Advocates for Students With Disabilities Balk at Proposed NCLB Changes

Education Week reports:

As Congress wrestles with reauthorizing the 5½-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, some disability-rights advocates fear high standards for students with disabilities could be sacrificed as states seek more flexibility in the law.

Some education groups, as well as lawmakers, have called for more choice in how states can administer the law’s accountability provisions, including greater power for school-based teams to decide what type of assessment a student receiving special education services should take.

That’s a step away from grade-level achievement as a goal for all students, said James H. Wendorf, the executive director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, a New York City-based group that works to provide opportunities for children and adults with learning disabilities. The law needs tweaks, not wholesale changes to its ambitious achievement goals, he believes.

Mr. Wendorf’s group advocates on behalf of the largest group of children served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that mandates special education services for some 6.6 million students nationwide. Students with “specific learning disabilities” account for nearly half the students covered under the law.

“No Child Left Behind has put some real teeth in the IDEA,” Mr. Wendorf said. “It’s given parents some information they wanted desperately, and some information that they didn’t know how much they needed until it was being provided to them.”

The federal law requires schools and districts to report the academic progress of students with disabilities, along with other subgroups of students, such as those in low-income families and those who are learning English. The performance of such subgroups on annual tests in reading and mathematics helps determine whether their schools have made adequate yearly progress toward proficiency for all students, as required under the law.

The reporting provision has forced administrators to pay attention to a group of students that is too often ignored, disability-rights advocates contend. They point to studies that show that students with disabilities, even those with cognitive impairments, can achieve at higher-than-expected levels when teachers hold them to grade-level standards.

As disability-rights advocates lobby federal lawmakers, their focus has been on maintaining what they see as the strong standards of the law, while allowing schools to get credit for a student’s academic growth towards proficiency, even if the student occasionally falls short of a particular benchmark.

For instance, the National Center for Learning Disabilities recently released two reports that outline the progress students with disabilities have made under the No Child Left Behind law, as well as the challenges that remain.

The group says that Congress should maintain the requirements for schools to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP; that all schools should be required to report the performance all student subgroups 20 students or more (current rules allow for a larger minimum); and that students should not be subject to repeated retesting for the purpose of determining AYP. Those recommendations would maintain or tighten existing rules for districts and states.

At the same time, the center supports allowing a “growth model” factor to be a part of No Child Left Behind’s accountability rules. Growth models allow schools to receive credit for improving individual students’ academic performance over time...