Sarah is in 4th grade. She’s the daughter of two professional parents and has an older brother, lovingly described by Sarah as a “pain in the neck.” Every time she writes an entry in her weekly journal, she’s eager to include one of her brother’s adventures. Her teacher has taught her to start each entry with a line that grabs the reader’s attention. “My, what a week this has been!” or “You’re not going to believe what my brother did this time!” Sarah loves to write, always filling up a page or two with ease. She’s bright and clever, eager and creative. Her words are engaging and her stories pull you in.
But Sarah can’t read her own writing and I can’t either. She brings her weekly journal to my Special Education Resource Room each Thursday, and together we labor over the confusion of half words and reversed letters. The sentences are literally endless, with that one capital and maybe that final period. In the middle are wonderful ideas, but we can’t figure out where they start and end. Little by little, word by word, Sarah and I piece together the writing. She says, “Oh yes, I remember, that’s the word uncle. My uncle had a flat tire.” And I ask, “Sarah, could that be the word shaking? Was your dog shaking?” The story takes form but Sarah’s luster is fading. She knows her failings. She knows, as hard as she tries, she can’t spell or read like other students. She knows that as fast as these stories emerge, she can’t reread them. Ideas start and stop in her mind, but she can’t find that on her paper. Sarah has a Learning Disability, effecting all that she does during her academic day. Social studies, science and math lessons all require both reading and writing, which Sarah labors over daily. School is a struggle from beginning to end, but Sarah perseveres with the support of family and teachers.
Sarah has been tested, and her intellectual potential is above average. Through a series of subtests that involve verbal and non-verbal tasks, it’s discovered that Sarah has the learning potential of students her age and older. However, on certain tasks that involve the perception of visual information, her brain confuses those images. It’s particularly evident when she encounters symbols such as letters and numbers. Additionally, when asked to reproduce those skewed images, as a writing task, her brain once again confuses the message. Her pencil to paper coordination is weak and the letters are labored and poorly formed. Her writing is a series of words with omitted, misordered or illegible letters. In terms that we can relate to, Sarah reads, spells and writes like a student at the end of first grade. She has the interests, experiences and enthusiasm of a 10 year old, but performs the school work of a seven year old.
When Sarah was in Kindergarten, her ability to master readiness skills was strong. She was well-socialized and had good background information from an enriched home life and some preschool experience. Her parents and teachers were prepared for school success in all ways. However, by the middle of first grade, the progress was slowing down. As the demands of symbol decoding for letters and numbers increased, Sarah was not moving forward. Her peers now were building an automatic sight vocabulary and were playing with the phonic units of reading and spelling. But all this eluded Sarah. She was struggling with the basic deciphering of the very direction of the symbol or with the association of a cluster of visual information (letters) with its meaning as a word.
By the end of 1st grade it was recommended that Sarah get the help of a Remedial Reading teacher. With the enthusiasm of this teacher, Sarah was able to maintain her love of story and writing. Second grade brought little change and her official referral for a complete evaluation came at the end of that year. By third grade Sarah was placed in Special Education and in fourth grade, with daily services by a trained professional, she had made a substantial leap in reading, having gone from preprimer (early 1st grade) to the mid-2nd grade level.
The school days can be very long for Sarah, but weekends bring relief. Sarah is a fine athlete and excels at soccer. Her weekends are filled with cheering crowds and team hugs. There are sleepovers and dinners with grandparents. She has pets, a new clarinet and a Diskman. She’s a friend to many and is well-liked by her peers and teachers. Back at school, she was voted by her classmates to be a Peer Mediator, an esteemed role that many students aspire to. Sarah will certainly succeed in that role too. She’s an average, healthy middle class, suburban girl. The only thing that separates her from thousands of other 10 year old girls is a Learning Disability.
Our Board of Education says that we have to assess all students. We should track their progress and be certain that we have set high expectations. We should help all students access the curriculum, and support and recognize their achievement. I would want nothing less for Sarah. I test her individually at the beginning and end of every year. I want to see how I helped her, and I share the results with her so she too can mark her progress. We enjoy seeing how she changed, comparing her two spelling tests and giggling over how she read that same word back in September. These tools help me create the individual program for Sarah. Her needs are unique, but with this assessment and my years of training and experience I can select the appropriate techniques and materials that will ensure her progress.
