Dive Brief:
- School employees in California are saying that a number of unique glitches in the state’s new standardized tests designed for special education students have prevented them from being used with reliability.
- One teacher told the Los Angeles Times that the new “enhanced” tests actually made it more difficult, not easier, for the majority of her students to access the material.
- Problems reported include text-to-speech tools that read passages too quickly for students to follow, accessibility tools like Braille that couldn’t be used simultaneously with text-to-speech tools, and an overly robotic text-to-speech voice that was distracting to students.
Dive Insight:
At the same time the problems were being reported in districts across the state, the California Department of Education wasn’t tracking complaints around the accessibility glitches. That means no one knows, for sure, what the magnitude of the problem actually is.
“Of the more than 300,000 students with disabilities who took the tests in California, 88% did not meet achievement targets in English language arts and 91% did not meet targets in math, according to data on the state’s testing website,” the L.A. Times reports. Some teachers blame the poor results on the glitches.
Similar rollout problems with standardized tests for students with disabilities in the states of Oregon and Washington have also been reported by teacher's unions.
