Fighting over how to test students with learning disabilities spills out of Kentucky to the federal arena

The current fight in Kentucky about trying to get a handle on the apparently excessive number of students with learning disabilities who get reading tests read to them has now spilled over into the federal arena.

Education Week reports that there is a dispute between two agencies that control the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) about what to do with states like Kentucky that exclude large numbers of students from that federal testing program.

In one corner, the National Assessment Governing Board wants to test these kids. The board points out that these students don’t ever get scores from the assessment and cannot be harmed by those scores. However, the board is concerned about whether these students have much reading ability what so ever.

In the other corner, the National Center for Educational Statistics doesn’t want to penalize states like Kentucky even if they have excessive exclusion rates on the NAEP. The center argues that exclusion doesn’t much matter.

I’m on the side of the governing board on this issue. Kentucky’s nation-leading exclusion in 2011 of students with disabilities from both the fourth and eighth grade student samples the NAEP wanted to test for reading provides very disturbing evidence that we are way out of line with educational practice in other states.

How can it be that Kentucky had to exclude a whopping eight percent of all the fourth grade students NAEP wanted to test (both students with and those without disabilities combined) while in Mississippi they only excluded one percent of their raw sample?

Can it really be that Mississippi is eight times better than Kentucky at getting learning disabled students to the point where they can at least sit for a true printed text reading test?