Autism Spectrum Disorder Prevalence Rises in New CDC Data Report

About 1 in 68 children in 10 states monitored by the Centers for Disease Control have been identified with an autism spectrum disorder, the highest prevalence of the diagnosis since the CDC first started monitoring this in 2000.

In 2008, the estimate was that approximately 1 in 88 children in the monitored states had been diagnosed with an ASD. In 2006 the ratio was 1 in 110, and in estimates for 2002 and 2000, it was 1 in 150. 

Read more of Christina Samuels On Special Education article HERE.

Special Ed. Grants Awarded for Data, Parent Assistance, School Climate

The Education Department has announced grant awards for several areas related to special education:

Data: Westat, Inc. of Rockville, Md. will receive $6.5 million to create the NationalTechnical Assistance Center to Improve State Capacity to Accurately Collect and Report IDEA Data (one hopes that the name will eventually be something catchier than NTACISCACRID). Westat will work with states to upgrade their ability to report high-quality data under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Part of the center's work will also be to help states with their state performance plans and annual performance reports, which is already seeing changes under the department's shift to "results-driven accountability."  

Parent Assistance: More than $14 million will be used to operate eight special education parent technical assistance centers that work with families of children with disabilities. The Education Department already funds 98 parent centers around the country; these newly funded entities will provide support and resources to the centers in a given region. The department has created a list of regional contacts.

Read more of Christina Samuels' On Special Education article HERE.

New 'Double-Testing' Flexibility and Students With Disabilities

My colleague Catherine Gewertz blogged earlier today that states have been given the option by the Education Department of suspending for one year their own state exams for the 2013-14 school year, if they are administering the Common Core field tests being designed by the two common-assessment consortia in math and English/language arts.

Digging further into the guidance from the department released Tuesday, this one-year flexibility waiver—intended to help states avoid "double-testing" their students—has some particular points relevant for students with disabilities. Among them:

Read more of Christina Samuels On Special Education article HERE.

Ed. Dept. Finds Areas to Improve in Review of Common-Core Test Accessibility

Both of the consortia tasked with creating assessments for the Common Core State Standards have made progress but need to work on accommodations and accessibility, according to a recent technical review conducted by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, should consider expanding the training it provides test-item writers in the area of accessibility and accommodations, the department review panel wrote in a recently-released memo. PARCC, which comprises 21 states and the District of Columbia, recently released the first edition of its accommodations and accessibility manual, which is meant to guide school teams in figuring out the type of test assistance that is appropriate for students with disabilities. Technical reviewers from the Education Department said they appreciated seeing the manual.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, made up of 25 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands, was told that it should increase the involvement of special education experts in the test development process. The consortium was praised for incorporating universal design into the item writing process.

Read more of Christina Samuels' On Special Education article HERE.

Florida Law Enhances Special Education Rights

Florida enacted a new law this week intended to reiterate the rights of parents of special education students, including a provision that parents must agree to have their child placed on a track to earn a non-standard diploma, and that schools cannot discourage parents from bringing an adult of their choice to individualized education program meetings.

The text of the law, Senate Bill 1108, has been helpfully summarized by Disability Rights Florida, an advocacy group. The advocacy group supported the changes, said Ann Siegel, the managing attorney for the organization's education team.

Many of the new provisions underline rights that were already a part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but that parents nevertheless had a difficult time enforcing, Siegel said. Parents have always been a part of IEP team meetings, but Siegel said she has heard of cases where schools were shifting students onto special diploma tracks without giving parents an opportunity to object, or to even see the information that was prompting such a decision. The parents were then forced to shoulder the burden of proving that such a placement was inappropriate. Special, non-standard diplomas also cannot be used to enroll in college or the military, so a student with a special diploma can have limited options after graduation, she said.

Read more of Christina Samuel's On Special Education article HERE.

Special Education Essential to Preschool Plans, Says Advocacy Group

Boosting funding for young children with disabilities covered under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act should be a part of the Obama administration's plans to expand early-learning opportunities, says a letter from the Council for Exceptional Children's division for early childhood.

Most of the federal government's funding goes to what is known as Part B of the special education law, which serves students from 3 to 22 years old. However, another part of the law, Part C, helps pay for early-intervention services for babies and toddlers. While school-age children covered under the law receive "individualized education programs," the babies and toddlers get "individualized family service plans," which support that child's family. About 450,000 children were covered by the law in 2011, the latest year for which statistics are available. (In comparison, about 6.5 million students were served that year under IDEA Part B.)

