NAEP Plan for Testing Special Groups Gets Public Airing

Washington

The National Assessment of Educational Progress should be as inclusive as possible of English-language learners and students with disabilities, representatives of education organizations testified last week at a hearing here on proposals to bring more uniformity and coherence to testing those populations. But the testimony yielded some disagreement about how NAEP policymakers plan to do that.

The National Assessment Governing Board has been grappling with the issue for a decade . It is concerned that testing accommodations and exclusion rates for those two groups vary widely among states and districts, possibly jeopardizing the fairness and validity of comparisons with NAEP data. The board plans to vote on policies addressing the issue at its March meeting.

Particularly controversial at the hearing was the board’s proposal to permit students with disabilities to receive only NAGB-approved accommodations and not all those that may be in their individual...