Entry Testing and the Overrepresentation of Romani ... - UR Research

R7For Romani children in Central and Eastern Europe, a disability label generally serves to segregate them and providethem with an inferior education under the law through streaming into special education on the basis of testingprior to or in the first years of primary education. As is true throughout the region, Roma are disproportionatelypresent in special education in the case study countries, accounting for a majority of pupils in practical schools inthe Czech Republic; between 20 and 90 percent of children in special education in Hungary; 25–40 percent ofpupils in special primary schools and 40 percent of students in special secondary schools in Serbia; and approximately60 percent of children in special primary and secondary education in Slovakia. Pupils from Romani communitiesthus tend to have experiences in educational milieus in which teachers have lowered expectations of them,presume them to be academically and socially deficient, and blame them for their failure to succeed in schools.This failure in schools is based almost entirely on Romani children’s placement in special education, wherereassignment to standard education is rare and there is limited opportunity for secondary education, negativelyaffecting their later participation in the labor market and entrapment by poverty to complete a vicious circle ofspecial education, school failure, unemployment, and poverty.METHODOLOGICAL PITFALLS AND BIAS IN ENTRY TESTINGAmong the roots of the broader problem of separating children into educational streams are two major methodologicalflaws in entry testing as practiced in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia. First, only one kindof instrument is used. Second, the instruments rely on standardized measures that assume a pupil’s exposure tocertain cultural experiences resulting in a repertoire of knowledge and skills associated with putatively intelligentbehavior, as well as a vocabulary associated with membership in the middle class. All of these countries relyheavily on at least one of two culturally and linguistically biased tests commonly used to make disability determinations(the Raven’s Progressive Matrices and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children).Raven’s Progressive MatricesFirst published in 1938, and used frequently today in Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia (as well as in many other countries),Raven’s Progressive Matrices are nonverbal assessments purported to be free of or to have reduced cultural bias.In these tests, “correct” responses are those which complete an abstract pattern of matrices in the most putativelyobvious way. If respondents take a more creative approach to the patterns, however, the resulting responsesare likely to affect test (that is, IQ) scores negatively. Moreover, the fact that performance improves with repeatedadministrations of the test to members of non-dominant cultural communities suggests that the ProgressiveMatrices are in fact not free of cultural bias. In similar fashion, children trained in inductive reasoning strategiestend to perform better on the test than do children who do not receive such training. Finally, changing testingconditions by presenting instructions in different ways has been shown to impact the performance of children fromlower socio-economic strata, with such children performing better when the test is presented as a game thanwhen it is presented as an evaluation of strengths and weaknesses.