Standardized Tests Truly Reflective of

¶ … standardized tests truly reflective of all students, even those with cultural diversity, limited English, and disabilities? In order to determine the answer to that question, first standardized tests in general must be examined for their fairness to minorities, those with cultural diversity, limited English and disabilities. To that end, this paper will first examine the reliability of standardized tests as a fair indicator, focusing primarily on the experiences of African-American students.

Taking that conclusion in hand, the paper will then tackle the issue of whether NCLB and AYP are successful in depending on standardized tests to determine both funding and students' and schools' success and failure. This paper concludes that standardized tests are not at all fair towards minorities - as indicated in the fact that several colleges, such as Holy Cross, are abandoning standardized tests in their admissions processes - and as a result must be eliminated or at least diminished in importance in NCLB and AYP.

Standardized Tests and Bias in College Admissions: Several Case Studies This year, the College of Holy Cross joined the list of schools abandoning reliance on standardized tests. The College of the Holy Cross announced last month that students applying for admission beginning in September 2006, will no longer be required to submit standardized test scores.

According to a study in Black Issues in Higher Education, applicants may choose not to include their SAT I, SAT II and ACT scores as part of their applications without risking any negative implications at all on subsequent admissions decisions. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 2005) This decision -- made after several years of study, discussion and serious consideration -- reflects our existing admission policy," says the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, president of Holy Cross. "We have a highly personalized admissions process that already de-emphasizes standardized test scores.

In addition, the application process itself is a window into the academic and intellectual life at a college, and we want prospective students to understand that Holy Cross is committed to the holistic education of young men and women." (Black Issues in Higher Education) Although a momentous change, in some colleges this change may not be as earth-shattering as the facts initially indicate.

In fact, admissions decisions at Holy Cross - and many other top notch universities and national liberal arts colleges -- have over time lumped more weight on a student's high school course of study and other qualitative evaluations than on standardized test scores, says Frank Vellaccio, senior vice president, who oversees admission policy at Holy Cross. We look at the whole student," he says. "We evaluate a student's academic career and consider the choices he or she has made both in the classroom and outside activities.

While standardized scores give some snapshot indication of a student's abilities, we are increasingly concerned with the inherent racial and socio-economic bias in standardized testing -- as well as the fact that no test can communicate a student's passions, interests, motivations and achievements." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 2005) Holy Cross Director of Admissions Ann McDermott adds that when doubts and published reports came up this spring about changes in the SAT and the implementation of the addition of an essay component to the much-maligned test, Holy Cross was entirely sure that it had indeed come time - finally, and once and for all -- to forego the mandatory standardized test.

We see the stress students and their parents experience during test-taking season, as well as the amount of money and time spent in test preparation," Director of Admissions McDermott commented.

"Since classroom work, writing and intellectual exploration are more important to Holy Cross, we wanted to send the message that that's where students should be spending their time and energy." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 2005) McDermott observed that any applicant may opt to submit scores if they believe a standardized test score helps present the fullest picture of their academic and intellectual accomplishments. "We want to put the responsibility of portraying their academic career back into the hands of the student," she noted.

(Black Issues in Higher Education, 2005) At Holy Cross and most other colleges following in its path, international students whose first language is not English will still be required to submit results of the standardized test TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). (Black Issues in Higher Education, 2005) However, the question of course remains.

Will the applicants actually feel secure in not submitting scores given the fact that they may perceive that the schools will only assume negative scores should they not submit? The matter is a bit like silence under the Fifth Amendment - certain assumptions are still made. Perhaps it is more effective for schools to eliminate consideration of the standardized tests altogether so as to provide a completely level playing field. The seed for the distrust of the standardized test for bias issues was planted as early as 1999.

College and testing officials were scrambling to craft responses to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) policy guidelines published in 1999 that noted in no uncertain language at all that colleges and universities could face legal difficulties if they rely primarily on test scores in admissions and scholarship decisions. Specifically, in 1999 the Education Department circulated a guide to college officials that says colleges and universities that make decisions based primarily on standardized test scores must show that they also do not violate civil rights and anti-discrimination statutes.

