One of Maryland’s candidates for governor wants the General Assembly to conduct a hearing into whether the state’s higher-than-average exclusion rate of students on a national reading test also inflated the high ranking among states a magazine awarded Maryland, the Baltimore Sun reports.
“I am demanding answers about who in the administration was involved in this cheating scandal, what exactly they knew and when they knew it,” the Sun quoted Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ron George as saying. “I am calling on the leaders in the General Assembly to convene hearings to get to the bottom of this matter. We tell our students cheating is wrong and hold them accountable when they make a mistake. What message are we sending them now when corrupt politicians abuse the education system to advance their own political agendas?”
Mr George is the ranking member of the House Ways & Means education subcommittee. A spokesperson for the House speaker said no hearings had been scheduled on the matter.
Let me save them the trouble. The higher-than-average exclusion rates for special education students with a certain accommodation for testing did not affect Education Week’s high score for Maryland over the past five years in a row by too much, if at all.
Furthermore, the state has to deal with its high exclusion rate as a matter of rule, not law. The House and Senate can, at best, pass a resolution to encourage local school officials to try to encourage kids who have special needs to take the NAEP reading test, since the school and the students are in no way affected by their performance on the test. The NAEP rules allow the exclusion, but no other state exercises its right to exclude students as much as Maryland does.
The decision to exclude students is made on a case-by-case basis at each school. The excluded students had all been offered the accommodation in question on state tests, but NAEP simply can’t accommodate them, because officials at NAEP haven’t designed an alternative form to handle this particular accommodation, known commonly as “read-aloud.” NAEP has alternative forms for use with some accommodations, such as a calculator form of the math tests, but there is no special read-aloud reading test form available at this time.
