Because
of the alignment of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and
No Child Left Behind, special education students are expected to have
Schools,
school districts and states are required to measure and report this progress as
part of the NCLB accountability system.
It
has been suggested that changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
in its next reauthorization should allow schools to use the Individualized
Education Program (IEP) as the primary accountability tool for demonstrating the
progress of special education students in order to achieve Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP).
There
are a multitude of reason why a student’s IEP cannot and should not be used for
NCLB accountability.
1.
The IEP is a tool that serves multiple functions. The
IEP outlines agreed upon services and supports required to address the individual
needs of a student so as to enable the him or her to participate in the regular
education curriculum aligned to the standards set for all and with his or her
peers without disabilities to the maximum extent appropriate.
Additionally, a significant portion of the
IEP meeting and document are devoted to ensuring that the IEP complies with the
procedural requirements of IDEA. Part B
regulations specify the content of the IEP:
§
Statement
of a child’s present level of academic achievement and functional performance
§
Statement
of measurable annual goals designed to meet the child’s needs that result from the
child’s disability to enable a child to
be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum.
§
A
description of how the child’s progress toward meeting the annual goals will be
measured.
§
When
periodic reports on the progress toward meeting annual goals will be provided
to the parents.
§
Statement
of the special education and related services and supplementary aids and services
to be provided to the child.
§
A
statement of the program modifications or supports for school personnel that
will be provided.
§
An
explanation, if any, of the extent to which the child will not participate in
the regular classroom and in extracurricular and nonacademic activities
§
A
statement of the accommodations that are necessary to measure academic
achievement and functional performance of the child on State and district wide
assessments
§
The
projected dates for the beginning, frequency, location and duration of the
special education and related services, supplementary aids and services and
modifications and supports.
§
Transition
services beginning no later than the first IEP after a student turns 16.
§
Statement
of rights that transfer at Age of Majority.
2. Additionally, the IEP has served as a tool for
monitoring individual child progress based only on the effectiveness of the
individualized services and supports developed to address the student’s
disability related educational needs.
IEPs
are not designed or utilized as tools for holding schools accountable for
ensuring that students with disabilities are taught to the academic content and
achievement standards established by the state for all students. As
result student goals are often set too low and do not align with state or
district content standards. Furthermore,
aggregate performance data is impossible to obtain at a school, district or
state level and no consequences are attached to a student’s failure to attain
individual IEP goals.
In fact, recent data indicated that only a few states require that the IEPs of
students with disabilities even address academic content standards.
Congress
acknowledged these problems in the May 9, 1997
Committee on Labor and Human Resources Report accompanying S. 717: “An exclusive focus on the components of
the Individualized Education Program has often resulted in special education
becoming detached from the curriculum and teaching and learning in schools”.
3.
An example of this detachment is illustrated in the following chart contrasting IEP goals that address deficit
areas, strategies, accommodations and modifications with the actual age and
grade level instructional goals based on the general education curriculum in
the general education setting for the same student:
|
Language
Arts/Reading IEP GOAL for 15 year old Maryland student with Down Syndrome |
Actual
instructional goals and activities in the general education classroom and
curriculum school year 2006-2007 |
|
-
Will use word bank, pictures or visual cues to generate and select topics
using graphic organizer, webbing, writing questions on topic and discussion. |
-
Read original text of “Animal Farm”, the No Fear version of Shakespeare’s “As
You Like It” and an abridged version of the Hobbit. |
|
-
Will use writing-to-learn strategies such as journals, listing graphics,
think-aloud’s on paper to connect ideas and thinking about a lesson. |
-
Had 20 grade-level objectives per quarter to master in U.S. History. -
Worked on weather, chemistry and geology in science including Power Point
presentation and oral presentations on grade level topics |
|
*IEP Progress
Report to Parents:
|
Progress
Report to parents: Quarterly grades
based on the same assessment and projects used by the rest of the class. Takes regular grade level assessment under
NCLB and earned 337 in |
*Of note as well is the minimal content of the IEP Report about progress
toward achieving the annual goal contrasted with the detailed information
reported to the parents regarding their son’s progress in
4. IEP Teams do not make curriculum
decisions. Only 57 percent of special
education teachers say that they are “very” familiar with their state’s
academic content for the subjects they teach. ( Source: Quality counts 2004: Count Me In, Education
week 2004) In fact, the earliest special education Supreme
Court decision, Rowley in 1982, defined an “appropriate” education for
children with disabilities as
“reasonably calculated to confer educational benefit”. This set a low and confusing standard for
accountability until NCLB shifted the policy goal for students to that of
attaining a standard level of performance.
Under NCLB individual instruction has taken on new meaning as all
students are to be held to grade level content standards and all but 30 percent
held to the same achievement standards as non-disabled peers (Source: Closing
the Achievement Gap and Students with disabilities. M McLaughlin).
5.
IDEA and NCLB are not incompatible.
While there might
be a gap – sometimes significant – between a student’s present level of
performance and the skills and knowledge required to meet grade level standards
– the IEP should address what needs to
happen in order for the student to meet the standards. Once the IEP team has analyzed a student’s
current performance and determined what the student needs to learn, the
“specially designed instruction” (i.e. special education) and related services
and support can be developed (Source: Aligning the IEP
and Academic Content Standards to Improve Achievement, C. Cortiella 2006).
As one
experienced parent advocate has said “The IEP says how our kids will
learn. No Child Left Behind says what they will learn”.
6. 14% of
public school students currently receive special education supports
nationally. That rate is as high as 20%
in some states. To exclude students with
disabilities from the determination of Adequate Yearly Progress as required by
NCLB, or to marginalize their participation by using IEP goal attainment as an
alternative measure will limit accountability for one of every 5 to 7 public
school students and will surely result in a violation of their civil rights
under section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.