Exit exam ruling due for disabled students
Sacramento Bee 5/10/07
Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of schools, has recommended that the exit exam become a graduation requirement for students in special education. Those students -- who have learning disabilities, autism, deafness, mental retardation and a host of other conditions -- have been exempt from passing the test since it became mandatory for all other students beginning with the class of 2006.
O'Connell's recommendation that special ed students in the class of 2008 and beyond be held to the test is sure to spark fierce debate and could reopen a lawsuit that's been on hiatus for over a year.
"If legislation adopts that recommendation, it leaves students with disabilities completely unprotected and it puts them in a situation where they're going to be penalized by the state's failures," said Roger Heller, an attorney with Disability Rights Advocates, which sued the state over the exit exam.
"All they're really doing here is forcing us to return to court."
O'Connell acknowledged that he risked a lawsuit, but said the test will help special education students get the schooling they need by bringing increased resources, expectations and attention from teachers.
"I don't make educational decisions or recommendations based upon what a group of lawyers may or may not do," he said. "We make decisions based upon what's best for kids."
The exit exam is a standardized test of 10th-grade-level English and middle school-level math plus algebra.
Education leaders have struggled to figure out how to test students' knowledge of that material if their disabilities put them in lower-level classes.
The State Board of Education has been considering the matter for several months. Members have heard testimony from special education experts, advocates and parents of children with disabilities. They have examined a range of options for how the exit exam requirement could be tailored for students with disabilities -- from allowing them to take smaller sections of the test, to developing a different test for them, to creating a special certificate students could receive instead of a diploma.
O'Connell rejected those ideas and suggests instead that changes be made to the so-called "waiver process" students in special education go through if they have passed the test using modifications, such as having the test read aloud or using a calculator.
Many students with disabilities take the exit exam with modifications described in their individualized education plans. If they receive a passing score by using modifications, their parents are supposed to lobby the school board for a waiver that grants them a diploma. Some districts grant them and some don't, creating an uneven situation across the state.
O'Connell's recommendation calls for standardizing the waiver process. Instead of parents requesting it, principals would have to start the process. Instead of school boards deciding whether to grant the waiver, superintendents would be required to grant them as long as the student had met certain conditions.
"I want to bring more uniformity to the process," O'Connell said.
"This places the burden on the school for applying to the school districts for the diploma -- currently the burden is on the parents. It's better for the families if the burden is on the principals and the superintendents."
The State Board of Education votes on the recommendation today. Then the board will forward it to the Legislature, which must make the final decision on whether California public schools will require students with disabilities to pass the exam to receive a diploma.
Heller, the attorney, said he will try to persuade the Legislature to take a very different approach from O'Connell's. He wants the state to allow special education students to show a portfolio of their accomplishments instead of making them take the test.
Paper-and-pencil tests are not appropriate for people with some types of disabilities, including attention deficit disorders and dyslexia, Heller said. Another problem, he said, is that many special ed students are placed in classes where they do not learn the material on the test.
That's true for Jennifer Thurman, a junior at Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks. She is in special education because of a severe speech and language delay that affects the way she reads, writes, hears and talks.
Thurman has failed the exit exam twice.
"Some parts are easy and some parts I never have taken," she said.
"The one with x and y coordinated points. I learned that after I took the test."
The 17-year-old girl is being raised by her grandmother, Carla Thurman, who said she has tried many times to get Jennifer enrolled in algebra.
"I've struggled with that school," Carla Thurman said. "They will not give her the classes she needs. She has done after-school tutoring, I've got her set up in summer school taking classes for the exit exam. But they will not give her algebra."
Thurman said she doesn't mind if the test is a graduation requirement for her granddaughter -- as long as Jennifer can take the classes to prepare her.
Experts who have looked at exit exams in the many states that have them say the question of imposing the requirement on students with disabilities is always tricky.
"This is one of the thorniest issues for almost every state," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington D.C.
"Many of these kids have a range of disabilities, and therefore there is no approach that works for all of them. With children who are deaf you have to develop one approach, for children who are blind, another approach, for children who are autistic, yet another approach. It's just not an easy issue."