"The Maryland School Performance Assessment Program is a statewide, high-stakes, performance-based assessment program. In all our state assessment programs, we are mindful of equity issues and try to address them in all phases of development and implementation of those programs. We define equity in terms of race, ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status or wealth, and for students who are from regular, special education, and limited-English-proficiency (LEP) programs, and so forth. We address equity in five ways: first, through program philosophy; second, through test design and development procedures; third, through test administration procedures; fourth, through scoring; and fifth, through statistical analyses.

I want to comment briefly on just a couple of these. First of all, we address and try to ensure equity through program philosophy. Our philosophy in Maryland--which I think is very typical--is that all students can learn; that all students should have access to rigorous curriculum and instruction; and that all students, teachers, and schools should be held to high but attainable standards.

Regarding addressing equity through test administration procedures, I'll make two brief comments. First, we strive for standardized test administrations for all students. That's a difficult thing, given the complexity of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, that involves group activities, hands-on science tasks, and tools and manipulatives with the science and mathematics tasks. We also provide accommodations that allow special ed and LEP students to participate in this assessment program. Without some of these administration accommodations (such as time extensions and the ability to dictate responses), they wouldn't be able to participate in a program like this.

Two other brief comments. We try to address equity in the scoring process by ensuring that scorers are blind to the region, the state, the school, and any background information on the student whose answer book is being scored. We also go through large numbers of statistical analyses of student responses to detect what some people call item bias, or what many others call differential item functioning. In the end, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program attempts to address and ensure equity at all stages of the test design and development process."