Sarah took the MCAS tests this spring. It was her first time taking it and my second giving it. I have opposed this one dimensional, trivia-laden test since its inception, but I have an obligation as a professional to administer this test to my Special Needs students. I had already separated out the two children who qualified for the Alternate Assessment. The state allows me 1-2%. It was like a biblical story. Who shall I sacrifice? I sent those bewildered but grateful students to the library for 15 hours over two weeks with learning packets and educational games under the supervision of our paraprofessionals. The other two Special Education teachers in my building had done the same. My students joined several others, who grew increasingly irritated by the change in their schedule and unfamiliar activity. “Why can’t we come back to your class”, they asked me each day. “The governor wants to know how all the schoolchildren in Massachusetts are doing”, was my best explanation. One was grateful and the other insulted. “Thanks for getting me out of that one”, exclaimed one. And “Sure, I’m not smart enough!?!”, said the other. It hurt no matter what I did.
According to the allowable accommodations for the MCAS for students with Special Needs that were determined at her Team meeting, I can help Sarah in several ways. I could administer it in a small group setting in my Resource Room. I can read all directions until I’m certain she understands. I can read all parts of the test to her, except for the ELA. “Except for the English Language Arts test”, I kept repeating to myself. This makes absolutely no sense. No sense at all.
Now they are really losing me. How is this an accommodation that is fair to a disabled reader? She must pass the Reading section of the MCAS for graduation, yet by 10th grade she will still be a highly disabled reader? Do they imagine that she will be un-disabled by 10th grade and able to read 10th grade testing material? Do blind people suddenly see in 10th grade in order to take the MCAS without their Braille?!? She has a Reading Disability but I can make no adjustments to the Reading section of the MCAS. I can read all other sections, but not that one. Yet ultimately all the Sarah’s of the Commonwealth must pass that one in particular for graduation. I’ll go on for now.
I came to the testing session with a positive attitude. I can do this, I told myself. I’ll make this as productive a day as I can for my students. No, I mean as productive a two weeks as I can. I’m upbeat and this will spread to my students, I reassure myself. With the help of the other two Special Education teachers and our paraprofessionals, we have arranged a complicated schedule in order to administer the test with the proper accommodations. Some students will have the allowable sections read to them, some we will scribe for, and several just need the directions clarified. But due to the special reading and scribing arrangements, we have to do this one-to-one. How can we write for more than one student at a time? For our other students in grades Kindergarten, 1,2,3,and 5, substitutes have been hired and we have provided materials and activities so their programs will not be disrupted. Perhaps I am making this sound easy, but any teacher would shudder at what this entails. It is instructional time used unwisely, it’s an additional expense for substitutes and a great deal of extra work on our parts. We resent this, but are trying to be professional, and, above all, ensure that all our students are comfortable and using the time productively.
Sarah is my student and we will spend the next several days together for about two hours each day working through the test. The tests are untimed which is both a blessing and a curse. There will be no pressure to rush for Sarah, who processes everything slowly, but likewise, she is a perfectionist and is likely to need a great deal of time to select her answers or develop her ideas for the open-response questions. There are 3 sessions for English/Language Arts (ELA), two for Math, two each for Science and History. The Long Essay had been the week earlier. Sarah is smiling, cautious but ready to work. Her parents and regular class teacher have prepped her well. She is a shy girl who is wary of making mistakes. It’s a condition she is used to and compensates for it with a fixed smile and a feigned positive attitude. Her face is now quite flushed as we begin.
The first Reading selection is manageable and she chooses to read silently. She can independently answer the comprehension questions though I can see that there are many errors. The second exercise takes 45 minutes, the equivalent of a daily reading lesson together. Her face reddens when she sees the next page, and deep sighs are audible. The next selection is a poem, and she can read one out of four words, is my estimate. She reads silently and answers all questions wrong. We can’t fool Sarah any more. She knows she doesn’t know. And she knows that I know she doesn’t know. This is so very humiliating.
Her eyes are wet now, but she’s silent and stoic. I check in and she reassures me she’s fine. She appears to be on the verge of weeping but she will not be deterred. I cannot help in anyway. I can only sit nearby and return a false smile. I can offer a break, no more. I later calculated the reading level of this next selection. She reads like a second grader and the selection is at the high 5th grade level. Her eyes now only scan the paragraphs. I know she’s stopped reading, just glancing and gazing. It’s meaningless and it hurts, yet she attempts every question. It’s now two and half hours, and my anger grows. This is immoral and has become intolerable. This is professionally irresponsible. And it’s only the first day.
