IU report: No Child Left Behind Act too stringent for special education

Students in special education programs are being put at a disadvantage by the No Child Left Behind Act, claims a recent IU study conducted by Center for Evaluation and Education Policy and the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. The Nov. 15 report states that "the act's narrow assessment criteria creates pressure for schools to reverse inclusion efforts," which may negatively affect special education dropout rates.\nSandi Cole, director of IIDC's Center on Education and Lifelong Learning, said the No Child Left Behind Act's standards are too stringent for some special education programs.\n"Every student is tested every year, and they have to meet a certain standard or a certain score," Cole said. "If they don't make that, they're considered a failure. The problem with this act is that there are many students with disabilities that have been negatively affected."\nIssues arise because the act includes special education programs in school progress reports, said Lowell Rose, executive director emeritus of Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation in Bloomington. However, if special education students are held to the same standards as other students, such programs will be set up to fail.\nRose said schools then try to cut special education programs so they have a better chance of meeting progress reports and avoiding sanctions imposed by the act.\nRose said Indiana had about 950 schools miss their Adequate Yearly Progress marks last year. Of those schools, 32 percent failed because of the shortcomings of special education programs. Those programs were at least partially responsible for 62 percent of Adequate Yearly Progress failures as well.\nCole, who wrote the report based on the study, said the report itself was not intended to be purely negative. She said she believed including special education students in school curriculum was good, but holding special education programs to normal standards just isn't practical.\n"What the article tries to do is say that it's a good thing that students with disabilities are being included nationally," Cole said. "But there are some things that need to be changed."\nCole said she didn't think the law needed to be struck down, but said she thinks the report showed changes are necessary.\n"Right now, the details in the law are not working for kids," she said. "There are some pieces in the law that need some serious revision."\nRose said he believed the answer could be found in the use of Individual Education Programs, which evaluate a student's abilities on an individual level. The standards each student must meet are based off these evaluations.\n"What I would like to see, and what I think they have to do to make the legislation work, is have special education students operate under federal law, under the IEP," Rose said. "It seems very clear to me that what the standard ought to be, then, for these students, is whatever the IEP specifies as an appropriate program."\nBoth Lowell and Cole said they hoped the report might influence policy makers when the act comes up for revision, which Lowell said will occur in 2007. Cole said she believed the act needed revision based not just on the report, but also on the opinions of teachers who have spoken out against the act.\n"I think that administrators and teachers are speaking strongly about what needs to be changed," Cole said. "The optimistic side of me hopes that the revisions in 2007 will be a better accountability nationally for students"