The Other Achievement Gap: Children With Learning Disabilities

By Nirvi Shah from On Special Education

Just in time for Learning Disabilities Awareness Month, a new report is out that discusses how to help more children with dyslexia become proficient readers.

Without these students—who combined with other students with learning disabilities make up about 5 percent of the school-age population—schools can't overcome the achievement gap, the report notes.

The report, commissioned by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, offers a number of recommendations for policymakers and educators. They include: high expectations for all learners with accountability measures that indicate how individual students are doing; early-childhood programs that prepare children for reading and identify young children at risk of having reading problems; curricula, instructional practices and tools, and assessments that are science-based and accessible to all students; and teacher training and ongoing professional development that incorporate findings from neuroscience as well as best practices for how to teach reading.

Read more HERE.

New Center Will Aim to Develop More Effective Special Educators

How can special education teachers be more effective? The federal Education Department is funding a new center to find out.

The department's office of special education said Thursday it will spend up to $5 million on the creation of the Center to Support the Development of Effective Educators to Serve Students with Disabilities.

The new center—applications are due Sep. 4—will provide technical assistance to state education departments that are reviewing and reforming certification and licensing standards for teacher preparation programs. It will be expected to work with school districts and colleges and universities.

The standards the groups collaborate on will have to be proven effective through research and help teachers work effectively in inclusive settings.

Notable, the announcement said, is that about 95 percent of the nearly 6 million students with disabilities in public schools spent part or all of the day in general education classrooms.

"As students with disabilities spend an increasing amount of time in general education classrooms, all teachers and leaders must have the knowledge and skills necessary to address their diverse needs," the application request says.

In an interesting contrast to this call for more investment and thought to be put into preparing teachers who work with students with disabilities, last week, U.S. House subcommittee spent a bit of time talking about allowing teachers who are still working on their certification to be considered "highly qualified" under the federal No Child Left Behind law. This is allowed now, but this provision expires soon. Its possible extension has been a source of angst in the special education community. Earlier in July, the House appropriations subcommittee approved extending the provision.

Read more of Nirvi Shah's On Special Education article HERE.

State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Issues Statement on NCLB Waivers

From California Department of Education (CDE) - NEWS RELEASE

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson issued the following statement regarding today's announcement of the first states to be granted waivers from No Child Left Behind requirements:

"California has rejected No Child Left Behind as a broken system that has not worked for our schools or our students. While our state continues to weigh its options regarding a waiver, this much is clear: one top-down decade is enough. The law's failures should prompt a thorough reassessment of the federal role in education, not merely the substitution of one set of inflexible requirements for another.

"Our schools are making great strides—even in a time of terrible budget choices. They deserve relief that does not require them to slow or reverse their progress with no assurance of stability for the long term."

Read Article HERE.

In RTI Era, is Federal Special Education Law Out of Date?

When districts first started adopting response-to-intervention, the approach quickly became the target of criticism from parents who believed school districts were trying to put off more costly special education services.

RTI, an approach that involves using an escalating set of techniques to address skills a student is struggling with, got a boost in 2004, when the federal law changed to require states to let districts use it if they chose.

The hope was that its use would help distinguish between children who truly have specific learning disabilities and students whose learning difficulties could be resolved with general education interventions. Sure enough, in the last few years, the number of students identified as having learning disabilities has dropped.

But there are still lots of questions about how RTI is used, and whether it's being used correctly, considering the federal rules about identifying students with disabilities haven't changed. The RTI Action Network recently posted this piece about whether those rules and RTI jive. It comes almost a year after the federal Department of Education warned states about not using RTI to delay or deny evaluations for special education services.

Read more of Nirvi Shah's On Special Education article HERE.

Teacher Makes a Personal Case for NCLB Waivers

By Greg Mullenholz, Guest Blogger for the ED.gov Blog

I would like President Obama to meet one of my former students, Rashawn*.

Rashawn was a fifth grader, an African-American boy with an Individualized Education Program (IEP). In my classroom he received a bevy of services relating to his learning and academic disabilities, and yet he struggled mightily with reading and math.

Rashawn came from a tough section of the district and lived well below the poverty line in a broken home. He father was incarcerated. He had dreams of playing in the NBA. His smile set him apart, and he was a hard worker, a talker, and a thinker.

Rashawn entered my class in 2008, shortly before the nation elected Barack Obama to be president. He was far behind his peers academically, but he worked hard. Working as a team, a special educator and I provided Rashawn with rigorous instruction, and we set high expectations. We wanted him to succeed, and he wanted to succeed. From the beginning of the year to the end, Rashawn made significant academic progress.

But none of that mattered, under the accountability measures of the No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB). Although he showed academic growth, Rashawn scored as “basic” on Maryland’s tests. According to the statisticians and policymakers, that was a disappointment. As his teacher, NCLB noted that I had failed Rashawn. When my results were printed, he would appear as nothing more than a name and an ID number awash in pink printer ink.

Rashawn is a perfect example of why teachers are crying out for NCLB to be overhauled. NCLB ushered in an era where we no longer ignore children on the periphery. Now, every student counts. That’s one thing NCLB got right.

Unfortunately, the NCLB accountability system fails students like Rashawn because it measures only one piece of data at one point in time. We need an accountability system that acknowledges growth and looks upon every student as an asset, not a deficit. We need our country to measure and reward the growth of our students, not just mark where they place on an arbitrary bar.

I would like President Obama to meet Rashawn. It seems that he had the Rashawns of the world in mind when he granted Secretary Duncan the authority to issue waivers for some areas of NCLB. The President still insists on a high bar for all children, but he gets it that what Rashawn has achieved transcends what is indicated by a single-measure on a poorly-designed bubble test.

I am thankful that with waivers, states won’t be given a pass on maintaining high expectations for all students, and they surely won’t be allowed to toss aside teacher accountability. Our students need schools with high expectations, and states will have to adopt college- and career-ready standards. But they will also be given the chance to innovate and design plans that meet the needs of their unique populations of students. And they will be allowed to use multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, so that teaching competence will no longer be boiled down to a solitary line of printer ink.

I haven’t seen Rashawn in a few years. I hope that he aspires to attend and complete college and to play basketball while he’s there. I dream about him earning a teaching degree and joining me as a colleague. Fixing NCLB would be one way to support all of the Rashawns in the classrooms throughout this great country. Something even better, I think, than meeting the President.

Greg Mullenholz

Greg Mullenholz is a Washington Teaching Ambassador Fellow on loan from Rockville, Md.

*My student’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity.

Article HERE.

1 Percent Means 1 Percent, Except When There's an Exception

For years, the U.S. Department of Education allowed Ohio and a few other states to count more scores than allowed for everyone else as passing when it came exams for students with severe cognitive disabilities, some of whom take tests that are different than other students.

They were making an exception to a rule that said states could only count as passing the scores of up to 1 percent of all students tested when figuring out school ratings under the No Child Left Behind law.

The point of the Education Department's rules about so-called "1 percent" exams (at least for most states) was to ensure that districts don't give alternate exams to student with disabilities who can take the same exams as kids without disabilities. Knowing they can only count 1 percent of the scores regardless of how many kids take the exams was supposed to curb the inappropriate use of these alternate tests, because the scores from the remaining alternate exams count as failing when tallying a district's rating.

Read more of Nirvi Shah's On Special Education article HERE.

President Obama Calls on Congress to Fix No Child Left Behind

From The White House, Office of the Press Secretary says that President Obama Calls on Congress to Fix No Child Left Behind Before the Start of the Next School Year to read more click on: Statements & Releases