The use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory," the OCR guide says. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) Education Department officials say the guide, which they released in the fall of 1999, will help education administrators make appropriate - and not excessive -- use of the tests. Department officials said that these guidelines were not new but tried to "capture the existing state of the law," according to Arthur Coleman, Deputy Assistant Secretary for civil rights.

(Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) We reject the notion that excellence and equity cannot go hand in hand," noted Coleman, who says the guide is intended to clarify issues and help colleges to "avoid the litigation and controversy that accompany" issues of affirmative action.

(Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) widely publicized study published in 1999 in the journal, Black Issues in Higher Education, explained the rationale on both sides: "This was just the latest installment in the public debate over affirmative action as several states, most notably California and Washington, have passed initiatives prohibiting the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions.

Much of the attention has been focused at highly selective institutions like the University of California campuses, where White and Asian applicants complained that they were denied admission to top colleges while minorities with lower SAT or ACT scores were admitted.

Moreover, as many states move to increase the use of assessment tests in elementary and high schools, the debate has ensued over the legitimacy of testing and the disparate impact on women and minorities." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) And as we know, the debate has continued well into the 21st century as well.

But college officials noted in 1999 that without college admissions tests, it would be difficult to differentiate between the thousands of high schools in the country - this issue, as we noted above, has been handled in various different ways; for instance, Holy Cross has made the tests optional. I don't know anyone who admits on test scores alone," commented Rae Siporin, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of California-Los Angeles, in 1999. "We look at a whole range of criteria such as how rigorous the course work is.

But I would hate to throw away information that gives some measure of what's going on in a student's educational experience." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) Siporin observed at the time that the debate really should be focused on improving the educational experiences of all students in elementary and the secondary grades.

(Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) Do we say the test is bad," Siporin asked, "or does it mean that these students are not getting the same education background that these other students are getting." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) The courts have not been spared the argument since 1999 as well. The new directive also appeared to support the position of plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by minority college students in California.

The eight students claimed the University of California-Berkeley showed bias against them by using standardized test scores in the admissions process. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) But a conservative organization commented in 1999 that the OCR policy could prompt a legal challenge if left to stand. The Center for Equal Opportunity, a critic of race-sensitive admissions in higher education, "may consider legal action against the guidelines," commented Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Washington-based organization. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) And his sentiments were echoed by conservatives throughout America.

OCR recognizes that colleges and universities are under a lot of legal and political pressure to stop using racial and ethnic factors in admission," Clegg commented. "[In response,] the agency wants to intimidate colleges and universities to continue using these preferences." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) The National Association of Scholars, while raising doubts about the reasoning behind the OCR document titled "Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing," pointed to what it believes is hypocrisy from higher education gurus who had previously undervalued the use of the test scores.

It goes without saying that these guidelines are outrageous," commented the association's president, Dr. Stephen H. Balch, in 1999. "But it's hard not to see this as the educational establishment's being hoisted by its own petard. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) For some time now," Balch continued in a statement released shortly after OCR began distributing the guidelines, "our best universities in particular have selectively waived the results of standardized tests for the sake of diversity, insisting in such cases that there were many ways of evaluating good students.

Now that OCR is telling them to apply this approach uniformly, they reverse course and hold that admission tests are indispensable to weighing the abilities of college applicants.

Very strange." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) In fact, a testing official commented at the time that the education department's guidelines focused on whether standardized tests place an unfair burden on women and minorities, but the department should be concerned about whether other criteria used in admissions decisions also have a disparate impact - indeed, a worthy challenge that endures to this day. The outcomes in terms of tests are not going to address the inequities," observed Wayne Camara, executive director of research for the College Board.

"The test is the lightening rod. The disparate performances on the tests are related to the disparate preparation" in elementary and secondary schools. (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) According to a study in the Black Issues in Higher Education journal, "Camara also says that the Education Department should wait to release the new guidelines until after the revised Standards for Educational And Psychological Testing -- issued by the three research and education associations -- are revised and reissued this summer.

The OCR guidelines, which are based in large part on the standards, will be irrelevant by then, Camara says." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) The SAT's Racial Bias - If This Test Didn't Work, What of NCLB and AYP? Jacqueline Fleming's research drew quantitative attention to the fact that the SAT discriminates against African-American students. She was alarmed that African-Americans are faced with the threat of losing affirmative action as a legal vehicle for taking race and racial context into account.

