NYT on people who shop around for extra time on SAT exam.
[If I ever end up possibly bleeding to death in a hospital, I sure hope that my doctor is not someone who needed twice as much time on their SAT (and MCAT) exams.]
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September 26, 2002
Paying for a Disability Diagnosis to Gain Time on College Boards
By JANE GROSS
WHITE PLAINS, Sept. 25 - Dr. Dana Luck and Dr. Steven
Mattis work in a modest suite of offices here, in the
shadow of Westchester County's fanciest mall. The sign on
their door reads "Center for Neuropsychological Services."
These days, for the two educational psychologists, that
often means the diagnosis and treatment of learning
disabilities.
Clients pay $2,400 for a battery of tests and an
evaluation, $200 an hour for psychotherapy and $250 an hour
more if Dr. Luck or Dr. Mattis visit a high school or the
Educational Testing Service to lobby for a
learning-disabled student who is not getting the special
services the law requires.
Lately, Drs. Luck and Mattis are seeing many parents and
college-bound teenagers who want only one thing: a
diagnosis that will entitle the youngster to additional
time to take the Scholastic Assessment Tests. They assume
this has something to do with a recent decision by the
College Board to remove the asterisk flagging the scores of
disabled students who take the exam under various special
conditions.
"More and more people are asking legitimately," Dr. Luck
said. "But more and more are also asking because, why not
ask? It's part of our culture that every point matters, so
they're looking for any kind of edge," including time and a
half or double time on the stressful three-hour exam.
In Westchester County, which is typical of many wealthy,
highly competitive communities, a dozen educational
psychologists acknowledged this kind of diagnosis-shopping
in the wake of the College Board's announcement that it
would unflag scores of learning-disabled students.
Dr. Jeanne Dietrich, a psychologist in White Plains, said
she had five such requests this summer, more than ever
before in that slow season. Each parent reported that "a
child had bombed the SAT" and wanted a quick diagnosis
because the application deadline was nearing for the next
round of tests. Four agreed to a thorough evaluation and
one hung up, Dr. Dietrich said.
The asterisk indicating that extended time and other
accommodations were made to the test-takers will disappear
from student records a year from now and will be removed
retroactively from tests taken previously. That means
30,000 students, or 2 percent of the 1.3 million high
school seniors who sit for the College Boards each year,
will submit scores to colleges as if they had been tested
under the same conditions as everyone else.
This change, part of the settlement of a 1999 lawsuit, has
been hailed by disability rights groups and many educators
who see unflagged, extended-time testing as a way to level
the playing field for those with learning disorders.
"Everybody has heard stories of rejections," said Dr.
Richard F. Heath, a psychologist who runs the support
program for learning-disabled students at St. Thomas
Aquinas College in Rockland County. "That anxiety will be
completely alleviated without the asterisk."
But others worry that the unflagging of scores will be an
invitation for accelerated abuse among some well-to-do
families who have already been diagnosis-shopping and thus
cheapen the claims of the truly disabled while widening the
gap between the haves and the have-nots.
"This further privileges the privileged," said Jane Brown,
the vice president who oversees admissions at Mount Holyoke
College in South Hadley, Mass., which is in the second year
of a five-year research project on the effect of making the
tests optional. "You have to be able to afford a
diagnosis."
Dr. Alan Wachtel, a New York City psychiatrist with a
specialty in attention deficit disorder, said it was
"regrettably true" that some parents bid for the services
of "hired guns." Their behavior contributed to an
adversarial attitude in certain schools, he said, where he
is sometimes asked, "What are the parents paying you to say
this?"
Judith Hirschhorn, director of secondary school special
education in Armonk, said she had received several
suspicious requests from 11th and 12th graders who had
never sought services before, some on the suggestion of
their private College Board tutors.
Jerry Wishner, chairman of the Committee on Special
Education in Chappaqua, said that he had "never been
approached only for the SAT," but added, "I can't say it's
not done" by families elsewhere - or by those in his school
who are seeking private evaluations in growing numbers.
