Group removes bias from reading exams

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, June 2, 2003 | 10:59 a.m.

When a group of volunteers led by the state Education Department met recently to ferret out signs of prejudice in Nevada's statewide reading tests, they tossed a few paragraphs they feared could offend students in this increasingly diverse state.

Among them was a poem that referred to an insect being tricked and swatted.

"Buddhists are opposed to killing any life form," said Merlinda Gallegos, director of community development for United Way of Southern Nevada and a member of the Bias Review Committee, a group that has met annually for five years.

"Would a child opposed to killing have a problem with this?" she asked.

Another story had only female characters. It also got tossed.

"We felt that it was biased because boys couldn't relate to it," said Ricki Barlow, a committee member who works for Las Vegas Councilman Lawrence Weekly.

So went the May meeting, the first in a series that will extend over several months. The little-known group's job is to determine if there is bias in the passages chosen for possible use in the statewide standardized tests, according to Cindy Sharp, an educational consultant who works with the committee.

And though several members of the group lauded its aims, others said the fear of offending anyone may be creating tests that bore students, and note the work of many compelling authors is absent.

"It was almost like searching for a cuss word with a fine-toothed comb or something to throw out," said George Cantu, an administrator for the Community College of Southern Nevada, who also served on the committee.

"It was all so bland," he said.

The group is made up of parents, business people, teachers and administrators, as well as staff from the offices of several elected officials. All volunteers, they look at reading, math and science tests from third through eighth grades and high school, in search of bias based on class, religion, culture or gender, according to the department's description of the committee.

The first meeting focused on the reading tests and the group will look at the science and math tests in July and August, respectively.

Gallegos said she was "impressed by the group's diversity." Its work, she said, would help create tests that "looked different from the ones I took back in the 1980s.

"The outcome is positive for all our youth," she said.

But Cantu said that most of the texts he read had already been chosen so as not to offend anyone, making him wonder what the committee could accomplish. The result, he said, could be a test that is harder for students to relate to and less interesting to read.

"Somebody's already handpicked this stuff," Cantu said.

"I would rather be challenged by a passage that referred to something like 'home boys' and discuss what that really means."

Dr. Richard Vineyard, assistant director of assessment, project accountability and curriculum for the department of education and a trainer for the committee, agreed that the tests had been dulled somewhat by the process of selecting and reviewing texts.

"We do have a sort of vanilla test," he said.

Vineyard also said the department is attempting to expand the pool of texts to choose from.

"We are actively selecting from other people ... to help us find different genres, authors, characters and situations," he said.

This is not always easy, either. For several years running, poems by the black writer Maya Angelou have been rejected because "they raised objections from Hispanics, who pointed out that the figurative language would not be accessible to students for whom English is a second language," Vineyard said.

Cantu said he would be meeting with several members of the committee to suggest texts for future years.

Barlow, meanwhile, pointed to a benefit the group could provide -- if its work were more well-known.

"This committee could help ease the fears of the community I talk to on a regular basis," Barlow said. Weekly's ward is about 40 percent white, 20 to 30 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic, he said.

"A large amount of people believe that an elite group prepares these exams and that no minorities are involved and so it's hard for minority students to pass it," he said.

"(But) I was on the inside ... and I can now say to my folks that this is not the case."