As her study dictates, "In education, [affirmative action's] removal would mean greater reliance on "objective" indices such as SAT scores. This article presents analyses which show that racial context influences the SAT's ability to predict Black students' collegiate success. First, SAT items are shown to denigrate the Black experience and demonstrate a bias toward science. Thereafter, the test's predictive validity is shown to depend on college racial environment, adjustment issues, gender, and Black identity factors.

Thus, whereas the nation may do away with mandates that consider race and racial context, these forces continue to influence the performance and lives of Black students." (Fleming, 2000) The consequences of losing affirmative action are tied directly to the effectiveness of standardized tests for the various minority groups - whether gender, racial, national or sexual orientation. As Fleming notes, though our society should be colorblind, colorblindness has not characterized the experience of Black people in the United States.

In fact, affirmative action is based on the recognition that in order to get beyond racism, we in this nation must first take race into account. It recognizes, for example, that African-Americans have been prevented from competing fairly by a series of strategies, including the denial of access to educational opportunity, and it resolves that these barriers be removed even if vestiges of educational disadvantage remain.

(Fleming, 2000) Abandoning affirmative action will undoubtedly equate to stricter reliance on objective indices like test scores, such as those for the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT - even in the face of top-notch colleges such as Holy Cross moving away from such standardized testing. Fleming finds the subject of standardized testing, particularly the analysis of standardized test scores, fascinating - and quite disturbing with regard to its impact on minorities' futures. According to Fleming, "This is not just because testing has such a shady history, which it does.

Note, for example, that the center stage of recent testing controversies has been monopolized by individuals who espouse hard-core racist ideologies (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Nor is it because standardized tests have been used as tools of oppression, which they have. Nor again is it because testing is such a taboo subject, which it is. No, I am interested in standardized tests and testing because the subjects evoke so much emotion in U.S. social circles.

By themselves, tests are generally valuable and, like competition, constitute a motivational vehicle for getting the best out of individuals. Yet the very word "test" usually elicits an emotional response among most Americans, who typically hate being tested." (Fleming, 2000) The feeling of having to sit through a standardized test almost always strikes fear into the hearts of those who must sit through the challenge.

People perceive tests through the lenses of their personal experiences and feelings-e.g., "I don't believe in the test because I didn't do well on it," or "I don't think tests are valid because they don't reflect my ability," or "Testing is a 'White' thing; it's what they do to us." Fleming suspects that these sentiments, though possessing a certain validity, also mask the fears and anxieties surrounding the tests. The challenge for a social scientist is to separate testing hysteria from testing validity.

(Fleming, 2000) That, as Fleming argued in 2000, is where research comes in. There is much credence to the belief that racism is inherent in standardized testing. The standardized testing idea has a racist history in both old Europe and the United States (Hirsch, 1981). Particularly, standardized tests have been utilize to impede the social progress of Africans and African-Americans for at least two centuries.

Gould (1996) provides a chilling account of early movements to measure mental capacities in such a way that Africans in Europe and African-Americans here in America would be almost guaranteed a spot at the bottom of the scale.

(Gould, 1996) In fact, Gould presents efforts to measure cranial capacity, size and weight of the brain, number of convolutions of the brain, ratio of the distance from front to back of the brain, placement of the foreamen magnum (the hole in the base of the skull), intelligence in general, and the G-factor (an estimate of general intelligence derived from factor analysis) in particular-concluding that all these measurements have been tainted by historical social prejudices.

(Fleming, 2000) Gould reanalyzed most of the data on which many of the "scientific" racist assumptions of Black inferiority have been based, and upon taking the most obvious corrections into account (e.g., sex of the skeleton, unreliability of the measuring instrument, or testing conditions), he found no significant racial differences in intelligence.

(Gould, 1996) According to Fleming's research, Gould was absolutely prescient: "Indeed, the point emphasized throughout his treatise is that intelligence is an abstract concept, defined by a series of scores on a set of measurements, then reified-that is, elevated to the level of a biological attribute and deigned to have its antecedents in the brain.

