The No Child Left Behind Act and Students with Disabilities

Q. How does the December 9, 2003, regulation change the Act's implications for students with disabilities?

A.   If the Law (NCLB)  is enforced, schools will be accountable for results.

• Over time, the Act may force schools to use research-based methodologies and other services to improve the education of children with disabilities and gain them access to the general curriculum.
• Unfortunately, the new regulation allows schools to leave one percent of its students behind.

The Controversy

Background

The NCLB Act.

1. To oversimplify, the NCLB Act requires school districts to have all students proficient in reading and math by the year 2014.
2. (All means 95%)
3. Districts must make incremental  progress over the next  10 years at a rate set by each State's Bd of Ed.  (e.g.: 35% proficiency in 2003, 40% in 2004, 45% in 2005, etc.). Illinois rate.
   
4. Each subgroup of a school must make Adequate Yearly Progress, including
1. economically disadvantaged students
2. students of racial and ethnic groups
3. students with limited English proficiency, and
4. students with disabilities.
5. A school which does not make adequate yearly progress must start a school improvement plan, which may mean instituting:
• research-based methodologies,
• professional development
• mentoring programs
• offer supplement services
• offering students a transfer to other schools
• restructuring the school
• other improvements, and ultimately, a restructuring of the school.
  
6. Severity of improvement plan depends on whether there is one year or two of failures.
7. Adequate Yearly Progress is determined by standardized assessments against the the State's learning standards.

Other laws apply:

• The U.S. Constitution,
• the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA),
• the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and
• section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act,

These laws state that it would be illegal to discriminate by excluding children with disabilities from assessments.

Rationale for including all children in assessments:

• Assessments are beneficial to students, and excluding students with disabilities from these benefits of assessments would be illegal.
• The purpose of the Act is not to leave anyone behind, not to leave leave children with disabilities behind.
• Exclusion from assessments could prevent someone from seeking a post secondary education.
• Assessments are beneficial because they provide valuable information indicating individual progress and evaluating educational programs.
• Assessments show whether a school's program is worth anything or severely misguided.
• More attention is spent on drafting goals and methods in IEPs.
  
• Thus, assessments lead to improvements for students.

The Compromise Regulation

The rule:

• These students will thus not be judged against grade-level standards, for which they would not meet proficiency.
• Schools are not limited to giving alternate assessments to 1%, but if they exceed 1%, the excess will be counted against then.
• Schools are not restricted to just the most cognitively impaired students, but have flexibility to choose who gets one.

Why 1%?  Many educators wanted a higher percentage.

• In line with statistical studies of the most cognitively impaired population.
• Studies cited say that if you increase the percent, schools will institute more IEPs and call more students disabled to get them out of the assessment pool.
• Only 9% of disabled students are severely cognitively impaired.
• Don't crimp expectations

Keep High Expectations

• When teachers have low expectations of the students, they do not achieve.
• When high expectations are made, students surprise teachers with results.
• All students deserve a challenging curriculum.

 Alternate Assessments

What are they -- examples

• teacher observation of student making progress
• teacher judging samples of student work
• completion of standardized tasks
• In Illinois, teachers prepare a portfolio of a student's work. (See below).
  

Who decides

Details: An alternate assessment must

• be aligned with a State's content standards
• yield results in reading and math separately
• promote access to the general curriculum
• designed to indicate Adequate Yearly Progress

Requirements for alternate assessments

• Clearly defined structure
• State Board of Education guidelines for IEP teams to apply when determining whether a student's significant cognitive disability justifies alternate assessment
• A report format which clearly indicates student performance in terms of academic achievement standards

The State Board of Education must

• write these alternate assessment standards.
• report to the Feds the number of assessments, alternate assessments and regular assessments with accommodations.
• document that students with the most significant disabilities are, the extent possible, included in the general curriculum.
• promote the use of accommodations to increase the number of children who are scored against grade level standards.
• Somehow ensure that regular and special ed teachers know how to administer assessments.

 The Change in Outlook

IDEA- Believed that by assuring parental involvement in the process, schools will write good IEPs.
NCLB- Believes that from checking assessment results, force schools to make changes.

IDEA- schools waited for students to fail before taking action
NCLB- schools must be proactive and teach children while their minds are still open to reading.

IDEA - Schools interpreted laws to say schools decide on a methodology.
NCLB - Schools must use research-based methodologies.

