This letter is about children & reading --but applies to adult literacy. Make sure your adult students who are parents or caregivers get connected to their local library's summer reading program. Work with your students to help them gain skills and confidence to read to their children.
Jacksonville has a well established adult literacy program and closely partners with the local volunteer literacy program.
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Guest column: Library offers summer reading program
Mon, Jun 16, 2014 @ 2:07 pm
Letters from Readers
Every Jacksonville resident should be concerned after reading
the headline May 23:
“FCAT: 1 in 5 fail to make grade; 22% of third-graders in Duval
schools below test reading standard.”
Poor reading skills affect everyone, regardless of whether you
have children in school.
As the article pointed out, children who struggle with reading in
third grade have an incredibly difficult time in later grades.
They grow up to be teenagers who often do not graduate from high
school.
They find it difficult to get and keep a job.
They are more likely to commit crimes and be dependent on
welfare.
And they don’t contribute to our economy as they could have.
For more than 100 years, Jacksonville libraries have been the
place where children read a book for the first time.
Libraries are an important partner for parents and teachers in
education and literacy, especially in the summer when school is out.
The library is a vital bridge after the school day ends and
between school years.
GED Ready test
No word from GEDTS® regarding any kind of new test development. Earlier, they indicated it would take months, and that's after they decide to start the process.
The whole thing is crazy, not to mention unacceptable. It’s certainly not a valid approach to test-taking.
Following is a long summary of the problems we're having with the new GED® test. For those of you in adult education who are dealing with this new test and you have students with learning disabilities, it may be worth your time to read on. If you're not working in adult ed and/or you don't have students with learning disabilities, you should probably stop reading right here...because there's a lot of problems.
While the GED Ready™ is my biggest concern at the moment, there are other concerns about the actual GED® test.
First, depending on the student’s score, they can either earn a high school equivalency diploma or a college-readiness certificate. When the new GED® test was released in January 2014, our adult education centers began testing for the students who passed the GED Ready™. A couple of months after the official test release, GED® Testing Service sent out a notice that they were increasing the time on the math portion of the test by twenty minutes. So, you can do that after the test has been normed and validated? I’m thinking of the students who took and passed the test with a score that got them their high school equivalency diploma, but who MAY have been able to attain the college readiness certificate if they’d had the same amount of time on the math test that students get now.
Second, before the new GED® test was released, we were told that it would include text-to-speech software as an accommodation for students with disabilities who are approved for an audio format for testing. This software is still not available. Pearson-Vue is supposed to arrange for a reader to go to the testing center and read the test to the student. This is not a standardized approach to testing, and it decreases the independent functioning of the student with a disability who is taking the test.
Furthermore, GED® Testing Service has always said that a student must have a 15-pt. discrepancy on their learning disabilities evaluation to request and receive an audio format as an appropriate and effective testing accommodation. So far, we had had no requests for a reader approved here in Arkansas – and one student had a 40+-pt. discrepancy on his disability documentation.
Third, the new requests for accommodations forms for the GED® test are designed for the student to fill out themselves and submit directly to the GED® Testing Service Accommodations Team. Page 2 of the request form for learning disabilities has spaces to list each accommodation requested as well as a rationale for each one. Our students don’t know how to write a psychological rationale for accommodations; indeed, the psychologists who have been evaluating students for learning disabilities this year can’t even figure out what GED® Testing Service wants them to write. One psychologist told me that the student’s request for accommodations was denied because “there wasn’t enough information in the narrative report.” That psychologist says he’s never seen any testing service that requires the kind of detailed report required by GED® Testing Service, and he can’t figure out what else he’s supposed to write.
One example of how difficult these request forms are to fill out was during a presentation at the Learning Disabilities Association of America 2014 Conference in Anaheim, California by Dr. John Hostermann, Director of Accessibility and Disability Services for Pearson VUE & GED® Testing Service. In that presentation, Dr. Hostermann said that a student can’t request “extra time,” or even “double time.” They must request “standard time plus 25%” or “standard time plus 50%,” etc. or the request will be automatically denied. The rationale for that request, assuming the student wrote it correctly, must include information tied directly to the narrative report included with the psychological evaluation that documents the learning disability.
What student can do that? It’s like GED® Testing Service is setting up the student for an automatic denial of accommodations.
If a testing service like Pearson-Vue is going to allow accommodations on the GED® test, they must make those accommodations available on both the GED® test and the GED Ready™. Furthermore, they can’t make it so hard to ask for and receive accommodations that nobody can figure out how to do it, not even professional psychologists.
Patti White
Disabilities Project Manager, AALRC