In reality, he concludes, the concept is not at all rooted in biology but rather in the set of measurements chosen as the determinants of intelligence, and those determinants are by and large those on which Europeans, and specifically elite Europeans, excel. When the test results have not conformed to social prejudice-that is, when Blacks did not perform poorly or as poorly as intended -- the tests typically were altered and the incongruous theories discarded.

One of the by-products of this dubious history is a general awareness among African-Americans, even if they do not know all the details, that standardized tests have been used against them. Often, African-Americans take this awareness into the testing situation." (Fleming, 2000) The question must absolutely be posed in order to determine the effectiveness or viability of standardized testing with regard to NCLB and AYP: What do SAT scores measure? There has long been debate about what the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, measures.

Its developers claim that it measures neither intelligence, the mysterious G-factor, nor intellectual potential, but rather that it is specifically designed to predict college grades, especially in the freshman year - this is akin to the LSAT being a predictor of law school grades in first year, but in fact rarely correlates. As a result, utilization of the test has been restricted to predicting correlations with grade point average or GPA. Purportedly, the SAT measures verbal and analytical reasoning.

It has also been inferred that it measures problem solving ability because "prepping" or coaching in problem solving improves SAT scores (Whimbey & Lochhead, 1986). According to Messick (1980), coaching improves SAT scores more as the coaching approaches a substantive educational experience. This implies that a good education improves verbal and analytical reasoning skills and perhaps problem-solving ability. Whatever the SAT really measures, its usually reliable prediction of grades has been established.

(Messick, 1980) Fleming delves deeper: "Do SAT scores give a true reading of potential, aptitude, or ability to achieve good grades in an academic setting? Many doubts have been raised about the relevance and accuracy of the SAT for African-American students. The true significance of test scores with regard to the academic aptitude or performance of African-Americans is unclear for three reasons.

First, several researchers have maintained that SAT test items are biased against African-American test takers because they require a working knowledge of the White middle-class experience, but the charges of test item bias remain largely speculation (see Jenck & Phillips, 1998). I personally discovered a latent source of item bias while analyzing the content of reading comprehension tests in The College Entrance Examination Board's (1983) Ten SATs.

Of 59 reading comprehension tests described in that work, the greatest number (41%) addressed science-related issues, while 20% were devoted to literary issues, 16.9% to social science issues, 15.3% to issues germane to minority groups, and 6.8% to medieval history topics. The Black/White disparity is greatest in science, and this gap widens with time." (Fleming, 2000) As a result, it follows that the most consequential subject matter of presumably neutral reading comprehension tests is slanted toward a subject on which majority students excel (relatively speaking), but on which African-American students show a weakness.

(Fleming, 2000) Most alarmingly, of the seven tests addressing "African-American issues," four or 57% were "negative" or culturally unflattering and unappealing in nature. Those tests focused on the slavery experience and on the diminished rights, poverty, and racial/ethnic chauvinism faced by Black people in the United States. (Fleming, 2000) The three "positive," or culturally celebratory, tests addressed Harlem (New York City) politics in transition, William H.

Johnson's paintings, and a memoir of a Black leader - as the popular sarcastic phrase in the industry notes, the rest of the questions are about polo and fly fishing, activities in which, for both social and economic reasons, African-Americans are hardly likely to engage. Second, SAT scores simply may not paint an accurate interpretation of African-Americans' academic abilities since Black students' test results traditionally have been 200 points, or one full standard deviation, lower than those of European-American or White students.

(Fleming, 2000) According to Fleming, "The lower scores immediately raise doubts about the fairness of the test, and suggest that historical societal prejudice, racism, or educational disadvantage has played a role. Although no precisely measurable mechanism has yet been identified as a factor in systematically causing test takers to score lower on the SAT, a number of theories about the factors that improve students' scores have emerged." (Fleming, 2000) Pelavin and Kane (1990), for instance, argue that mathematics and language courses are the great equalizers in education.

