CEC Gives Cautious Approval to New Regulations on Assessing Students with Disabilities

ARLINGTON, VA, APRIL 5, 2007—The new regulations on modified academic achievement standards include a number of provisions that will enable educators to better assess the academic progress of students with disabilities while still maintaining high standards for them, says the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). The new regulations will also enable schools to show more accurately that students with disabilities are meeting No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB’s) adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements.

While the modified academic achievement standards is a step in the right direction, CEC believes we have not yet reached our goals for providing appropriate assessments for students with disabilities and including those scores in the accountability system. In CEC’s reauthorization recommendations for NCLB, CEC has--and continues to--recommend that states be allowed to pilot progress measures that use children’s growth in achievement as well as their performance on standardized assessments. CEC says measuring achievement growth is essential for children with disabilities, as the academic progress of some students with special needs is not reflected on standardized assessment.

States may count proficient and advanced test scores on these alternate assessments for up to 2 percent of all students assessed when calculating AYP under NCLB. (Up to 1 percent of students with severe cognitive disabilities may take alternate assessments aligned to alternate achievement standards when calculating AYP.)

Many of the positive provisions of the new regulations are those CEC supported. They include:

• Flexibility within the 1 and 2 percent options as long as the number of students taking alternate assessments do not exceed 3 percent. For example, a state may have .5 percent of its students take alternate assessments for students with significant disabilities and 2.5 percent take the alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards.
• Students with disabilities may take state assessments more than once, and states can use their highest score for AYP calculations.
• The scores of students with disabilities who have moved out of special education can be counted in the special education subgroup for two years, thus giving a more accurate picture of the academic progress of these students.
• States that opt to develop alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards have two years to develop the assessments. The two-year transition period can begin at any time.
• The subgroup size for students with disabilities is the same as that for other subgroups, ensuring that students with disabilities are included in accountability measures.
• Federal funds are available to help states develop assessments based on modified academic achievement standards.

CEC supports continued research to ensure that alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards best meet the needs of this subgroup of students with disabilities, and the association anticipates working with the Department of Education and educators in the field as we progress.

Reference:

http://www.cec.sped.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=8177&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm

Reaction Joyce:

This trends talk about how to improve the educational success of individuals with disabilities. and/or gifts. It also talks about how states may develop modified academic achievement standards and alternate assessments based on those standards. Students who are eligible for these measures are those who do not have a significant cognitive disability but may not achieve grade-level proficiency and likely will not reach grade-level achievement in the same time frame as other students. These students are taught the same general education content as non-disabled students. The alternate assessments these students may be given measure their mastery of grade level content but are not as difficult as those administered to non-disabled students.