Testing Officials Again Tackle Accommodations And Exclusions for Special Student Populations

Perhaps no topic has as thoroughly vexed officials who oversee the nation’s leading test of academic progress as the wide variation among states and cities in the proportion of students with disabilities and limited English proficiency whom they exclude from taking the exam or provide with special accommodations for it.

The board that sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been wrestling with the issue for roughly a decade and has made a number of changes in an attempt to close those gaps.

Yet today, the broad discrepancies in the exclusion and accommodation rates of individual states and cities that take part in the heavily scrutinized exam, known as “the nation’s report card,” continue to spark complaints from those who believe those...