Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S22

The option is controversial amid a clash of philosophies;
what some see as a useful tool others decry as a crutch
But it's not so easy to separate
cessibility concerns does not mean
lowering the standards. It does
mean, for example, providing a
way for students who cannot hear
to demonstrate their 'listening'
skills; for students who cannot
see to demonstrate their 'viewing'
skills; and for students who cannot
decode to demonstrate their
comprehension skills in reading,"
the report says.
the tasks of reading comprehension
and decoding, said literacy
expert Timothy Shanahan, the
chairman of the department
of curriculum and instruction
at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
"Part of the task of reading and
learning to read is learning to get
the words off the page while you
think about them. Not having to
get the words off the page gives
a measurable advantage in most
studies," he said.
In a blog post, Mr. Shanahan
gave PARCC's read-aloud accommodation
decision the "Lindsay
Lohan Award for Bad Judgment,"
a cheeky reference to the troubled
starlet. Smarter Balanced
made a better move by limiting
the read-aloud accommodation in
the early grades, he said, but his
preference would be not to use it
at all.
"Part of my concern is I have
absolutely no doubt there are
going to be school districts and
states where people are going to
be shopping to get the highest
scores they can get," he said. And
in states where read-aloud accommodations
are used liberally,
"those kids are going to do better
if they're read to than if they
have to read it themselves."
Diane Cordry Golden, the pol-
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S22 | EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 30, 2013
n
icy coordinator for the Missouri
Council of Administrators of
Special Education and the project
coordinator for the Association
of Assistive Technology Act
Programs, has a foot in the special
education and the assistivetechnology
worlds. She criticizes
views such as Mr. Shanahan's,
saying they are akin to "telling
a child who can walk with great
difficulty that using a wheelchair
is not as good. You need to walk,
period," she said. "We can't give
you technology to work around it;
we've got to fix this thing that we
see as not normal in you."
It's a legitimate concern that a
read-aloud accommodation could
be overused, Ms. Golden added,
but "this summative test is not an
appropriate mechanism to use to
address those issues. If you have
kids who are really failing readers
because of poor instruction, that
needs to be driven by something
else other than calling out kids
with disabilities."
Moving Forward
The consortia are moving ahead
with field-testing on a united front,
though some state education leaders,
such as in Colorado, a PARCC
state, registered concerns about
allowing the accommodation when
the final vote was taken.
"Read-aloud is one of our major
concerns. It's pretty fundamental
to us," said Robert Hammond,
Colorado's commissioner of education,
at that meeting, held in
June.
But both consortia say it's important
to have some policy in
place in time for the field-testing.
If the accommodation is overused
or badly deployed, the field tests
will reveal those problems.
Mitchell D. Chester, the commissioner
of education in Massachusetts,
a state that does use
a read-aloud accommodation on
reading tests in limited circumstances,
voted for the policy for the
purpose of "getting it out into the
bloodstream."
"I don't think there's a right or
wrong answer to this," said Mr.
Chester, the chairman of the PARCC
governing board. "I think it's more a
philosophical question." n
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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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