The CEC's early-childhood division says that states applying for early-learning grants should explicitly involve the Part B and Part C programs in their ongoing implementation plans. "Partnerships at the state and local levels will ensure that: young children with disabilities and their families have meaningful access to early-learning programs; service providers that work with these IDEA programs have access to professional development opportunities; and state systems' efforts focus on all young children including those with disabilities," the letter states.

Read more of Christina Samuel's On Special Education article HERE.

Resources For Special Education And The Common Core

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), one of the two consortia tasked with creating tests for the Common Core State Standards, has released a list of resources for special educators who want to learn more about how the education standards may affect children with disabilities.

The list is not comprehensive, but it offers a good general overview, with links to basic information on the common core as well as lesson ideas and other tools. The education standards have been adopted by all but four states.

Read more of Christina Samuel's On Special Education article HERE.

Disability, Literacy Groups Unite On Common Reading Goal

By Christina Samuels from On Special Education

The push to have all children reading on grade level by third grade must include students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, say two advocacy groups who have bonded over this common goal.

The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, based in New Haven, Conn., has made grants to support children with learning disabilities and their families since 1992. The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is a coalition of philanthropies and associations working towards improving literacy among low-income children. The two organizations have come together to promote a new initiative called"Don't 'Dys' Our Kids," which offers policy solutions for including students with disabilities like dyslexia in literacy promotion efforts.

For example, the groups promote the idea of early identification and research-based interventions for children with reading disabilities, including individualized learning profiles for struggling students. The groups also want to see improved training for teachers and more family engagement for parents of children with dyslexia.

Read more HERE.

Common Core Test Group Seeks Comment on Writing-Support Accommodation

A 23-state assessment consortium is looking for feedback on another piece of the test-accommodations manual it is drafting, this time focusing on proposed policies for the use of scribes and word-prediction software.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, is one of two groups that is creating tests for the Common Core State Standards. Earlier this month, public comment closed on two other draft policies, relating to the accommodations such as human read-aloud and calculators. The policies will eventually be included in a comprehensive "accommodations manual" that will guide schools and districts in how to administer the tests.

The scribe accommodation proposal says that scribes--a human or device that records what a student dictates--should only be used for:

•A student with a physical disability that impedes the motor process of writing, or,
•A student with a disability that significantly impacts the area of written expression.

The proposal goes on to state: "For students identified with a disability that significantly impacts the area of written expression, to be eligible for the scribe accommodation, a student must also meet the following conditions: Student receives ongoing, research-based interventions for written expression, as deemed appropriate by the [individualized education program] team and indicated as a specific instructional goal in the student's IEP; and student only has access to written expression during routine instruction through the use of a scribe, outside of time spent in direct writing instruction." 

Read more of Christina Samuel's On Special Education article HERE.

Disability Advocacy Coalition Criticizes ESEA Waivers

A coalition of groups representing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities outlined its concerns with the waivers from certain requirements in the No Child Left Behind law that the U.S. Department of Education has granted to states.

The Collaboration to Promote Self-Determination released its letter Thursday, the same day a Senate committee held a hearing on the waivers, which have been issued using the education secretary's broad waiver authority—and without much Congressional oversight. The collaboration, formed in 2008, includes groups such as the National Down Syndrome Society, the Autism Society, the National Fragile X Foundation, and the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Among its concerns are that states haven't made a strong effort to get meaningful from people who represent the disability community; the waivers diminish subgroup accountability by allowing states to consolidate them into so-called "super-subgroups;" and that states are failing to address in detail how they plan to transition severely cognitively disabled students who are taking alternate assessments to common college- and career-ready standards.

Read more of Christina Samuels' On Special Education article HERE.

Va. Special Educator Leader Forms Partnership For Students

Judy Sorrell, who coordinates special education services for students in six Virginia counties, says she first knew she wanted to be a special educator when she saw how a younger cousin with Down syndrome was isolated from other students at her school.

Sorrell, who is now the director of the Shenandoah Valley Regional Program for Special Education has spent 33 years in the field. Among her achievements is expanding the capacity of her districts to provide therapy to students with autism by partnering with a state organization that provides teacher training. That work, which was recognized by the state as an example of a successful collaboration, also led to Sorrell's selection as one of Education Week's Leaders to Learn From for 2013.

