On Sunday, March 11, 2012, the Prichard Committee’s Blog weighed in about Kentucky’s nation-leading exclusion of students with learning disabilities in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments.

Unfortunately, Prichard’s blog glossed over the exclusion problem, claiming, “Kentucky's recent record of relative NAEP success does not, in fact, evaporate when exclusion rates are considered.”

I hoped Prichard would add more to their story. I even contacted them by phone on March 14th to encourage that. You see, they won’t post my comments in their blog.

So far – no updates.

So, I’ll add the rest of the story here, starting with the well-known reason why Kentucky excludes so many kids from NAEP reading. This involves a long-time Kentucky testing policy that allowed the state’s reading assessments to be read to a surprisingly large proportion of our students with learning disabilities. That’s right – many Kentucky kids had the so-called CATS and earlier KIRIS ‘reading assessments’ read to them. It was all ‘legal’ so long as the learning disabled student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP) called for this testing accommodation.

Over the past two decades, Kentucky’s policy probably led to some very unfortunate consequences for many special education students. We don’t know if these special students can read. There simply is no evidence from the state assessment program to show if their schools expended any effort to try to teach them to read, either.

This testing policy also is the major reason why Kentucky’s exclusion rates on both the fourth and eighth grade NAEP reading assessments were the highest in the nation in 2011. You see, the NAEP tests real reading skills. When learning disabled kids had conflicting IEPs that would not allow a real test of reading, those students got excluded from the NAEP reading assessments.

Sadly, Prichard’s blog doesn’t tell you why Kentucky has nation-leading rates of exclusion of learning disabled children on the NAEP reading assessments. The blog merely says Kentucky is doing something different from other states in reading. Prichard does not admit that the major difference between Kentucky and other states with much lower NAEP exclusion rates is that the Bluegrass State has not been testing many of its learning disabled students for reading skills at all.

There is still more to the story. Click the “Read more” link to see that.

Prichard’s silence about the reason for Kentucky’s high NAEP exclusion rates is puzzling. There has been abundant discussion – a lot quite recent and very public – about why Kentucky’s NAEP reading exclusion rates are so high.

I would be very surprised if Prichard’s blogger was totally unaware of the Kentucky Board of Education’s recent and extensive discussions of Kentucky’s NAEP reading exclusion issue. The subject came up repeatedly over the past six months during the board’s deliberation of a revision to the 703 KAR 5:070 testing regulation. Board members – and anyone else paying even passing attention – now know that the major reason Kentucky excludes so many kids on NAEP reading is due a very poorly designed testing policy for Kentucky’s now defunct KIRIS and CATS assessments.

The board thoroughly discussed the fact that under Kentucky’s former state assessment policy, teachers actually were allowed to read so-called ‘reading assessments’ to a large proportion of the state’s learning disabled students. Those learning disabled students never got a state assessment of their printed text reading and comprehension skills. They just took a spoken word comprehension test.

However, in a great deception, scores for those spoken word assessments were reported to parents and the public as though they were legitimate reading scores. Kentuckians were lulled into feeling good by inflated test scores. Meanwhile, this poorly crafted assessment policy created a situation where there was no evidence to prove our schools were making any attempt what so ever to teach large numbers of our learning disabled students to read.

In fact, with Kentucky’s old reading policy, thousands of students could have been carried through their entire Primary to grade 12 school years as illiterates. The old testing program could never identify that obvious problem.

The regulatory change in the revised 703 KAR 5:070, which Prichard’s blog never mentions, is intended to fix this problem.

Unfortunately, many thousands of Kentucky public school students with learning disabilities were impacted by the state’s former reading policy.

For example, page 7 in “Test Accommodations For Readers,” a document presented at the December 7, 2011 meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education (sorry, not on line), indicates that 1,785 Kentucky public high school 10th grade students in 2011 were carried all the way into high school still using readers on the state’s reading tests. That amounts to 38 percent of all the learning disabled tenth grade students in the state who survived in school long enough to take the Kentucky Core Content Test in reading in 2011 (of course, unknown numbers of students already dropped out by this time).

The same page of that document shows over 42 percent of the fourth graders with learning disabilities and generally over 45 percent of the learning disabled students in grades five to eight used readers on the state ‘reading’ assessment in 2011. Overall, the information package presented to the Kentucky Board of Education shows that 17,310 Kentucky learning disabled students got the reading accommodation in 2011 state reading testing. There is a very real concern that none of them are receiving much instruction in real printed text reading and comprehension.

Clearly, all of these non-reading (at least for testing purposes, possibly for any purposes) learning disabled students are on track to enter the adult world as very weak readers, if not totally illiterate. Individual schools could claim they are attempting to teach these students to read, but the state doesn’t have a shred of evidence to back that up.

By the way, documentation of the board’s deliberations about NAEP exclusion and testing accommodations is extensive, including, for example, comments made in the October 5, 2011 meeting (See Meeting Summary Minutes, Pages 10 & 11), those made in the December 7, 2011 meeting (Summary Minutes, Pages 8 & 9) and the summary of the January 31-February 1, 2012 meeting (Board Notes, Page 2).

Documentation presented to the board also indicates that Kentucky is virtually the only state in the country that still allows readers for the state reading assessments. Other states have much better policies in this area – policies that provide the public and policymakers with far more accurate information about the real performance of reading instruction in their public schools.

Aside from the Kentucky Board of Education’s recent discussions of Kentucky’s NAEP exclusion situation, there are plenty of other examples of discussions about this topic. Perhaps the oldest is a paper I wrote way back in 1999 when the exclusion issue first came up. That paper shows the reading accommodation issue and the NAEP exclusion problem were no secrets more than a decade ago. This issue isn’t new.

However, while almost every other state moved ahead in this area, Kentucky failed to fix the problem for more than a decade. The prime excuse given for this inaction is that a small number of learning disabled students will never be able to take a real reading assessment. I think that is true; but, I also think the numbers involved are very small.

I am not in favor of sacrificing thousands of other learning disabled students to a life of near or total illiteracy so we can perpetuate a policy that many other states considered and abandoned. How can we excuse excluding eight times the proportion of learning disabled students that Mississippi excluded from the NAEP 2011 Grade 4 reading assessment? If Mississippi can get so many more of its learning disabled students prepared well enough to at least take the NAEP reading assessment, what is wrong with Kentucky?

The very small number of learning disabled students who truly can never be taught to read can be handled with our alternative assessment program. The very small numbers of these students should not be used as a cover to deny other kids the right to have their schools make a strong, good faith effort to teach them to read and for the public to have evidence that schools are in fact making that effort for these special students.

To close: I think Prichard should have said more about this decade-plus old issue.

I am also concerned about Prichard’s inappropriate and incomplete analysis of NAEP scores in an attempt to create the notion that exclusion isn’t a big deal. I’ll discuss that faulty analysis in the next blog.

One more comment: at one point the Prichard Blog promises it won’t leave out students with disabilities. Sadly, that is what the blog did. By ignoring problems with the state’s two-decades old testing policy, which over the past 20 years possibly contributed to the delivery of tens of thousands of Kentucky school children into the adult world as illiterates, Prichard ignores both a serious problem and the reasons for a very important regulatory change that should finally make things right.