That night my desire for dinner is gone, and I unload my frustrations on my understanding husband, into the evening and night. How can I meet my professional obligations to my administrators and to the intent of the assessment, while meeting my obligations to nurture and support the development of these special young people? My priority is always for the children. Do I tell her to “Just skip them, you tried and this test is just too hard. Forget it, you tried.” But this is not the way I teach. I would never approach a lesson with my students this way. I would never offer a lesson that did not challenge my student yet ensure their success. I would always want them to give it their all. To compromise my values as a teacher, hurts deeply. To have Sarah question her faith in my judgement, is irresponsible in my role as her teacher.
I finally resolve to try a new plan, after discussing it with Sarah the next day. Having seen the next session of Reading and noting that the reading levels were even higher, I commit to not having her experience a higher level of defeat and frustration again. Sarah is paler today and there are dark circles under her eyes for the first time. I know she will work another day without complaint. We decide to skip all the sections except one. Together we select the easiest one and she agrees to read it aloud to me. In this way she and I can be certain that she has really read the passages, rather than breezed over the text, pretending to read. Sarah is a conscientious student and tells me that she’s worried what “they” will say if she doesn’t read everything. I reassure her that “they” will like it if she does well on just this one.
Her reading is halting and labored. She struggles with words like medium, altogether and participate. I cannot help her though with her eyes she seems to plead. She pushes on and her comprehension of the passage slips away. She is just going through a meaningless exercise. She cannot read critical words and she has no understanding of what she has just read. The multiple choice questions follow. She reads them aloud and takes cautious guesses. The selections are random and she gets 1 out of 8 correct. Sarah has an organic, physiological disability, and the blind is being asked to see. Learning Disabilities are invisible, and the Board of Education is requiring this reading disabled young lady to read at grade level, and in fact, above grade level. Does this make any sense to anyone?
I value this child, I support her struggle and am dedicated to her special form of education. But I participated in hurting Sarah. I took away a piece of her pride, her joys and her dreams. I forced her to face the fact that she is less than normal, and that she will be judged as such. She’ll receive a letter later in the early fall, just before the excitement of a new school year, that states definitively that she is a “FAILURE”. It will arrive in her home mailbox, and like other children her age, she’ll enjoy the anticipation of the daily mail and will open the letter that says “To the Parents of Sarah B.” She can’t read the long sustained text, but she can read a graph. The graph will show that small black bar at the bottom that designates FAILING. Board of Education members- how dare you do that to all these fine children, or to 10 or to one. How dare you!
And I’m sorry to say that I know this first hand. Our disabled and complex son, took the MCAS two years ago as an 8th grader, and boycotted this 10th grade year. He was not going to be subjected to this ever again. It was not for a political statement, so much as for the necessity of acting as responsible parents, that we told the school to make other provisions for our son. He was NOT to take that test. However, two years ago we knew less than we do now and he took the MCAS with our daily support and encouragement. His teacher fed him donuts and Coca-Cola to assure his and his friends’ compliance. Seven Learning Disabled boys, reading at the 3rd grade level, took the 8th grade MCAS and played along. Each day, our boy would arrive home telling us he couldn’t answer any of the questions. “I can’t do any of it, Mom,” is what I can still hear.
My son loves to walk our long rural driveway and deliver our mail to us each day. He can read to the “Parents of...” and knew it was the MCAS results. It was too late for me to stop him. He scanned the text and read the graph. He threw an angry glare at me and tossed the wadded letter across the room. “I told you I was stupid!”, he yelled out. My heart broke, broke in pieces. How dare they do that to our son! After years of holding that precious, fragile self-esteem intact, after years of his walking through that school door one more time, and facing yet another day of being less able than everyone, the BOE tells him he’s a failure.
Sarah is only one of my caseload of 24 students. That’s a reasonable amount of students to attend to, but who these children are and why they are and what the BOE is asking of these children is not reasonable. Sarah is privileged with intelligence and a healthy home. Not so for Mandy who has CP and mild retardation who would not qualify for the Alternate Assessment. Not so for Cynthia who isn’t sure whether her mom will be home each night, and who chews the skin off the tips of her fingers and has to have every direction repeated, and won’t qualify for the Alternate. How about D.C. whose dad is in prison and whose mom is a heroin addict. He lives with his mom in the local shelter, and in 3rd grade enjoys shocking us by imitating a needle plunging into his arm. He reads three grade levels below his ability, and has to take the MCAS. Paul is autistic and spins in his chair repeating TV commercials when stressed. He’s very bright and reads years above his age level with no comprehension of what he just encountered. Sorry, he doesn’t qualify either.
