Standardized Testing
Families who elect to home school on the basis of the 1984 Home Instruction Law commonly utilize some form of standardized testing to submit to the local public school superintendent in order to comply with the law. If you decide to claim religious exemption, or file under the tutorial statute, you may use standardized testing as a method of gauging relative progress from year to year. However, you do not submit your results to school authorities.
There are several options for having your children tested. If you are a qualified tester (depending on the requirements of the test company), you may test your own children. Roanoke has a group of home schooling moms who are qualified testers that offer group testing in the spring. You need to watch the newsletter in January to get registration information. You may have a friend who would qualify as a tester who would be willing to test your children. The final option is to test through a correspondence school (you do not have to be enrolled in their program).
School districts send out a letter in the spring that makes it sound like either you must test your child at the school, or let them know the details of your plans to test. This information is not required by law. You can just ignore the letter – you do not have to respond. We do not recommend that you have your child tested at the public school when the schools are testing. The unfamiliar environment may adversely affect his testing. Also, the school system has the test in their possession before it is scored. If the composite score is below the 4th stanine (23rd percentile) you can be put on probation and will not have the option of retesting or using another form of evaluation.
Most parents test children in the spring. You must allow plenty of time to receive the tests, do the testing, send them back for scoring, and submit results by August 1st. Also, it is wise to test early enough so that if your child scores low, you have time to retest and get those results to the superintendent by August 1st. We suggest that you test in April or May. It is not necessary that your child have completed his full year of school before you test. The scoring takes into the account that month that your child tested and the amount of time left before he should be finished.
Some school officials may want to know who tested your children, require you to use a particular test, or place other restrictions on your testing. HSLDA has told us that, “There is no requirement that the test administrator or evaluator be approved in advance. Under the law, any standardized test can be administered anywhere, anytime, by anybody, as long as the test results show the child has scored at or above the 4th stanine. Of course, each parent is responsible to follow the test manufacturer’s standards which may include having the test administered by a person with a college degree.”
Below are resources for commonly used tests. These resources are gathered by HEAV and were current as of March 2002:
