Special-education pass rates higher on VGLA

State leaders are worried that elementary and middle schools across Virginia are increasingly turning to an alternative - some say easier to pass - measure of student competency to help earn accreditation.

The alternative is used instead of the Standards of Learning exams. With the substitute, students are scored on a body of their work collected throughout the year rather than their performance on a multiple-choice test.

Pass rates on the alternative assessment are significantly better than those on SOL tests - in some cases, nearly twice as high, according to an analysis of state testing data by The Virginian-Pilot.

Portsmouth's Brighton Elementary and Cradock Middle schools gained full accreditation after more students participated in the SOL alternative, The Pilot's analysis shows.

School officials defend their use of the SOL alternative, saying they are merely following state guidelines. But it's not always that simple.

State investigators flagged a Norfolk middle school last year for misusing the alternative. In a memo Friday, Norfolk's superintendent disclosed complaints about its use at two more schools.

Despite those problems, Norfolk uses the SOL alternative at a far lower rate than Portsmouth and Chesapeake locally, and less than the overall rate in Virginia.

The substitute is called the VGLA, short for the Virginia Grade Level Alternative assessment. Schools started using it in the 2004-05 testing cycle.

It was created predominantly for elementary and middle school special-education students whose disabilities prevent them from showing their knowledge on multiple-choice tests.

A team of school staffers and a parent or guardian decide whether a student participates in the VGLA. School officials score the portfolios. The state pays a testing company to grade SOL exams.

A bill introduced in the General Assembly this year calls for an annual audit of the VGLA system. A version of the legislation, requiring superintendents to sign off on their divisions' use of the VGLA, has passed the House of Delegates and is awaiting a hearing on the Senate floor.

"We're concerned about the overuse of the VGLA," said Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education.

"The VGLA was never intended to be a means just to inflate pass rates," he said. "Our primary goal is to fix the problem."

As part of the fix, the state will flag school divisions with high percentages of VGLA participants and require that education officials undergo training.

To support that effort, the state plans to launch a VGLA training Web site that will include reports from The Pilot and other media about testing irregularities.

In June, a teacher at Norfolk's Lafayette-Winona Middle School complained to the state Education Department that administrators were improperly directing special-education students to the VGLA as "a strong guarantee of passing scores to avoid consequences of" not meeting state or federal standards.

The complaint triggered a state investigation. Although problems were found, the allegation was not substantiated.

Other testing problems unrelated to the VGLA have been discovered at three other Norfolk schools in recent months.

In a memo to Norfolk's School Board and City Council issued Friday, Superintendent Stephen C. Jones said an Oakwood Elementary teacher has contacted the state about the administration of the VGLA at that school. He also disclosed that "someone affiliated with" Rosemont Middle raised VGLA concerns over the handling of makeup work. He said he did not know whether that person is a staff member or parent.

"As of today, we are working with the Virginia Department of Education and the principals at the two schools to get the details," Jones wrote. "We will keep you apprised."

Norfolk school officials have admitted to previous mistakes with standardized testing, but they also said their division has been unfairly singled out. Testing irregularities are widespread, Jones has said.

The growing use of the VGLA and ensuing problems have been particularly worrisome to some educators.

Last year, Virginia elementary and middle school special-education students were eligible to take more than 355,700 exams in reading, writing, math, history and science. Of those, the VGLA was used for 40,072 assessments, or a little more than 11 percent, mostly in reading or math.

In Portsmouth, nearly 23 percent of the assessments from eligible students were VGLA rather than SOL tests, according to The Pilot's analysis. Chesapeake's rate was also higher than the statewide figure, at just over 12 percent. The Virginia Beach rate was 7.4 percent, Norfolk's was 4.9 percent, and Suffolk's 1.8 percent.

The number and percentage of VGLA participants varies widely among schools, even in the same city.

Chesapeake's Thurgood Marshall Elementary used the substitute at a rate among the highest in the state, ranking 13th out of the 1,500 Virginia schools with eligible students.

At Thurgood Marshall, 118 of 193 possible assessments by special-education students were VGLA - roughly 61 percent.

By contrast, Chesapeake's Southeastern Elementary administered only one VGLA assessment to one student. Educators could have chosen the alternative for 287 assessments for the school's special-education students.

Cindy Sparks, Chesapeake schools' director of assessment and accountability, said the number of VGLA participants in one school is unrelated to the number in another.

"Teachers and principals are neither encouraged or discouraged about using the VGLA," she wrote in an e-mail.

School officials in Suffolk say the same, even though administrators there rarely turn to the alternative. State data show that just 64 VGLA assessments were compiled last year across the whole school division.

Educators in Portsmouth, Chesapeake and other local divisions deny that they use the VGLA as a tool to earn accreditation.

They point out that the alternative assessment was created by the state as a legitimate option for some students.