"That's their right," Dr. Wishner said, regretfully.
The ability of rich families, however small their numbers,
essentially to buy the right to extended time on the
College Boards highlights the most common criticisms of a
test under siege. Detractors say that it is a proxy for
affluence, not intelligence. They say scores are polluted
by advantages such as $400-an-hour private tutoring and are
therefore not meaningful measures.
Many educators, and the officials of the College Board, say
that the small risk of abuse pales beside the unfairness of
stigmatizing, or perhaps discriminating against, disabled
test-takers. But to lessen that risk, the College Board,
which owns the tests, recently beefed up its compliance
department to audit and discipline high schools that seem
to be granting an unreasonable number of accommodations.
College Board officials do not dispute that there is an
unintended class bias in the granting of accommodations,
although they say it is no worse than other inequities in
the education system, be it outdated textbooks or
overburdened guidance counselors.
"That's true wherever you look," said Chiara Coletti, the
board's spokesman, who once held the comparable position
for the New York City schools chancellor. The College Board
also says it widely promotes test accommodations in
handouts and on its Web site and wishes more inner-city
schools used them but has no power to force the issue.
The College Board has no data on the demographic breakdown
of requests for extended-time testing. But a study by the
California state auditor several years ago showed one in
four accommodations went to private school students.
The board does track the direct correlation between average
family income and College Board scores: In 2002, those
students whose families earned less than $10,000 a year
scored 859 out of a possible 1600, while those earning more
than $100,000 scored 1123.
Large inner-city high schools have neither resources nor
time for sophisticated diagnosis and services. One
psychologist in private practice who used to work in a
Bronx public school guessed that half of the students there
might have qualified for remediation but said that "the
city would have gone broke." Ms. Hirschhorn, in Armonk,
said that an underprivileged youngster was "not going to
look like a child with a disability in a sea of children
not doing well, and that's a heartbreak."
Government statistics show that 2.9 million children in
public elementary and secondary schools are learning
disabled, or 6 percent of the total. More than a quarter
drop out. Of those who succeed in graduating from high
school, 13 percent go on to a four-year college. But only 2
percent seek test accommodations. Once in college, 11
percent seek extra help. Access to extra help in college
and a true appreciation for a disabled child's efforts
could be adversely affected by the unflagging of test
scores, some educators say, even as they applaud the
anti-discriminatory sentiment behind the move.
Without the asterisk on College Board scores, nothing on a
standard college application - including a transcript of
courses and grades - would alert admissions officials to a
diagnosis of a learning disability.
"If you use the information in a positive way, it creates a
context," said Ms. Brown of Mount Holyoke. "You want to
understand all the threads, the whole story, and position a
student's accomplishments in light of the difficulties
they've faced. And you want to know if you have adequate
services for a student you've admitted."
Others worry that a school that admits a student not
knowing about a disability might not even have the
necessary services. "It's one thing to get in," said Frank
Liana, one of New York City's leading private college
counselors. "It's another thing to get what you need to
succeed. Why do you even want them at a school that is
biased against them and doesn't feel equipped to help?"
Drs. Luck and Mattis are less concerned with whether scores
are flagged than they are with a test that they say
consumes and distorts the last years of high school and
inspires desperate requests. "It's not `Can you help us
understand what's wrong with our child?' " Dr. Luck said.
"It's `Can you help us document the need for more time on
this test?' Students are anxious. Parents are anxious. The
environment is anxious. But we would much rather debunk the
myth of the SAT than help people work the loopholes."
Dr. Luck and Dr. Mattis say they gently explain to such
families that they do not churn out diagnoses for anyone
who can pay. Yes, they will fight for a child who they
believe has been unfairly denied services at school or
handle an appeal with the testing service. But only after
an evaluation documents a real problem. "We give them our
data and sometimes they will not hear it," Dr. Luck said.
"So they get angry and go to someone else until they get
what they want."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. |
