Test Scores Plummet for Hawaii Disabled Students
The Hawaii Department of Education is going back to the drawing board on its annual test for students with severe disabilities, after the number meeting proficiency requirements plummeted this year.
About 680 of Hawaii’s most severely disabled students in public and public charter schools are eligible to take the Hawaii State Alternate Assessment, which is an alternative to the statewide test used to hold schools accountable for meeting federal requirements.
Only 8 percent of severely disabled students in Hawaii public schools scored at grade-level proficiency in reading on this year’s assessment, down from 70 percent last year. The drop in math proficiency was equally dramatic, from 62 percent last year to 4 percent this year, according to a report released Friday. Both were light-years away from federal objectives for this year.
The dramatic declines this year can be attributed to redesigned assessment that tightened requirements, per a directive from the U.S. Department of Education. The new design focused on testing grade-level content standards. It required independent student responses (without prompting from a teacher), and the tests were scored by external parties.
“Hawaii was required to create a new assessment for this population of students with severe cognitive disabilities,” said Cara Tanimura, director of the Department of Education Systems Accountability Office. “We tried to do something innovative and creative, and we were very surprised to see the very low score.”
She said the results are accurate, but she added that because of the redesign, this year’s scores and last year’s don’t really make for an apples-to-apples comparison.
“This is more like baseline data for us,” she said. “The HSA is for accountability of the system. One of the great things about No Child Left Behind is that it brings to light these subgroups and how they’re doing. The law requires us to take care of these subgroups, too.”
Student Assessment Section Administrator Kent Hinton said now that the baseline has been established, it’s time to revisit the assessment and examine every aspect of it, from the design and delivery of the test items to the training for teachers administering it.
It’s a tremendous challenge to develop a test for a 10th-grader with severe cognitive disabilities, he said. These students are expected to know the same concepts expected of their peers.
“The U.S. Department of Education isn’t going to let us teach 10th-graders fourth-grade math,” Tanimura explained.
“We realize it is not an easy test for this population of kids, and we’re working with the contractor and our technical advisory committee to revisit every aspect of it,” she said.