"It's not for me to say it's good," Portsmouth Superintendent David Stuckwisch said.

Ellen Giordano, the Portsmouth division's coordinator for special education, wrote in an e-mail that "focus on instruction has made a difference" in the school system's recent accreditation successes.

For the first time, all Portsmouth schools earned full accreditation last year, and school leaders threw a huge celebration. Poor-performing schools can harm property values, teacher recruitment and morale. Consistently under-performing schools face state intervention.

Portsmouth's march to accreditation occurred while there was a significant rise in VGLA use and notable success with it, The Pilot's analysis shows.

For example, last year in math, Portsmouth students with disabilities taking the SOL exam tallied a pass rate of 51 percent.

The pass rate for those who took the VGLA was 98 percent.

When asked about the varying pass rates, Giordano wrote that "students learn and demonstrate knowledge of content in various ways."

In the 2008-09 school year, Brighton Elementary School was conditionally accredited because it failed to meet all state testing benchmarks for the fourth consecutive year. That year, its pass rates were figured using 20 VGLA math assessments and 25 in English. The next year, 42 Brighton special-education students participated in the VGLA math assessment and 35 submitted VGLA English portfolios. The school is now fully accredited.

Cradock Middle School showed a similar improvement after using the VGLA at a higher rate. So did Waters Middle School, which failed to reach federal standardized testing goals in 2006-07 but met them the next year.

Stuckwisch said the school's use of VGLA didn't make a difference in Waters' rating.

"They didn't need those tests to get accredited," he said.

Last year at Waters, 63 percent of the possible assessments by special-education students were VGLA, the 11th-highest rate in the state and the highest locally.

Cradock would have earned full accreditation last year in reading and math with or without the VGLA, Giordano wrote.

The school doesn't use the VGLA assessment as a strategy to increase pass rates, Cradock's principal, Rosa-lynn Sanderlin, wrote in an e-mail.

Not every student who was given the VGLA passed it, Sanderlin wrote. "It is just like the standard SOL test; some will pass and others will not."

Educators have a lot of leeway in deciding who participates in the VGLA.

The state gives three basic guidelines: students must be identified as needing special-education services, must be achieving at their grade level and must be prevented by their disability from showing their knowledge on a multiple-choice test.

In most local divisions, school leaders said their teams review a student's classwork and previous tests on a subject-by-subject basis when considering whether the VGLA is the right option.

If more students are participating in the VGLA, it's because more teams are determining that it's the best route for the child, Portsmouth's Stuckwisch and Chesapeake's Sparks said.

However, state officials in the Lafayette-Winona investigation found cases where parents appeared to have been excluded from the decision to direct a student to the VGLA and where students' previous failing SOL test scores were weighed too heavily.

In some instances, teachers disagreed on whether the students had achieved enough to qualify for the alternative.

The amount and type of work submitted for a VGLA portfolio is left largely to the discretion of school staffers. However, state guidelines require that all staff members involved sign statements that the work was solely the student's.

Still, there can be glitches.

At Lafayette-Winona, for example, teachers were cited for including identical work - down to misspellings - in VGLA portfolios for multiple students.

The state allows a teacher, a library media specialist or any other educator with proper credentials to determine whether the assessment receives a passing score. Staffers may not score portfolios for students they know or a school they've been associated with.

Jared Cotton, assistant superintendent for accountability with Virginia Beach schools, said his division conducts its own internal audits to make sure students are eligible and material is properly collected. An assistant principal in each school is responsible for making sure the work is gathered throughout the year.

In 2006, the state tossed out the VGLA portfolios of six disabled students at Seatack Elementary in Virginia Beach after a local investigation concluded that they were prepared improperly by three teachers. One resigned and two were put on probation.

"There's certainly temptation to have more students participate," Cotton said, adding that special-education students tend to do better on the VGLA.

State leaders acknowledge the VGLA is not the best way to test special-education students, so they are working on yet another alternative.

It would be a multiple-choice exam for special-education students who perform below grade level. The eighth-grade reading and math assessment will be piloted this spring, but a full rollout is dependent on funding.

Initial questions on the exam are simplified versions of comparable grade-level SOL tests. It would give school divisions a way to measure progress for large numbers of special-education students who perform on a more basic level than their peers.

It would not replace the VGLA, state officials said. Still, some educators defend the VGLA as a better gauge of student learning than standardized multiple-choice exams.

Research shows portfolio assessments such as the VGLA are good methods of evaluation because students with or without special needs can better demonstrate what they know, Chesapeake's Sparks said.

"Everybody would probably do better with a portfolio if we had time to score them."

Pilot writers Hattie Brown Garrow, Cheryl Ross, Lauren Roth and Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer contributed to this report.

Amy Jeter, (757) 446-2730, amy.jeter@pilotonline.com