Special Ed Students Held to Same Standards Under 'No Child Left Behind'
by Jim Brown
January 16, 2004
(AgapePress) - A study by Education Week magazine finds major gaps between the achievement levels of special and general education students.Senior editor Lynn Olson says the report shows states will have difficulty fulfilling a new federal law requiring all students, including those with disabilities, to meet the same state standards. According to Olson, there are "large" achievement gaps between special education students and other students in terms of the percentage of those who are now proficient on state tests.
"Under the No Child Left Behind Act, all children are supposed to perform at the 'proficient' level on state tests within a decade," Olson says, "so it's going to be a real challenge for states to ensure that students with disabilities meet those goals."
Eighty-four percent of the teachers polled for the Education Week study do not think special ed students should have to take the same tests as other students. But Judy Elliott, assistant superintendent for special education in the Long Beach (California) Unified School District, believes special ed students should take the same tests as other students their age.
"I think in many cases we get real good at admiring the problem instead of creating some solutions to that [problem]," she observes. "Kids [with disabilities] have been able to be very successful in the general education setting in those standards-based classrooms -- with the appropriate accommodations."
She says achieving that involves "looking at your current structure of resources and reallocating it so that the teachers can teach and we can help those kids with accommodations where necessary."
Elliott believes teachers should support the No Child Left Behind Act. "Who's going to stand up and tell which parent their child is going to be left behind?" she asks. "Not to hold them accountable to the same tests is a gigantic loophole."
She contends that those who would say "Yes, we want to provide [students with disabilities] the opportunity to learn, but we don't want to have them take the same tests" is essentially saying "they can be included, but they don't count." The California educator says creating a separate assessment test for those students does nothing but perpetuate the "separate is not equal" philosophy.