And there are more, many more. They live in condos, raised ranches, tenements and converted chicken coops. They play in city parks, cornfields, groomed soccer fields and back alleys. They are your neighbors and your neices and, perhaps, your own child. They are developmentally delayed, have ADHD, are autistic and abused and neglected. They have compulsive disorders, expressive language delays and are scared about their fragile lives. Do I need to go on? Please make me stop because this is just the beginning and their faces parade before me, and this all makes no sense.
My disabled 4th grade students cannot take the MCAS in its present form. They still cannot read. There is a critical point in a student’s education when they go from learning to read to reading to learn. This typically takes place in third grade. My students have not yet made that transition. For 4th graders the present MCAS is a ridiculous waste of time, emotion and self-esteem. By 8th grade these same students may now have made that transition but their understandings are far behind their peers. They will often continue to make progress but at a decidedly slower pace than typical peers. The average disabled reader by 8th grade is probably at the 3rd grade level now. By 10th grade, if their motivation sustains, they could achieve 7th or 8th grade levels in reading. They have a disability. Their brains don’t work like yours and mine. More services will help and we should always expect a little more for each of them, but let’s get realistic. The disability won’t go away, just as blindness, deafness or Cerebral Palsy won’t vanish upon graduation.
However, with 7th or 8th grade reading skills, they can function in the World of Work in many, many capacities. Remember, they are disabled readers not disabled people. In the case of a specific learning disability, it is often accompanied by average to above average intelligence and a host of strengths in areas such as spatial relationships, social perception, problem solving, fine motor coordination and dexterity, mechanical ability, aesthetic senses, and empathy and compassion. (The present MCAS does not assess these skills for any student.) Reading is only one aspect of their abilities, only one tool for learning, only one portion of a developed human being. Young people with disabilities can graduate with the motivation to continue to learn on the job, from travel, television, discussions, cinema, their family and friends. They will be providing services in the fields of daycare and hospitality and medical reception and computer repair. They will be our police force and design our gardens and process our banking and make the music we listen to. The possibilities are vast. But without a diploma and without self-esteem, this will all end.
Are there solutions? Yes, many. I would not recommend exemptions for disabled children. I too am committed to equal access to public education. All students must be assessed, disabled and non-disabled. But changes in the current MCAS must be made. Many teachers, parents and advocates for disabled students have the answers. Just ask us. For starters, we could stop using the term “failure”? That language is powerful and non-productive. For standardized testing, let’s use the Iowas, a shorter and easier test that is nationally recognized. Revise the present MCAS, making it easier, and lower those inflated readability levels. Base this new MCAS on agreed-upon Frameworks, and eliminate social studies and science. End the use of the single paper and pencil task as a determinant for graduation. Use broader and more diverse, authentic assessment like portfolios and videotaping. Assess students on their multiple-intelligences with required projects, public speaking or Science Fairs. Expand the criterion for the Alternate Assessment to include 80% of the disabled students, not just 1-2%, or while we’re at it, let’s try this for all students. Now there’s an idea!
On several occasions, I have been asked to ponder this question- “Does the disabled student deserve the same diploma that the valedictorian receives?” My response is, absolutely yes! The World of Work will determine what the value of the diploma is. The disabled student does not necessarily want the job that the valedictorian wants, and the valedictorian may not want the job that my disabled son seeks. However, without a diploma our boy will not be able to be a landscaper- grooming someone’s lawn, paving their walkways and advising them on proper fertilizer or drainage stone. The valedictorian has options for higher education in a four year college and graduate level work. The disabled student can enter the work force with basic knowledge, and perhaps additional vocational skills from one of our states’ fine technical high schools. That student can continue their education at work, in a 2 or 4 year college with the support and understanding of their peers, educational institution and employer. Their “can-do” attitude, persistence and confidence will save them. Without work ethic, our work force will surely decline.
If marked at FAILURE as a 10 year old, then again as a 14 year old and finally as a 16 year old, their motivation ceases, and they spiral downward. They are robbed of an education and marked forever as a failure and of no worth. Surely, this is not what our Board of Education intended. Please call for the immediate suspension of the MCAS in its present form, before more harm is done.
Pixie J. Holbrook, MEd
Mother and Educator
Western MA CARE (Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education)
August 2000