticut State Sales Tax.

The legislation, which was overwhelmingly adopted by the Democratic controlled Connecticut General Assembly, was cited as one of the state’s major accomplishments.

Gina McCarthy, then Connecticut’s Commissioner of Environmental Protection and now the head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, highlighted the “landmark” legislation in her 2007 Annual State Report entitled Protecting and Restoring our Environment.

In a 2014 national EPA report on “Existing State Policies and Programs that Reduce Power Sector CO2 Emissions,” McCarthy’s agency explained the importance of “State tax incentives for energy efficiency,” writing

“…sales tax exemptions…spur private sector innovation to develop more energy efficient technologies and practices and increase consumer choice of energy-efficient products.

To this day, the federal government promotes Connecticut’s sales tax exemption law on its Department of Energy website

However, just two weeks ago as World Leaders, including Gina McCarthy, worked around the clock to develop the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Governor Malloy and Democrats in the Connecticut General Assembly repealed Connecticut’s important sales Malloy and Dems take giant step backwards as World Leaders negotiate effort to save the Earth from Climate Change (updated) - Wait What?:

Common Core Architect Says Don’t Abandon Traditional Catholic Ed Students ‘Will Do Superbly’ on New SAT Exam

EXCLUSIVE: Common Core Architect Says Don’t Abandon Traditional Catholic Education, Students ‘Will Do Superbly’ on New SAT Exam:

EXCLUSIVE: Common Core Architect Says Don’t Abandon Traditional Catholic Education, Students ‘Will Do Superbly’ on New SAT Exam

David Coleman, president of the company responsible for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Advanced Placement (AP) exams and a chief architect of the controversial Common Core Standards, told The Cardinal Newman Society in an exclusive interview that students educated in traditional Catholic schools have nothing to fear about the Common Core-driven changes to the SAT and AP exams.

Moreover, Coleman praised religious liberal arts schools, “the beauties and distinctive values of a religious education” and even the new trend toward classical Catholic schools and homeschooling, insisting that the Common Core Standards should not be a reason for Catholic educators to abandon what is unique about a traditional Catholic education.

 “As president of The College Board it is my conviction that a child excellently trained in traditional liberal arts will do superbly on relevant sections of the SAT and other aspects of Advanced Placement work, ”Coleman said. “Rest assured.”

Coleman’s assurances respond to deep concerns in the Catholic community about the ability of Catholic school students to compete for college admission unless Catholic schools change their time-honored curricula to conform to the Common Core. Already many Catholic dioceses have embraced the Common Core standards, arguing that it is necessary to keep pace with the reforms in public schools and with changes to college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT.

But The Cardinal Newman Society, working with parents and education experts, has expressed concerns about the Common Core’s utilitarian emphasis on career preparation and college skills potentially diminishing the distinctive Catholic identity and liberal arts emphasis of traditional Catholic schooling. The Newman Society launched its Catholic Is Our Core program to identify and respond to the many problems Common Core poses to faithful Catholic education.

The concerns focus especially on the Common Core’s English Language Arts (ELA) standards.

“Our goal in teaching literature to kids is not just to prepare them for possible graduate school in English; our goal, especially in Catholic schools, is to form them and expose them to great, engaging, formative and normative literature and in the process instill in them a love and passion for reading great literature,” wrote Dr. Dan Guernsey and Dr. Denise Donohue,

- See more at: http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/4557/EXCLUSIVE-Common-Core-Architect-Says-Don%E2%80%99t-Abandon-Traditional-Catholic-Education-Students-%E2%80%98Will-Do-Superbly%E2%80%99-on-New-SAT-Exam.aspx#sthash.qRfYjXpx.dpuf

The ‘worst and dumbest’ education program of the year could get even worse - The Washington Post

The ‘worst and dumbest’ education program of the year could get even worse - The Washington Post:

The ‘worst and dumbest’ education program of the year could get even worse

There are a lot of bad ideas in education — really awful. But back in July, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune ran an editorial about a new one-year program in Florida under the headline “Worst and dumbest,” and it’s hard to argue with it. Unfortunately, it could soon get even worse.

As I wrote last June, the kooky program, ironically called “Florida’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarships,” is using $44 million of taxpayer dollars to give up to $10,000 bonuses to teachers who got high SAT and ACT scores before entering college — even if they took the test decades ago.  New teachers would just need to show their test scores at or above the 80th percentile on the SAT and ACT, while veteran teachers would also have received a “highly effective” evaluation rating.

