9/30 rdg responses-NCLB

McNamara Ch. 2 Communication and the design of language tests

I found myself skimming through the history section of testing when I realized that they seemed to coincide with the reading readiness and emergent literacy periods. It seems like they also coincide with the SLA theories of the time also (I think).
The author seemed to imply the politics of it all, which I naturally read deeper into and allowed myself to get frustrated. Still, I liked that McNamara said that the complexities of communication competence and performance measurements cause difficulties for standardization.
I took a great interest in the section, “Models of communicative ability”, particularly the strategic competence information.
The information provided on page 19 about strategic competence and the test designs and complexities were of great interest to me. I found myself agreeing with a lot of the statements he mentioned because I realized that I’ve wondered about some of those things before (which made me feel ok about having those thoughts, and glad that they were stated more clearly than I could have ever done.) For instance,
I’m aware of the factors, and am having a hard time thinking of authentic assessments to create, but I don’t feel that I’m reluctant like the author states the assessment field to be.
The author said it best, that it definitely is an “eclectic scene in language testing (p. 21- conclusion).” (I’m biased because eclectic is how my classroom syllabuses are.)


Abedi, J. (2004). The No Child Left Behind Act and English language learners:
Assessment and accountability issues. Educational Researcher, 33, 4-14.

This article presents very important information about the annual yearly progress (AYP) reporting issues. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) has four subgroups of children not to leave behind. These subgroups are based on a student’s financial standing, major racial & ethnic groups, disabled, or/and Limited English Proficiency status. The requirement to report the status of these four subgroups presents serious issues.
Of these four subgroups, the author focuses on the complicated and serious issues involving the LEP students. The author pointed out that many LEP students also fit in to one of the other subgroup categories. I suppose the not so many group would consist of stereotyped groups of people/students like say, for instance, the immigrants, like maybe Russians. Where they would fit in? What happens to them? Are they considered a part of the unstable group? I’m assuming that they’re not poor, disabled, but I guess they’re from a major racial & ethnic group. Anyways,…that was my little brainstorm. I now share the author’s identified four critical issues concerning the LEP students within states, counties, school districts, schools, classrooms, and they are:
1. Classification inconsistency
2. Sparse LEP population
3. lack of LEP subgroup stability
4. Measurement quality of AYP instruments for LEP students
On top of that, it should be remembered, as we were reminded by the author, that “state academic achievement tests have lower reliability and validity for LEP population that are constructed and normed for Native English speakers.” It doesn’t look like Alaska is taking that advice? Is it because a lot of the schools are funded by the state?
The information about the cut off points of compensatory aseessments that allow test scores to compensate for each other is of the past, and that that government now has the nation under the conjunctive model which is known as the NCLBA, which does not allow any one subject to be less than proficient for positive AYP results to occur, despite your subgroup category and it’s issues.

I needed more time to understand, but finally read their interpretations and it took a while for me to see the point of the tables because it was explaining accountability. I am glad for the high expectations, but I remember when this word first came flying around when we were abruptly told that our district was now a standards based model and teachers got so frusterated and turned the accountability word around and left it in the hands of the students with little guidance and direction, either in retaiation against change or maybe that was their interpretation of accountability, literally to mean that the students were now/ finally accountable for their own learning and took no responsibility for their learning after that for the rest of the year. My son got caught in this change over adaptation and it was not cool.

Finally, the information on the LEP baseline scores section about not meeting AYP for four (again) years in a row are considered a school in “crisis” which is supposed to get overhauled as they say, hasn’t happened yet to a school I know and this is their fifth year in crisis. This real life situation is not just a scenario, it’s about student’s lives that are going to affected by this NCLBA’s AYP expectations. It goes to prove that invalid assessments and unreliable reporting can determine if a student gets a diploma or not to be able to make a decent living.