School test data delayed

If low special-education scores and too few kids taking tests cause some schools to fall short of federal standards, then Utah's school leaders could live with that.

But many of them cannot live with the stigma of not measuring up when they know it's only because of data-collection problems.

So at an emergency superintendents meeting Monday, school leaders narrowly voted to ask the State Office of Education to go back and gather more complete data on special-education test scores used in the upcoming No Child Left Behind reports.

That will delay the release of the reports, originally set for Dec. 8, until possibly as long as Dec. 22.

Next week, school districts will decide whether to leave alone numbers on how many kids took tests, as the state recommends, or have each district go back and fix errors on its own.

Both ideas are intended to make things fair as districts prepare to release reports under the controversial federal No Child Left Behind Act.

But some say making changes could bring unintended consequences.

At issue is the backbone of No Child Left Behind — "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. It's a big deal this year, the first for all schools in Utah to be part of the new, emotionally charged national school accountability program.

Schools must show AYP for every student group, be it by ethnicity, poverty or disability, in three areas: test scores; having 95 percent of kids take tests; and high attendance and graduation rates.

Problem is, one bad mark will sink a school and give it the public label of failing to make AYP.

And that's shaping up to be the case, mainly in the special-education student test scores and participation rates.

Some of it, however, can be explained through problems with data collection.

First, special-education scores.

The problem there is about comparing apples and oranges.

Basically, in 2002, schools could let special-education students take tests on their own levels. So, a sixth-grade class might have a speech-therapy student taking sixth-grade-level tests and an intellectually disabled student taking second-grade-level tests.