What about  teachers with consistently great evaluations but who came through community colleges and didn’t have to take college admissions tests? Plumb out of luck.

What about new teachers who got high SAT/ACT scores but only have five or so weeks of teacher training through a program such as Teach For America? Ah, they are eligible for the bonuses.  Quite the plum for them.

So how did such a cockamamie idea become a cockamamie $44 million program? That’s another interesting part of the story.

This was the brainchild of state Republican Rep. Erik Fresen, who somehow thinks that test scores are a good way to decide who is a good teacher — and that the lure of the bonus will entice “the smartest kids” to go into teaching,the Orlando Sentinel reported. The smartest kids to Fresen are the ones who do well on the SAT and ACT, and apparently the best teachers are, too. The wrongheadedness of both propositions is staggering.

In any case, as  Jeffrey S. Solocheck wrote in this Tampa Bay Times story,Fresen’s bill didn’t pass the  Republican-led Senate during the legislature’s session last spring, but somehow it was resurrected in a June special session and was included in the 2015-16 Florida education spending budget. As theHerald-Tribune reported:

“The bill went through absolutely no process,” [Republican State Sen. Nancy] Detert said. “Never got a hearing in the Senate. We refused to hear it because it’s stupid.”

State Rep. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, agreed. Rep. Ray Pilon, R-Sarasota, blamed Gov. Rick Scott. “If the governor felt so good about vetoing not-for-profit health-care clinics and Manatee Glens,” he said, “why the hell didn’t he veto that line item?”

A better question would be: If the Best and Brightest bill was so bad and so dumb, how did it get past so many legislators? Yes, a 

The ‘worst and dumbest’ education program of the year could get even worse - The Washington Post:

Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs

Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs:

Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs

JACKSON, Miss. -- Hundreds of educators from thePhilippines, India and elsewhere from outside the U.S. are in Mississippi classrooms teaching in hard-to-fill positions and in rural areas.

Superintendents in Jackson Public Schools,Noxubee County, Holmes County, Meridian andGulfport have all hired foreign teachers on temporary visas called H-1Bs, along with others. According to MDE, there are 451 teachers in the state with degrees from outside the country.

School officials in Noxubee County three years ago began working with an agency that helps recruit teachers from the Philippines.

The district, which is classified by the state education department as one of 48 critical shortage areas, had difficulty filling special education positions. Former Special Education Director Darlene Cole said the district also had trouble finding speech language pathologists to work with students with communicative disorders.

Cole began working with Ligaya Avenida, the CEO of California-based Avenida International Consultants Inc., an agency that helps school districts employ qualified Filipino teachers.

“I would tell her what kind of teachers I needed, and she would send me some resumes. I’d review the resumes, and then we actually — one year they actually funded one of our employees to go over there (to the Philippines) and conduct the interviews in person,” Cole described.

During other years, Cole would interview the candidates on Skype.

Once the interviews were complete and the school board approved the hires, Avenida began working on the visa process for the employees, who often pay her company a fee of about $10,000 to cover visa fees, transcripts, airfare and housing, among other expenses.

Cole, who was the special education director from 2004 to 2015, said it was only in the last few years of her career that finding teachers became such a problem that the district began looking outside the country.

“It got harder and harder to find certified teachers, and in the rural area we live in, our district supplement isn’t that much, so it doesn’t attract people to come here to this high-poverty area,” she said. “And the housing — we just don’t have the apartment complexes that other cities have … They’d rather go to Starkville, Louisville, rather than come to Macon is what I perceived.”

Macon, the county seat of Noxubee County, has around 3,100 residents. The median household income from 2009 to 2013 has been $24,338, according to the U.S. Census.

“The people we hired in special ed and for speech language pathologists are doing an excellent job. They were very thorough — they just did everything real professional and on time,” Cole recalled of the hires.Foreign teachers flock to Mississippi teaching jobs:

Who Is Shaping Notions of 'Right' Parent Involvement? | The Conversation US

Who Is Shaping Notions of 'Right' Parent Involvement? | The Conversation US:

Who Is Shaping Notions of 'Right' Parent Involvement?

As parents, you are constantly walking on a thin line. If you don't show up at the school enough, it's assumed you don't care about your child's education; show up too much and you're a "helicopter parent" who suffocates your child and her/his teachers by your "overinvestment."