Chambers' research (1988) has revealed that controlling for social class reduces most of the difference for Hispanic populations vis-a-vis Whites. (Chambers, 1988) What waxes even more interesting is Coleman's (1988) discovery that the one standard-deviation difference is typical of castelike minorities worldwide, including those in England, Japan, and New Zealand. (Coleman, 1988) Watson (1972) demonstrated in his research that the testing situation functions as a microcosm of society, and that anxieties related to issues of dominance and submission are activated and in most cases reactivated among members of racial/ethnic minority groups during test taking.

(Watson, 1972) In a parallel vein, Steele and Aronson (1995) have demonstrated that minority test takers' mere awareness of the racial/ethnic stigma associated with their groups' test performance portends a negative effect, serving as a psychological distraction important enough to cause a significant difference in the actual testing results.

(Steele and Aronson, 1995) Flynn (1987), on the other hand, much to the dismay of scholars such as Fleming, is credited with doing much to discredit theories about the biological basis of intelligence by showing that within-group variations in test scores over time are greater than differences between racial/ethnic groups. Thus, scores may be influenced by education, culture, or even nutrition, rather than genetics.

(Flynn, 1987) Third, SAT results simply may not give an accurate assessment for African-Americans because the SAT's predictive validity for Black students is significantly lower than that for other students. As Fleming notes, "Predictive validity is the correlation between SAT and GPA. Thus, the higher the correlation, the more the SAT contributes to GPA.

In a series of studies over a number of years, the predictive validity of the SAT has been found to be consistent for White students-that is, moderate to high correlations with GPA have been recorded-yet many authors contend that the predictive validity of the test for Blacks is unreliable. Boyd (1977), for example, claimed that the SAT was irrelevant to Black students' academic performance and bore no relationship to grades. Houston (1983) showed that the SAT underpredicted Black academic performance, and that Black students performed better than their test scores indicated.

Overprediction, however, is the most consistent phenomenon reported. Crouse and Trusheim (1988), for example, found that the SAT overpredicted Black students' performance in 18 of 22 samples, and that Black students performed lower than their SAT scores predicted." (Fleming, 2000) series of analyses have suggested that the predictive validity of the SAT for Black students may depend on the racial demographics of the college environment (Fleming, 1990).

These results demonstrate that it is not just the SAT scores that are at issue, but how those scores work in the college environment, or rather in interaction with the college environment. This means that college environment acts as a tremendous factor in determining whether the academic potential suggested by SAT scores comes to fruition. These results also suggest that adjustment to college may be an issue in predictive validity, especially for African-American students.

In other words, when students make a better adjustment to their colleges, the probability that their SAT scores will translate into good grades is improved. In any case, students' SAT scores do not tell the whole story. According to Fleming's 2000 research and subsequent study, "It appears that the impact of the college environment on the predictive validity of SAT scores is vastly different for Black males and females.

These findings are reminiscent of the earlier literature on Blacks in college, which purported that Black males developed best in Black colleges and by far the worst in White colleges (e.g., Fleming, 1984; Gibbs, 1988). The results appear to parallel the larger society's differential treatment of Black males and females, and suggest that negative treatment of Black students may be a crucial issue. When the treatment of Black students is positive, then research findings show that SAT scores translate well in satisfactory GPA attainment.

Better predictive validity coefficients may well reflect adjustment advantages in general, or treatment advantages in particular. Notably, Black females have markedly lower validity coefficients in Black colleges than do their male counterparts, a finding which suggests that the treatment of females on [historically black college and university] campuses is less favorable than that of males." (Fleming, 2000) All of this research taken in conjunction, at the very least, demonstrates that standardized testing is biased against minorities; and at the very worst, it demonstrates that this bias is deliberate and calculated.

With This Discrepancy In Standardized Testing, How Are NCLB and AYP Affected? Without a doubt, there exists a growing concern among teachers and parents about the overwhelming emphasis given to standardized testing in America's schools - especially in the wake of No Child Left Behind and AYP. Of course, these concerns are magnified in the wake of studies such as those analyzed above that demonstrated that standardized testing simply may not be the answer for minorities or school districts with a majority of minority students.

In fact, this worry is further accelerated when such critical stakes are connected with the results of these mandated standardized tests. Teachers and parents worry that more and more of the important things that prepare us for life will be pushed off the curriculum plate to make room for test preparation. According to a recent poll by Public Agenda, 88% of teachers believe that the degree of attention their school pays to standardized test results has increased during the last several years.

