When Newark Public Schools saw a surge in referrals for students with disabilities, it turned to Rutgers University’s School of Health Professions for help finding out why.
Experts in speech pathology at Rutgers have been analyzing the students since 2023 and found that many came from homes where English wasn’t spoken much or at all. They had mistakenly been put into special ed. Rutgers has been helping Newark develop better ways of evaluating students. Kristen Victorino is an associate professor of speech-language pathology who is working with the school district.
One of the problems Rutgers identified was overdue and misuse of standardized tests.
“You have to really look at multiple aspects of the child’s development and their academic functioning. We should be using standardized tests only when they are appropriate and validated for the population being tested,” she said.
“When there are no standardized tests available that would be appropriate for a student then we really have to look at other methods of assessment, which might include things like a very thorough interview with family members and teachers to really understand the child’s language exposure,” Victorino said.
Another problem was limited training in bilingual assessment tools.
“What we found was that there were a certain number of students that had a language other than English reported somewhere in their chart. But then they were tested by the speech language pathologists in English,” she said.
There were also found to be time constraints on evaluations and communication gaps among evaluation teams.
Requests for comment from the Newark Board of Education and Newark Public Schools were not answered.