Alternative (and questionable) test to be phased out

An alternative test once used by school districts to cheat their way around Virginia testing requirements – the state’s Standards of Learning Tests – will soon no longer be available, according to changes announced by the Virginia Department of Education.

April 23, 2010; 6:00 AM • by Chris Dovi

Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Patricia I. Wright announced Thursday that the alternative tests, commonly called the VGLAs, which had been easy to abuse because they were graded and reported within the districts where the students took them, are being replaced by online tests. Those new tests will be administered by the state.

The first tests to be replaced will be the math tests, beginning in 2011, followed by the reading tests in 2012. The VGLA, or Virginia Grade-Level Alternative tests, were first implemented in 2005.

Issues with the VGLAs, which are administered to students with disabilities that prevent them from being assessed by Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, were first brought to light by a series of blog postings by a local state retiree, John Butcher, and a former Richmond Public Schools board member, Carol A.O. Wolf. Their findings were later, in part, reported by the Washington Post. The state’s changes were mandated after a bill patroned by State Del. John M. O’Bannon (R-Henrico) was passed by this year’s Virginia General Assembly.

“Today’s announcement is the first step in carrying out the will of the General Assembly and addressing my own concerns about overuse and misuse of the VGLA,” Wright said in a statement released by the Virginia Department of Education on Thursday.

Even with the change, Butcher remains critical of the state, which he suggests ignored signs that the tests were being abused.

“In light of the information … one cannot but wonder why it takes a new law to excite the Superintendent’s ‘concerns’,” he wrote in an email and on his blog. “It seems to me that we need a Superintendent whose concerns center on Virginia’s students, not the administrators who have been abusing them via these alternative testing schemes.”

Wolf said she’s satisfied that some change is coming, but called for broader change — and an acknowledgment of the real human cost of the cheating that already has been allowed to go on: “Teachers have been fired, students kicked out of school and denied regular diplomas, parents treated as if they are non-entities with no rights — still, top-level administrators who knew of the cheating and chose to remain silent — continue to be paid high salaries.”

There was plenty of reason just in Richmond to suspect overuse when Wolf and Butcher began their investigation of the tests last year. According to a post on Butcher’s blog, crankytaxpayer.org, “Richmond has the second-highest rate of VGLA testing (substitute tests in grades 3-8 for kids with handicaps or disabilities) in the state” and “classifies an atypical number of black schoolchildren as ‘disabled,’ which contributes to Richmond’s high rate of VGLA testing.”

Though other VGLA tests will continue to be administered until they are eventually phased out, the state also indicated its desire to see greater accountability with those tests. According to the state’s release, “this spring, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) directed assessment, special education and other staff in divisions with VGLA participation rates of 25 percent or greater to undergo training on proper administration of the test.” The state average is 20 percent in both reading and mathematics.

The press release indicates that no time table has yet been established to phase out VGLA tests in writing, history, and science.