Read more of Christina Samuel's On Special Education article HERE.

Group Tackles Evaluation of Special Education Teachers

For several years now, teacher evaluation has dominated education-policy discussions in statehouses and otherwise. But for the most part, the country's 430,000 special education teachers have been left out of the discussion.

The Council for Exceptional Children is trying to change that. In October, the advocacy group released a paper detailing its position on special education teacher evaluation. And today, about 30 leaders from membership organizations, state and local education offices, and schools gathered in Arlington, Va., to discuss the CEC's recommendations.

The topic is quite complicated—even more complicated than, well, general teacher evaluation. As the CEC President Margaret McLaughlin explained, special education teachers can serve in any number of capacities—as intervention specialists, co-teachers, lead teachers, and consultants to general education teachers—and with students who have a wide variety of needs. The central issue, McLaughlin said, is figuring out how to evaluate performance in a way that "can accommodate the breadth and variety of experiences and expectations we have for the teachers of these students."

Read more of guest blogger Liana Heitin's On Special Education article HERE.

Model Gifted Program to Expand in Three Urban District

A well-respected, full-day gifted education program, the Renzulli Academy in Connecticut, will be replicated in three other urban school districts.


The Hartford Courant reported recently that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awarded the University of Connecticut's Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development a $500,000 grant to replicate the Renzulli Academy model in three other urban school districts.

The existing school, named after a researcher on gifted education, Joseph Renzulli, opened in 2009 in Hartford, Conn., serving students in 4th grade through 6th grade. It now has 115 students in 4th through 9th grades and the goal is for it to have a full elementary, middle, and high school program.

The newspaper reported that nearly all of the program's students are minorities, many of them are African-American, and about 70 percent come from low-income families.

State laws governing provisions for gifted students vary. In Connecticut, school districts must identify students who are gifted but for whom no extra services are required. The National Association for Gifted Children argued recently that the United States as a whole doesn't pay enough attention, or provide enough resources for, gifted and talented students, especially those from low-income families.

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

Study: People Who Are Blind Can Learn to Process Visual Input

People who are blind can learn to process visual input through sound—even after a lifetime of blindness, a new study published this month in the journal Neuron finds.

In their studies, researchers at the Hebrew University Medical School in Israel taught congenitally blind adults to use sensory substitution devices—non-invasive sensory aids that provide visual information—through the senses they do have. For example, using a visual-to-auditory sensory aid, images from a video camera are converted into "soundscapes" representing the images. These allowed users to listen to and then interpret the visual information coming from the camera or see the sounds.

"The adult brain is more flexible that we thought," said senior author of the study Amir Amedi of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada at the Hebrew University.

After being taught how to use the devices, blind people could use them to learn to read, with sounds representing visual images of letters, the researchers found, using a region of the brain called the visual word form area. In those who are sighted, this region is activated by seeing and reading letters.

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

District of Columbia Settles Lawsuit Over Transport of Special Ed. Students

After nearly 18 years, the transportation of students with disabilities in the District of Columbia is expected to soon become free of federal oversight.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said last week that the end of the oversight, triggered by a 1995 lawsuit, Petties v. District of Columbia, is a major accomplishment.

In recent years, District of Columbia public schools has spent about $28 million to upgrade the district's school bus fleet used to take about 3,100 students with disabilities to class. Overall, 77,000 students are enrolled in the district, although many students with disabilities attend classes at private schools found to be better able to meet their needs than public schools.

Over the years, a special master appointed to oversee transportation, Elise Baach, had found that some students were never picked up or picked up late, missing valuable time in school. Then two years ago, the district regained control of oversight of transportation of students with disabilities from the special master.

In October, the transportation supervisor found that the district was meeting requirements of 33 of 34 performance measures. The sticking point remains on-time-arrival performance, although the district continues to improve in this area. And earlier this month, the district took control of the payment and dispute-resolution process related to transportation.

Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia set a Dec. 19 date for a hearing for a final hearing on dismissal of the case.

"Looking back, we understood that we were facing an enormously difficult task when we took over student transportation services two years ago," said Hosanna Mahaley Jones, state superintendent of schools. "Because of this extraordinary team effort and the commitment to excellent service provided by everyone at the Office of the state superintendent of education's department of transportation, we are now awaiting a decision that will reassure all of those that have helped us achieve this milestone that their efforts have been formally recognized."

Read Nirvi Shah's On Special Education article HERE.