IDEA- Schools said students need only make some progress.
NCLB- Schools must use best practices.

IDEA- Schools need only assure process with no accountability for results.
NCLB- Schools are accountable for achieving results.

Goals- must now be written to achieve and to reference State standards.
All students must have access to the general curriculum.

IDEA- Parents enforce through due process individually for each student.
NCLB- State Bd of Ed and Fed OSEP enforce compliance broadly.

IDEA - Schools could put students into a "Functional Curriculum" of life-skills with little academics
NCLB - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are essential workplace, functional skills, too.

IDEA- schools spent too much fighting programs that worked.

 The Effects

General Effects of NCLB

• Positive benefits for children with Learning Disabilities such as dyslexia and speech delays who are not in the 1%, since schools will be forced to use research-based methodologies to get them to read.
• Since more General-Ed children will learn to read, fewer children will be placed in Special-Ed, conserving resources.
• Funding for more training of teachers
  
• Uncertain future for the most-impaired one-percent of students.

Schools will suspend students rather than assess them.

In a disturbing trend, some agencies have already reported that schools are increasingly attempting to use the juvenile court system to rid themselves of students they do not want to educate.  The juvenile court system seldom checks to see if the student was a low achiever because of a learning disability.  IDEA requires schools to evaluate students for disabilities if the student shows signs of a disability.  Also, IDEA states once a student is identified as a student with a disability, a school cannot suspend a student for more than 10 days per year for an action which is a manifestation of the disability.  In 2003, schools administrators approached Congress to enable themselves to suspend students even when the school is the cause of the misbehavior and the school has failed to implement the IEP which would have prevented the misbehavior.  The proposed legislation is still pending in Congress.

Time Delays

• Schools slowly build up to 95% proficiency- gradually rising to the year 2014.
• Schools use improvement plans with extra programs only after they fail to show adequate yearly progress.
• The level of intervention increases as the years of failing to meet adequate yearly progress build up.
• By high school, fewer assessments, too late for many children.

 Questions for the future

when neither has shown much interest in enforcing IDEA?
(The National Council for Disabilities reported that the government is not enforcing IDEA, leaving the expense and burden to parents.
See "Back to School" report.)

Under IDEA, States were required to implement an alternate assessment as of July 1, 2000.

Does it make sense that those who are supposed to be held accountable are the ones preparing the results?

• (Teachers prepare the student's alternate assessment portfolio which is the work to be evaluated for progress)
• Districts say that the compiling of a portfolio is so tedious that it in itself is a disincentive to placing a child on an alternate assessment.
• In Illinois, portfolios are sent downstate for uniform review.
  

Questions existing before the regulation:

• NCLB Act requires "highly qualified" teachers for special ed by the end of the 2005-06 school year.  Where will they all come from?
• Will students with disabilities qualify for  the "21st Century " Reading programs of NCLB?

Witnesses Urge Congress to “Stay the Course” on No Child Left Behind Standards

 Links

"Children with Disabilities Under No Child Left Behind: Myths and Realities" 
 
webpage:  http://www.wrightslaw.com/nclb/info/myths.realities.napas.htm 
pdf    :  http://www.wrightslaw.com/nclb/info/myths.realities.napas.pdf

For a comprehensive analysis of NCLB, see:
http://www.wrightslaw.com/nclb/index.htm
EdWeek panel discussion after the regulation

Illinois Alternate Assessment (IAA) home page
IAA Manual (pdf)

 Illinois Alternate Assessments

The IAA isn't like a standard paper-and-pencil test. Instead it is a portfolio of student work and other materials collected
at two points in the school year. The materials can include samples of student work, photos of the student doing work
in school or at home and teachers’ summaries of what students have learned. The portfolio demonstrates students’
learning in reading, writing, and mathematics at grades 3, 5, 8, and 11, and in science and social science at grades 4, 7,
and 11.

Trained scorers (certified teachers) evaluate each portfolio on several dimensions:

•       Student progress in the academic subject.
•       Relevance of the portfolio items to the Illinois Learning Standards.

Illinois NCLB Reading and Math Proficiency  Targets

      2003 40% 
      2004 40% 
      2005 47.5% 
      2006 47.5% 
      2007 55% 
      2008 62.5% 
      2009 70% 
      2010 77.5% 
      2011 85% 
      2012 92.5% 
      2013 92.5% 
      2014 100% 
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