North Carolina educators are facing a dilemma:  what constitutes literacy
in the digital age?  Before them are four teenagers who became blind in
the last few years and are highly computer literate.  Unfortunately, the
teenagers are not as literate in braille and are slow readers.  to receive
a diploma, students must pass a timed literacy and reading comprehension
test.  Current policy says that blind students must take the test in
braille while the students wish to take the test using a personal computer
with speech synthesis.  The article below describes the education battle
brewing between braille literacy advocates, parents of disabled kids
fearful of downshifting expectations and tech savvy students and teachers
as well as lawyers who consider this a civil rights issue.  I would be
curious to learn of the viewpoints of others on this.

kelly


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Blindness puts teens in test bind

By TIM SIMMONS, Staff Writer


     State educators say four children blinded as teenagers should be
denied high school diplomas because they cannot pass a reading test in
Braille.
     The students, blinded by accident and disease in the past two years,
are otherwise able to master the high school courses required of them, said
Charles Bernardo, superintendent of the Governor Morehead School for the
Blind.
     But the students rely on computers that read them their lessons, an
approach that state testing officials will not accept when it comes to
taking the reading comprehension examination required of all high school
graduates.
     "If the computer is reading the exam, then the student is not
reading," said Lou Fabrizio, who oversees the state's testing program.
"That is why we offer the test in Braille for students who are blind."
     But teachers at the School for the Blind say state rules for measuring
academic progress haven't kept pace with the technology and are denying
four otherwise educated students a chance to get their high school
diplomas.
     Mastering Braille, the system of printing and writing in which
characters are formed by patterns of raised dots that are felt with the
fingers, takes about four years, Bernardo said. Younger children tend to
learn Braille faster than older children. Some who lose their sight as
adolescents or adults never master it.
     Having worked with testing officials for almost 18 months on the
issue, those who oversee state programs for the blind are no longer hiding
their disgust with the education department.
     "This is just wrong," said Peter Leousis, an assistant secretary at
the state Department of Health and Human Services. "If we can't make an
accommodation for four kids who were blinded through no fault of their own,
then that is just absurd."
     On Friday, David Bruton, secretary of the Department of Health and
Human Services, sent a letter to the chairman of the State Board of
Education asking the board to reconsider the students' situation when the
board meets Tuesday.
     "Despite this significant life change, they are striving to achieve a
high school diploma," Bruton wrote in his letter to board Chairman Phil
Kirk. "We should make every effort to avoid placing still more obstacles in
their path."
     Bruton also questioned the legality of the education department's
current position. "The Attorney General's office may have useful thoughts
on this," Bruton said in his letter.
     The four students seeking the reading exemption, whom Bernardo did not
identify because of confidentiality laws, range in age from 16 to 17. They
are high school freshmen or sophomores, having lost classroom time because
of their disabilities. The school serves students until they are 21.
     Degenerative eye disease stole the sight of two students; the other
two were blinded by a car accident and a shotgun blast.
     "The students are learning Braille, but they are still at the
elementary level," Bernardo said. "We are not backing away from teaching
them Braille."
     In the meantime, Bernardo said, the school would be derelict if it did
not teach the children to use the technology that is now fairly common
among those who cannot see.
     To make his point, the school superintendent offered a quote from the
minutes of a meeting where one of the students involved explained his
dilemma. "If I had known that I would lose my sight in a car accident in
the ninth grade, I would have been studying Braille as a young boy," the
teen said.
     Hoping to find a compromise, Fabrizio said the state is prepared to
offer an alternative that would allow the students to use tests read out
loud by a computer and still earn a diploma.
     The compromise, he said, would require that they score at least 480 on
the verbal section of the Scholastic Assessment Test or 48 on a similar
test known as the PSAT.
     The state is willing to allow that change because the College Board,
which administers both tests, does not prohibit students from having the
verbal section of the test read to them.
     "We believe that is fair," Fabrizio said. "We realize the difficulty
here. All of us in one sense would just like to let them have the test read
to them and be done with it, but that would not be right. This one is
heart-rending."
     Bernardo said the school has several problems with the offer from the
education department.
     The primary problem, which Bruton echoed in his letter to Kirk, is
that the SAT requirement is much higher than the standard set by the
state's reading exam.
     The state's reading exam requires only eighth-grade skills to pass
while a score of 480 on the verbal section of the SAT is just below the
typical score posted by most college freshmen at area universities.
     "If all students were required to reach this level of achievement in
order to receive a high school diploma, our graduation rate would be
significantly reduced," Bruton wrote.
     The college entrance exam also measures a child's aptitude for
learning, while the state test is designed to see if children have mastered
their classroom lessons, Bernardo said.
     The decision on how to handle the issue involving the four blind
students is complicated, Fabrizio said, by a dispute involving children
with reading disabilities.
     Parents have argued for several years that children with obvious
reading disabilities should be allowed to demonstrate their understanding
of a topic by having test questions read to them. State officials have
steadfastly refused.
     Most of the 60,000 children in North Carolina who are diagnosed with
learning disabilities have trouble with reading, said Pat Lillie, who helps
run the Learning Disabilities Association of North Carolina.
     "It's not that these children want to be exempted from testing,"
Lillie said. "But the schools do such a poor job of teaching children to
read who have disabilities, that parents have little choice but to ask for
exemptions."
     Although children who are blind and those with learning disabilities
require vastly different approaches in instruction, Lillie said the testing
issue underscores a common thread that runs between them.
     "We are asking the state to do what is right, what is fair," she said.
"Can we show a little humanity?"

Tim Simmons can be reached at 829-4535 or [log in to unmask]




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