As did Goldilocks, school teachers, administrators, counselors and others seem to have a formula of "just right" participation that is not too much but not too little; not too pushy but not too passive; not too directive but not uninformed.

This begs some important questions: Where do these ideas about "just right" parent involvement come from? And who benefits from this particular take on the "right" way to be involved?

For one thing, my research suggests that "just right" parent involvement relies on America's white, mainstream, middle-class conventions of politeness, interpersonal interactions and relationships.

Far from being neutral, these conventions take for granted the ways in whichcommunication is shaped by gender, class, racial and cultural norms. As such, the "just right" involved parent manifests as a native-English speaking white woman who is available to be at school during the day because she isn't employed outside the home.

Additionally, there is an expectation that the good involved mother will not interact with teachers in ways that can be perceived as aggressive; will not pull the proverbial race card when her child experiences mistreatment; and will "speak the language" of school - that is, she will have the social and cultural capital to know what to do and say.

Consequently, the people who benefit from this frame of "just right" parent involvement are the people whose lived experiences fit its expectations, underlying assumptions and demands.

What is being missed in this approach is that America's population is vastly more diverse than it was a few decades ago. Indeed, the "just right" involved parent described above represents only a tiny slice of the US population today.

Changing demographics

Census data show a 158% increase in people over age five speaking a language other than English (LOTE) at home in the last three decades (1980-2010). Additionally,nearly a quarter of adults between the ages of 25-50 in 2014 were from racial groups other than white. Estimates also show that by 2044, more than half of all Americans will be nonwhite.

There are other changes happening as well at the level of household earnings.

The single-earner American household is a dying breed. In June 2014, the Council of Economic Advisers, a three-member agency in the Executive Office of the President that advises the president on economic policy, released a report titled Nine Facts About American Families and Work. The report showed that while most children live in households where all parents work, mothers are increasingly the household breadwinners and fathers are increasingly family caregivers.

Consequently, a growing proportion of today's students come from linguistically diverse families; families with different cultural understandings of the relationship between home and school; or families whose life circumstances make creating distance from school logical and self-protective (such as undocumented families or parents with multiple jobs).

Families could be facing other extenuating circumstances as well, such that a grandparent, an older sibling, a neighbor or close friend may be handling school Who Is Shaping Notions of 'Right' Parent Involvement? | The Conversation US:

After No Child Left Behind, What’s Next For Texas Schools – Houston Public Media

After No Child Left Behind, What’s Next For Texas Schools – Houston Public Media:

After No Child Left Behind, What’s Next For Texas Schools

“If anything this is a bill that could really empower parents, teachers, citizens who care about public schools to say, ‘Let’s make this flexibility work for us in creative ways by claiming a vision for our kids.'”

There’s a new law for public schools in Texas and around the country. It’s called the Every Student Succeeds Act and it’s supposed to end the era of No Child Left Behind, which brought more testing and tough sanctions to struggling schools.

The new law changes a lot about the role of the federal government in education. To find out more about the impact for Texas, News 88.7 Education reporter Laura Isensee sat down with Linda McSpadden McNeil, a professor of education at Rice University.  

Here are some highlights from their conversation. 

Does the new law mean less testing?

“On the surface, it looks like a lot less testing. But, the testing companies and their lobbyists were able to keep in a requirement that every state has to test every kid every year up through eighth grade and once in high school. So, what they do with those tests and how they use them, either for teacher evaluations or school ratings or whatever, is supposed to be now in the jurisdiction of the states.” 

Will we see changes on the accountability side?

“That is what people are combing through this 1,000-page law to find out. Because technically the big shift in what they’re calling Every Student Succeeds Act is that the responsibility for the numbers of tests, for how tests are used, will go back to the states.”

Will the work of improving struggling schools going to look different? 

“That is the question. And I think it’s going to play out differently state by state. States that have a commitment from their legislature, from their local school boards, from their governors, to protect and enhance and adequately and equitably fund their public schools are really seeing this as just an enormous opportunity to bring the knowledge that they and their teachers and their communities have had about schooling … In states like Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, states where the current governor and legislature are not supportive of the public schools, or where the budgets have been so cut, then people are very worried. And what I’m hearing is that people feel that this going to require much more citizen awareness, much more parents being informed and not just wait to see what one politician or one public official is going to do.”

What about arts education?

