Dear Mzee Kiziwi,
Responding to Questions about Gallaudet’s poor Rankings,
I. Current Title II reporting procedures unfairly penalize institutions with liberal admissions policies.
The sample of institutions being compared in the District of Columbia is much smaller than samples in the 50 states. There are only 7 institutions in the DC sample: American University, Catholic University,
Gallaudet University, George Washington University, Howard University, Trinity College, and the University of the District of Columbia. Most of these institutions have highly selective admissions policies.
Gallaudet’s mission is to provide postsecondary educational opportunities to deaf students, and for this reason its admissions policies are not so strict as they are at many of these other universities. Is it fair to
compare Gallaudet’s pass/fail rate with the pass/fail rates of highly selective universities – especially when the reporting system only counts those who passed during that one report year, and ignores those who may have passed in a later year?
II. Limiting the time frame to one year only unfairly discriminates against test-takers whose native language is not standard English, and against those institutions that heavily recruit from among minority populations. This year’s Title II Report only shows the performance of individual students on tests during that one report year. Some of these students will go on to pass the required standardized test or tests in a later year. Title II legislation recognizes this fact; that is why institutions are permitted to submit final pass rates on a cohort 3 years after the initial report year. However, just looking at the initial report year alone gives a distinct comparative advantage to institutions whose cohorts are made up of students
more likely to pass the test in the first year. Institutions whose educational mission or admissions policy attracts large numbers of students for whom English is not a native language are therefore at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to comparing scores, if the window of reporting is only the first year. This disadvantage definitely would apply to Gallaudet, where most of the cohort are deaf students, many of whom may have American Sign Language as their native language, not English.
III. Standardized tests that have been developed primarily for hearing test-takers have questionable validity when applied to deaf test-takers. According to the National Task Force on Equity in Testing Deaf Professionals, there is research that demonstrates that multiple choice standardized test items like those used in Praxis tests required for DC licensure severely disadvantage deaf test takers. To be specific,four fundamental flaws are cited by experts in the area of licensure testing for deaf test-takers:
1. Insufficient context in the stem of multiple-choice items for a person not fluent in English
2. Time restrictions on the examination can cause an unfair disadvantage for test-takers whose native
language is not English, and who therefore must spend a longer amount of time understanding the
questions being asked on the test
3. Inappropriate content of some items (for example, items about music and rhyme)
4. Use of unnecessary English language idioms, low-incidence usage of common words with multiple meanings (such as “cotton” used as a verb meaning “to take a liking’), or infrequently used, unfamiliar words that require speakers of English as a second language longer to figure out.
Although the time restriction is taken into account by test accommodations made available to Praxis test- takers with disabilities, the other pitfalls listed above still remain. Is it fair to either the deaf test-takers, or to an institution whose undergraduate population is overwhelmingly deaf, to compare their pass/fail rates to
those of hearing students or institutions who do not have large numbers of deaf students?
IV. Using a pass rate based only on those program completers taking tests for D.C. licensure ignores the fact that some Gallaudet students choose NOT to take the D.C. tests because they intend to teach in other states. While this may be true for most other institutions, this factor has an even greater impact in the District of Columbia because D.C. is not a state, and most teacher education program completers from D.C. institutions go elsewhere to teach. At Gallaudet, many students who complete a program leading to initial licensure choose not to take the required DC tests at that time either because they know they do not want to remain in DC.
V. Do some of the institutions Gallaudet is compared require their students to pass the tests before they can complete the program, thus guaranteeing a 100% pass rate at that institution? Although we do not know to what extent this is a factor in D.C., in some states certain institutions may require their students to pass all licensure assessments as a condition to completing their teacher preparation program. Gallaudet
does not do this. How does Gallaudet know if its pass rates are being compared with institutions that do have such a requirement?
VI. The pass rates on teacher licensure tests for any one year do not reflect the percentage of program completers who end up as teachers. Gallaudet’s aggregate pass rate for basic skills assessments in report year 1999-2000 was 50%, and its summary totals and pass rates was 55%. Compare these numbers with the results of a 1999 alumni survey, which showed that among recent graduates (within the past 5 years),
68% of undergraduate program completers had jobs in the field of education.
