[Nfbmt] From the State President's list

[James Aldrich]

Hi all,

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Jim

Subject:National Federation of the Blind and Parents of Blind Child 
File Suit to Make K-12 Assessments Accessible


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen

Director of Public Relations

National Federation of the Blind

(410) 659-9314, extension 2330

(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

cdanielsen at nfb.org



National Federation of the Blind and Parents of Blind Child
 File Suit to Make K-12 Assessments Accessible



New Milford, New Jersey (January 24, 2014):The National Federation of 
the Blind (NFB), along with its affiliate organizations the NFB of New 
Jersey and the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children 
(NOPBC), and the parents of a blind high school student in New Milford 
(named in the suit as S.H.) have filed suit (case number: 14-392)in 
federal court against PARCC, Inc., a nonprofit corporation that was 
established in 2013 by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for 
College and Careers, a consortium currently made up of eighteen states, 
including New Jersey and the District of Columbia.  This consortium 
received a $186 million federal grant through the U.S. Department of 
Education’s Race to the Top Assessment Program competition, with which 
it has promised to develop “next-generation” academic assessments for 
use in measuring the academic progress and achievement of K-12 
students.  The suit has been filed because assessment tests created by 
PARCC, Inc. that will be field tested at S.H.’s high school and other 
locations this spring are not accessible to students who are blind.  
The field test assessments will not be offered in Braille, nor will 
they be available for use with text-to-speech screen reading technology 
that is commonly used by blind students.  S.H. is a Braille reader.  
Another assessment consortium, known as Smarter Balanced, has announced 
that it will make its tests accessible in all phases of development, 
including field testing.  The suit alleges that the failure to make the 
assessments accessible during field testing violates the Americans with 
Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.



Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, 
said: “While PARCC has promised that its assessment tests will 
ultimately be accessible, the lack of accessibility during field 
testing will put blind students at a significant disadvantage, because 
accessibility issues that may arise will not be identified until 
PARCC’s assessments are being deployed throughout the states in the 
consortium.  Furthermore, the failure to make these assessments 
accessible during all phases of deployment violates federal law, 
especially since PARCC has received hundreds of millions of dollars in 
federal money to develop the tests.  Blind Americans, and the parents 
of blind children, cannot and will not tolerate blind students being 
forced to wait for likely inferior accessibility to the tests that will 
measure their academic performance, simply because the students happen 
to live in states that are part of a consortium that does not take its 
stated commitment to accessibility seriously.”



The NFB, NFB of New Jersey, NOPBC, and the parents of S.H. are 
represented in this matter by Jayne Wesler of the New Jersey firm 
Sussan, Greenwald & Wesler; Scott LaBarre of the Denver firm LaBarre 
Law Offices; and Dan Goldstein, Sharon Krevor-Weisbaum, and Trevor Coe 
of the Baltimore firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy.





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About the National Federation of the Blind


 The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is the oldest, largest, and 
most influential nationwide membership organization of blind people in 
the United States.  Founded in 1940, the NFB advocates for the civil 
rights and equality of blind Americans, and develops innovative 
education, technology, and training programs to provide the blind and 
those who are losing vision with the tools they need to become 
independent and successful.