Advocates: Uphold Grad. Rate Accountability Under NCLB Waivers

Some disability advocacy groups are joining forces with others concerned about whether states will continue to be held accountable for students graduating from high school now that so many states have been granted No Child Left Behind waivers.

The Learning Disabilities Association said last week it has signed onto a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan with a number of other organizations that questions whether states that have received waivers are in violation of federal regulations issued in 2008 linking strong accountability and improvement in high school graduation rates. The National Down Syndrome Society, National Down Syndrome Congress, Easter Seals, the National Center on Learning Disabilities, and National Disability Rights Network, among others, have also signed on.

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

Ed. Dept. Slashes S.C. Special Education Budget, Permanently

The U.S. Department of Education withheld $36 million in special education funds from South Carolina earlier this month, carrying out a penalty imposed on the state for cutting its own spending on special needs students three years ago.

In what may be a first-of-its-kind penalty, the feds used a provision in federal law that allows cutting a state's special education grant, permanently, if the state slashes its special education budget without the right justification. UPDATE: Kansas' state grant for special education was also cut this month, by about $2 million.

The $36 million cut represents about a 9 percent deduction in South Carolina's special education budget. It won't be felt this year, however.

State Superintendent Mick Zais convinced the South Carolina legislature to appropriate one-time funds in case of this scenario. So, "South Carolina students will not be harmed or denied services this school year because of the federal government's draconian cut," said Jay Ragley, South Carolina's director of the office of legislative affairs.

But the catch with the federal penalty: It goes on forever. In other words, South Carolina's budget will be cut by $36 million this year and every year going forward.

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

Group Offers Yardstick for Evaluating Speech-Language Pathologists

With value-added assessments for teachers growing more popular among states and local districts, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association decided it was time to create new accountability measures for speech-language pathologists.

The Performance Assessment of Contributions and Effectiveness, or PACE, has been designed to "more accurately reflect" the speech-language pathologist's role in furthering a child's academic success, according to a press release from the association yesterday.

The measure consists of a portfolio review, self-reports, and on-site classroom observation. The PACE matrix focuses on demonstrated knowledge of subject area and ability to provide appropriate services compliant with state and federal regulations. It also looks for collaboration with teachers and family, as well as efforts to seek out sufficient professional development opportunities. Student, parent, and teacher checklists are also included on the PACE webpage for school administrators' use. The ASHA says states and local districts can use all or part of the entire document in the development of their own measures for speech-language pathologists.

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

Jobs of Thousands of Special Education Teachers At Risk

A new report from Democratic members of the House Appropriations Committee says that those looming automatic cuts to federal spending will take an especially big bite out of special education.

The report issued last week says 12,000 special education teachers and aides could lose their jobs if automatic cuts in federal special education grants to states go through.

These automatic cuts, the wonky term for which is sequestration, are set to take effect Jan. 2. They stem from Congress' disagreement over raising the federal debt ceiling last summer. Lawmakers decided they needed to cut $1.2 trillion out of the federal budget over the next 10 years. The plan was to work on a bipartisan agreement to figure out what those cuts should be, but since they didn't figure out a compromise, across-the-board budget cuts go into effect automatically. (For schools, the single silver lining is that the cuts wouldn't really be felt until the 2013-14 school year.)

The White House had already warned that cuts to special education and other education spending would be steep: an 8.2 percent cut to almost every U.S. Department of Education program. That would mean special education programs, funded at about $12.6 billion, would be cut by about $1 billion.

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

Decades-Old Suit Over Special Education Services in Baltimore Comes to a Close

A nearly 30-year-old lawsuit over special education services in Baltimore has finally been settled.

Vaughn G., et al., v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, was filed by the Maryland Disability Law Center as a way to address delayed evaluations for students with disabilities, a violation of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

The 84,000-student district agreed, in 1984, to find ways to eliminate the delays in evaluation and improve special education overall. But for years, the district failed to meet any of the deadlines agreed to in the original consent decree. Several additional agreements between the district and the lawyers representing students with disabilities attempted to resolve the deep-rooted problems, with little success.

But in March 2010, Baltimore entered into a settlement agreement in the lawsuit, which the district called a probationary period. The city had to continue providing special-needs students with services, give them support in obtaining a regular education, and work to reduce the numbers that are suspended each year during that time. "The probationary period is now over," the district said in a written statement today. The case "is officially closed."

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