“The people who’ve looked at particular pieces of (the law) that relate to their work, like in the arts, are feeling a little more optimistic. There’s strong language and support for the STEM subjects, science, technology, engineering and math. But again .. they haven’t been able to tell me where does the money come from. Are they hoping the states will do this? Or is somebody in Congress actually going to make a major investment?”

What about teacher training?

“There’s a great concern that this is going to shift dollars away from educational institutions and into more commercial certification-mills that don’t necessarily prepare teachers to really know about child development, to really be very grounded in their subject, the kinds of things that we all want for our kid’s teacher.”

Is this a sea change for public schools?

“If anything this is a bill that could really empower parents, teachers, citizens who care about public schools to say, ‘Let’s make this flexibility work for us in creative ways by claiming a vision for our kids.’ Let’s decide what we want for kids and figure out how we can let this new, potential opening give us a space to do that and I think that more than just what comes out of Washington is going to be the great opportunity in this bill.”After No Child Left Behind, What’s Next For Texas Schools – Houston Public Media:

These Education Protests Got Results In 2015 | ThinkProgress

These Education Protests Got Results In 2015 | ThinkProgress:

These Education Protests Got Results In 2015

It’s been a year of robust student protests that have effectively highlighted racial and economic inequality in both K-12 and higher education. And unlike previous years, 2015 has made it clear to students that these protests can yield results.

From student debt activists attending meetings and public hearings with U.S. Department of Education officials to college executives stepping down from their posts after students of color demanded a more respectful climate on campus, protesters have proven that activism has a meaningful purpose in reducing inequities in education. Here are some of the most influential student protests of 2015:

Fighting to prevent AP history classes from erasing racism

AP American history courses have become a political battleground in the past few years — particularly after the College Board released new guidelines that included the history of violence against Native Americans, as well as a mention of the growing influence of social conservatives.

Conservatives railed against the standards, arguing that it’s unpatriotic to focus on more negative parts of U.S. history, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. They said the guidelines should have included more information about the Founding Fathers and military victories. (The College Board, for its part, said it didn’t initially mention the Founding Fathers because it seemed obvious that a teacher would include them in a class on American history.)

The controversy got so heated that the RNC even asked Congress to stop funding the College Board, saying it “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” Former Republican presidential candidate and soon-to-be former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal fanned the flames of conservative anger over AP history standards by suggesting that if history were included in Common Core standards, it would be about “victimhood” and “America’s shortcomings and failures.”

Jefferson County election workers count and stamp petitions collected by a group of parents and educators, called Jeffco United for Action, whose aim is to remove Jefferson County School Board members.

CREDIT: BRENNAN LINSLEY, AP

But some students fought back. After the Jefferson County, Colorado school board voted to create a committee to review the AP history course for similar reasons as those cited by the RNC, high school students protested and walked out of class, telling CNN, “True patriotism ought to be based upon accurate understanding of American history, and not a biased promotion of American exceptionalism.” Soon after the protests, the Jefferson County school board canceled a review of the standards. And the conservative members of the board who supported the review have since been voted out.

The College Board did agree to change the framework of AP history standards after outcry from conservative legislators in a few states like Georgia, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, and North Carolina. The Board now includes more information about “American exceptionalism” and more mentions of the Founding Fathers.

However, despite the fact that the College Board caved to conservative pressure by including the phrase “American exceptionalism,” it doesn’t appear that it has backed down on presenting an unvarnished and accurate account of American history. Mentions of slavery will be “roughly the same” as they were in previous standards, according to Newsweek.

Speaking up for racial justice on college campuses

Graduate student Jonathan Butler, center, addresses a crowd following the announcement that University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe would resign.

CREDIT: JEFF ROBERSON, AP

Protests against universities’ poor handling of racist incidents and an overall hostile campus climate for students of color ramped up this fall. One of the first protests to gain national attention was the decision of the University of Missouri’s mostly black football team to go on strike after These Education Protests Got Results In 2015 | ThinkProgress:

Berkeley Study of Charter Schools in Los Angeles | UC Berkeley - Graduate School of Education

Berkeley Study of Charter Schools in Los Angeles | UC Berkeley - Graduate School of Education:

Berkeley Study of Charter Schools in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Unified School District hosts more charter schools than any system in the nation. After tracking more than 66,000 sampled students over a four-year period, these new findings inform three pivotal questions:

• Do charter schools serve students and families that differ from peers served by traditional public schools? 
• Do charter students display steeper learning curves than peers in traditional schools?
• How does the performance of conversion versus start-up charter schools compare?

