More Students in New York Will Take Regular English Test

The Nefarious NY Times ^ | August 5, 2006 | DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

[neverdem]

Ordered by the federal government to improve its testing of students who speak limited English, New York State said yesterday that all children enrolled in school in the United States for at least a year would be required to take the state’s regular English Language Arts exam. The test is given annually in the third through eighth grades.

State officials said the decision would require about 90,000 children who speak limited English to take the regular exam in January. Students will continue to take the state’s math, social studies and science tests in a variety of foreign languages, officials said.

They also said they could not predict how many schools might fail to make yearly progress as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Law if many students score poorly on the English test.

Schools that fail to make adequate progress can be branded as needing improvement and sanctioned.

Previously, students who had been in an American school for fewer than three years were exempt from the regular test. Instead, they were given the New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test, which was developed to determine whether a child should receive special services as a limited English speaker.

New York had also used that test, known as the Nyseslat, to comply with the No Child Left Behind Law, which requires that schools demonstrate adequate yearly progress for their general student population and for subgroups of students, including racial minorities, special education students and limited English speakers.

But a federal review this year found that New York’s testing system failed to comply with the law. In June, the federal Education Department wrote to New York, saying the Nyseslat “is not sufficiently comparable to the regular English language arts assessment” test.

[Onelifetogive]

New York State said yesterday that all children enrolled in school in the United States for at least a year would be required to take the state’s regular English Language Arts exam.

The real question is: "Will a special version of the test be created in Spanish to avoid discrimination???"

[coconutt2000]

Actually, that question was asked and answered.

The implication of this entire article is that students with limited English were being tested in their primary language rather than in English. The English test will be given in English for at least a year, after which they'll probably return to the previous practice of giving the test in a foreign language.

Note the next line where it states that other subjects will be tested in a variety of foreign languages.