Learning remotely for many students has been tough this year. For English learners, many of whom live in communities with higher COVID-19 rates, it's been even harder. Some educators are calling for skipping the standardized test this year that’s given to multilingual students.
The English learner program in Springfield has nearly 4,000 participants, or about 16% of all its students.
Jean Marvel, who teaches English learners at Springfield Central High School, said Spanish is the most common language spoken at home, but students come from more than two dozen language groups.
"We have students from Africa who speak Somali, Swahili, Kinyarwanda. We have students from Myanmar, from Burma who speak Burmese," she said. "So we have a diversity of languages that makes our school a very rich environment."
These English learners and others in Massachusetts take a test every year called ACCESS. It measures progress in reading, writing, listening and speaking in English.
The federal government requires a yearly assessment. Results can influence whether students move up a level, and the test is required for students to exit the program. It's also used to evaluate schools.
Marvel said, in a normal year, the test gives teachers good information that helps them target instruction.
"But in this year," she said, "I don't think the information is going to be valid."
In particular, Marvel said her students have not practiced speaking that much when learning remotely — because they're afraid.
"Our students are very quiet," Marvel said. "They are not speaking up. They are doing reading. They are doing writing. They're doing a lot of listening. But the speaking part is not working for our students on a Zoom."
Marvel said she is also concerned test results could hurt her students' self-esteem.
"So imagine that you've now done worse than you did last year. It's going to be detrimental," Marvel said. "Our job is to build students up and tell them, 'Yes, you can do this.' And that test will do the opposite."
Early this year, after Marvel learned the state was asking English learners to take the ACCESS test, she filed a complaint against the state with the U.S. Department’s Office for Civil Rights. She said it’s unfair to ask English learners to come into the school to take the test because they are in a high risk category for COVID.
"Students who live in multifamily, multigenerational homes – more than likely crowded, close conditions — we are exposing these students to a risk by putting them on the bus and sending them to school to take this test," Marvel said.
The Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents has been urging the state to ask the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver to suspend ACCESS testing this year.
The state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education was not available for an interview, according to a spokeswoman, but she said the state does not plan to seek a waiver.
Mary Bourque of the superintendents association said English learners have already had to contend with enough.
"[These are] our most heavily, hardest-hit districts with the COVID," Bourque said. "And these are the students where their families have been hit. And yet we are going to make their schooling experience, not about relationships, but about testing."
Her group is also against MCAS testing this year, which is administered to all students at some grade levels. Some English learners take both tests.
Bourque points out schools already have ACCESS test results from last winter and English learning programs have been doing their own assessments.
"We have all the information at our fingertips," she said. "So why should we be putting our students through two tests — two statewide tests — during a year when we're trying to come back and recover from a pandemic?"
Helen Solórzano is the executive director of MATSOL, the Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages. She said testing is another disruption to learning during the pandemic.
"This year in particular when students are just coming back to school, that instructional time is very precious," Solórzano said. "So instead of testing students, we want just to get back to teaching."
But some Massachusetts educators want to give the ACCESS test. Virginia Guglielmo-Brady is director of English language learners in the Pittsfield Public Schools. She said her district does a lot of monitoring throughout the year and wants the data from the ACCESS test.
"We do believe the ACCESS would help complement and support our decisions moving forward on how to service our kids next year," she said.
Pittsfield has a much smaller group of English learners compared to Springfield — about 300. And students there have already had the choice to shift from remote to a hybrid (partially in-person) model of learning. That doesn’t begin in Springfield for a few more weeks, as the state pushes districts to get elementary and middle schools students back in the classroom.
Only in-person, in-school testing is allowed. The state has given districts a few extra months, until the third week of May, to complete the tests.
Guglielmo-Brady said that extra time brought a sigh of relief.
"We had a lot of anxiety in terms of how healthy this would be for our students and our teachers, especially when we were full-remote." she said. "So our viewpoint has changed considerably, given the shifts in the downward trend of the numbers of COVID and also the extension to May 20th. So we have a large window to work with, so we're able to focus."
Pittsfield is now categorized as a green, or low-risk, COVID community. Springfield just shifted from red to yellow.
Regardless of COVID risks in a particular city, in a year when nothing has been standard, standardized tests aren't going away.