Read the full report, Differing Effects from Diverse Charter Schools: Uneven Student Selection and Achievement Growth in Los Angeles

See Summary Graphics

See a Map of Charter School Expansion

Berkeley Study of Charter Schools in Los Angeles | UC Berkeley - Graduate School of Education:

How Charter Schools Skim and Scam Public Money - CAPITAL & MAIN

How Charter Schools Skim and Scam Public Money - CAPITAL & MAIN:

How Charter Schools Skim and Scam Public Money

Get this. In some states, charter school operators can purchase school buildings from public school districts — using taxpayer money. That’s right. The public pays twice for a building it no longer owns.

This scheme and many others are detailed in the National Education Policy Center’s new research brief on charter school policies. Through a study of policies from across the country, Bruce Baker and Gary Miron reveal how many charter operators use existing laws to profit from the privatization of public assets.

Their conclusion: Many current policies allow new actors into public education who skim profits from the system, pocketing money that might otherwise be spent on direct services for children.

These policies have serious costs. In Florida for example, a recent analysis by the Associated Press found that now-closed charter schools in 30 school districts had received more than $70 million in taxpayer money for capital needs. The state has since recovered only $133,000 of those funds.

Where does the money go? On top of complex real estate deals, charter school operators often “save” money by cutting teacher pay, hiring inexperienced school staff and avoiding children with disabilities. These “savings” are added to executive salaries rather than invested in serving all children and providing solid middle class jobs for teachers and staff.

The charter school growth industry wants to compete directly with traditional public schools, in some places creating a two- or even three-tiered education system.

We need great schools for all children—not just for some. Schools owned by us, not private companies. Let’s make sure every dollar we spend on education is spent on education, not skimmed off by real estate investors or to pay high-priced management fees.How Charter Schools Skim and Scam Public Money - CAPITAL & MAIN:

LA charter school study: who benefits? | Berkeley News

LA charter school study: who benefits? | Berkeley News:

LA charter school study: who benefits?

Children entering charter schools in Los Angeles already outperform peers who attend traditional public schools, then pull ahead even a bit more, especially those attending charter middle schools, according to a study released today from the University of California, Berkeley.

Pupils who enter charter elementary or high schools displayed significantly higher test scores, relative to counterparts entering traditional public schools at the same grade levels, the report said. Elementary students in charter schools benefit from slightly steeper learning curves, relative to peers remaining in conventional schools, researchers said. Charter high schools were no more or less effective than traditional schools in boosting student performance.

Charter schools, while publicly funded, operate independently of many state requirements and the administration of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Some 274 charter schools operate in L.A. Unified this fall, more than any school district nationwide.

The map above shows the spread of charter schools and the income levels of communities where they have been established in the L.A. Unified District since 2002.

Public schools awarded independence from state rules and labor agreements over the past 15 years – so-called conversion charter schools – draw more middle-class and higher-achieving children, compared with peers served by traditional schools, researchers said. Some 55 percent of all pupils attending conversion charters at the elementary level were Latino, compared with 77 percent of those in traditional schools. Half of these charter pupils were eligible for lunch subsidies, compared with 84 percent attending traditional schools.

Newly created charter schools, increasingly run by management firms, also draw students already achieving at higher levels than peers in conventional schools, although these gaps were smaller than the greater selectivity of conversion charters.

These patterns emerged between 2007 and 2011, the period during which the Berkeley team of Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the Graduate School of Education, and then-Berkeley graduate student Hyo Jeong Shin, now a statistician at the Educational Testing Service, tracked a sample of 66,000 students and teachers with data from L.A. Unified and the state Department of Education.

“Our study reveals two distinct charter movements,” said Fuller, author of Inside Charter Schools. “Conversion charters often serve middle-class families on the west side of the L.A. district and in San Fernando Valley, while newly created charter schools continue to locate more in blue-collar and poor neighborhoods.”

Small to modest gains

Still, he said, charter students in poor and middle-class communities posted academic gains, as judged by testing, but improvements were most striking and the strongest for middle-schoolers. Significantly steeper learning curves were detected in elementary LA charter school study: who benefits? | Berkeley News:

How new tools meant to help special education students take standardized tests actually made it harder - LA Times

How new tools meant to help special education students take standardized tests actually made it harder - LA Times:

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, 

These are the problems some California teachers had when they tested students with disabilities

 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 

These are the problems some California teachers had when they tested students with disabilities