How Many Students With Disabilities Take the NAEP?
While many students with disabilities are included in state exams in reading, math, and other subjects, in 2005, a Government Accountability Office report found that they are more likely to be excluded from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation's Report Card.
Even before the GAO report, there were studies and questions about whether students with disabilities participated in the NAEP. (And the National Governing Assessment Board did narrow the ways students with disabilities and students learning English could be excluded from the test, as my colleague Stephen Sawchuk noted last year.)
The NAEP's role is to serve as a comparison tool of students' skills from state to state because the test is the same, unlike the patchwork of state tests that measure a variety of skills. Details about the most recent math and reading NAEP scores are due out on Tuesday.
A more recent study, done at least in part in response to the GAO report, takes another look at how many students with disabilities are included in NAEP and why others are not. The report, from the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, notes that a "student with disabilities is assumed to be able to participate in NAEP if he or she participated in the state assessment in the selected subject and can participate with accommodations allowed by NAEP."
But reality hasn't matched that ideal. For example, the study notes that in the 2009 4th grade math version of NAEP, 85.4 percent of students with disabilities took the test. On the 8th grade math test, 78.5 percent of students with disabilities were tested.
Read Nirvi Shah's On Special Education article HERE.
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