Letter Report to the Office for Civil Rights, Department of Education (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Letter Report
Letter Report
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issued an earlier letter report about it, in June 1996, but its purpose remains unchanged. As you note in your transmittal letter for the Guide, it is intended to provide "inflation about the professional standards relating to the use of tests for high-stakes purposes, the relevant federal laws that apply to such practices, and references that can help shape educationally sound and legally sufficient testing practices." We note that the Guide was initiated because the Office for Civil Rights (OCR)
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In particular, a distinction should be made between reliance on the Standards, which are judged to represent the primary statement of professional consensus regarding educational testing, and other documents cited, such as High Stakes: Testingfor Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation (National Research Council, ~ 999) , which are used to help explain or elaborate principles that are stated in the Stanclard*
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Technical Issues The Guide undertakes the considerable challenge of conveying to lay readers some of the important technical considerations that relate to fairness in testing. It is surely true that some members of the Guide's target audience will be unfamiliar with the technical language used in the Standards, and the Guide provides important explanation, elaboration, and emphasis of key ideas for many of these topics.
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The paragraph on page 50 and the accompanying footnote refer to "statewide assessments used to hold schools and school districts accountable for student performance." It should be noted that inclusion rules for testing in program evaluation need not be identical to those used for making high-stakes student-level decisions. Inclusion of limited-English-proficient students in a test used to make high-stakes decisions about individual students is psychometrically defensible if the assessment can be shown to be a valid and reliable indicator of targeted skills and knowledge, and if both the student's English language proficiency and the degree to which English fluency is a central component of the skills and knowledge being tested are taken into account.
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Although this issue is certainly addressed in the current draft, we recommend that the cover letter and introduction be reviewed to be sure that they both contain consistent, straightforward language explaining OCR's legal responsibility to enforce civil rights laws and the specific mechanisms through which it does so. We recognize both the difficulties of the task OCR has undertaken and the inevitable effects on texts when input is received from a wide variety of experts and interested parties.
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Sincerely yours, _ 1 ~ Vv~ Robert L Linn, Chair Board on Testing and Assessment cc: Scott Palmer, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office for Civil Rights, U.S.
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