Alternate Assessment

Alternate assessment is a generic term for a family of methods used to assess the academic performance of students with significant disabilities or limited proficiency with English. A small but meaningful number of students have disabilities or limited proficiency with English that make their participation in general state- and district-wide tests impractical, if not impossible, and likely to result in inaccurate measures of [Page 19]their academic achievement. According to the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), “An alternate assessment must be aligned with the State's content standards, must yield results separately in both reading/language arts and mathematics, and must be designed and implemented in a manner that supports use of the results as an indicator of AYP (adequate yearly progress).”

Alternate assessments are an important component of each state's assessment system and, as such, are required to meet the federal regulations outlined in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Specifically, Title I mandates that “State assessment shall be aligned with the State's challenging content and student performance standards and provide coherent information about student attainment of such standards” (§1111[b][3][B]). In 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation increased the federal government's emphasis on assessment and accountability systems. Specifically, NCLB requires annual statewide assessments for all students in Grades 3–8 and once in high school in reading and language arts, mathematics, and (by 2007) science. Moreover, NCLB requires a disaggregated annual reporting of students' performance to ensure that all groups (including students with disabilities and English language learners) are making adequate progress toward the goal of all students' being “proficient” on statewide assessments within the next 12 years.

As noted by Ken Warlick, “The purpose of an alternate assessment should reasonably match, at a minimum, the purpose of the assessment for which it is an alternate. One might ask, ‘If an alternate assessment is based on totally different or alternate standards, or a totally separate curriculum, what is the alternate assessment an alternate to?’”