And 61% agreed that teaching to the test "inevitably stifles real teaching and learning." (Weaver, 2004) Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, notes that "As any good teacher knows, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to either teaching or learning. In fact, we now have a solid body of research about cognition and learning styles that provides ample confirmation of this. Any good teacher also knows that proper assessment of learning is both complex and multifaceted. Tests particularly paper and pencil tests that are standardized are only one type of assessment.

Good teachers make judgments about what has been learned on the basis of a variety of assessments. Finally, we know that what constitutes spectacular achievement for a child who suffers serious challenges may not equal the progress of his or her peers, but we honor this progress nonetheless." (Weaver, 2004) The NEA maintains that it owns a long history of supporting and furthering America's system of public education. However, it came out against NCLB and its reliance on standardized testing.

As Weaver comments, "When we are critical of the so-called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, our interest is to fix those elements of the law that we see as destructive to public education and, ultimately, to the children we serve." (Weaver, 2004) Teachers and school administrators from coast to coast and across the political spectrum are beginning to speculate that the standardized testing component of NCLB is in need of repair. And the present definition of adequate yearly progress is at the heart of what is wrong with the law.

The concept of adequate yearly progress is relatively simple: Set a lofty goal, establish a time frame for accomplishing the goal, establish incremental targets or steps toward achieving the goal, and hold schools accountable for meeting the targets and, ultimately, the goal. The goal is 100% proficiency in reading and math, and all schools must meet it by 2014.

As Weaver's study indicates, "Wouldn't life, and particularly parenting and teaching, be simple if progress in learning were linear and time-sensitive? Parents, teachers and cognitive psychologists alike know that learning is anything but linear. And yet we now have a federal law that not only violates what we know to be true about human learning but says that unless schools achieve linear progress, the federal government will punish you. Do we have a problem with this? You bet we do. Can it be fixed? We think so.

One of our state affiliates, the Connecticut Education Association (CEA), is a leader in recognizing and studying the problems with the federal definition of "adequate yearly progress" (AYP). Shortly after the law was adopted, the CEA had an independent economist develop a scenario based on existing test data in Connecticut in an attempt to visualize the impact of AYP in one of the highest achieving states in the nation. The initial results were shocking; however, because the law had yet to be implemented, the results were still hypothetical.

Nonetheless, the prediction became reality last summer when nearly 25% of schools in Connecticut were identified as having failed to make AYP. An astonishing 155 elementary and middle schools and 88 high schools were identified as "in need of improvement" under the federal law." (Weaver, 2004) And the shock follows: Considering the two years of test data, the CEA asked its economist, Ed Moscovitch of Massachusetts, to bring the scenarios up-to-date. This time the CEA asked the economist what its statewide failure rates would approximate over the full 12 years of implementation.

The new scenario, based on a model that allows for the rate of growth that students actually achieved in the last two years of testing, is very revealing. At the end of 12 years, 744 of 802 elementary and middle schools in Connecticut will have failed to make adequate yearly progress which constitutes 93% of its elementary and middle schools. (Weaver, 2004) Specifically, in the first year none of the schools identified had the white non-Hispanic subgroup failing to make AYP.

In the final year 585 of the 744 schools will have the white subgroup failing to do so. Even the powerful combination of social capital and great schools in a state that is regarded nationally as a high performer is not adequate to meet the statistical demands of this law - this points directly to the failure of the standardized tests as an answer or valid interpreter, especially for minority students.

(Weaver, 2004) Only in Lake Wobegon, perhaps, where all the students are above average, is there a chance of meeting the requirements set forth in the so-called No Child Left Behind law. Weaver's invective is even more aggressive with regard to minority students: "The current formula for AYP fails to consider the difference between where you start and how quickly you must reach the goal. That is, in my opinion, irresponsible. It is particularly irresponsible as it applies to English-language learners and special-education subgroups.

While the Department of Education (DoE) finally has acknowledged that students whose first language is not English may not perform well when given a test in English, it does not go far enough to correct the problem.