AP/Washington Post:

Visiting West Virginia on the first stop of a 15-state “listening tour,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan heard from a special education teacher who said mandated standardized tests are hurtful to students who don’t have the ability to pass them. Duncan later said the teacher was right.

“To have a child taking a test that it is literally impossible for them to pass and having that humiliation, and holding schools accountable for that, that doesn’t make sense,” Duncan said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Teacher Lynn Reichard said she worked all year to build the self-esteem of her students with intellectual disabilities, only to see the students distraught when required to take tests they knew they couldn’t pass.

“They feel so good about themselves, and then they look at a two-paragraph reading passage, and they know six words,” Reichard said. “I have one child here that’s a nonreader, and she’s going to have to take the test, and she’s going to cry.

“There’s just got to be another answer for that,” Reichard said.

Earlier posts here.

From the Washington Post:

A school in suburban Maryland that serves medically fragile students with severe physical and cognitive disabilities has been put on a state watch list of underperforming schools, even though its reading and math scores were on target. The problem: poor attendance.

Experts say the dilemma of Stephen Knolls School in Montgomery County highlights the way students with disabilities can get caught in the politics of the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

The dispute offers “a classic case of how well-intentioned federal policy has gone awry,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. “This district is earnestly trying to follow the spirit of the No Child law.”

Related story from the Houston Chronicle:

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From USA Today:

Groups representing people with Down syndrome say Sarah Palin could help boost efforts to help people with disabilities live more independently.

Among the priorities they cited were additional funding for physical therapy after birth, long-term financial incentives to help people with Down syndrome pay housing and medical bills into adulthood, and strengthening the No Child Left Behind law.

They also called for lifting the $2,000 cap on assets for Medicaid eligibility requirements, because the cap encourages people with disabilities to make less money in order to qualify for federal benefits.

Madeleine Will, vice president of public policy for the National Down Syndrome Society, said advocates also want Congress to make changes such as:

• Requiring doctors to provide more detailed information about Down syndrome to parents who receive prenatal and postnatal diagnoses, including life expectancy data and contacts of local support groups. The idea has support from lawmakers on both sides of the abortion issue.

• Allowing families to save money in tax-exempt accounts that can be used to pay for expenses associated with education, medical treatment and employment training.

Editors at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel challenge the No Child Left Behind Law, saying its standards for students with disabilities are unfair and impractical. Milwaukee’s prestigious Rufus King High School school was cited last week for lack of adequate yearly academic progress among students with special needs.

… is it practical to suppose that all students with special needs can compete in reading and math with others who don’t have those needs?

Surely, the term “special needs” exists for a reason. If King is under serving these students, the district must deal with that. But if the measure for determining this depends on students with learning disabilities scoring on par with students without these needs, this is too high a bar.

By all means, have standards for special needs children. But make them fair. On this score, NCLB unfairly punishes schools.

High school special education teacher Wayne Grytting, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, says state bureaucracy is needlessly denying students with disabilities the chance to graduate with a diploma. It’s not fair to withhold diplomas because teachers can’t figure out the rules for submitting portfolios for student work, he says.

Last year, half of all disabled students failed the portfolio, many because of unseen errors by their teachers. You would be hard pressed to find a special-ed teacher who is not aghast at what we are being mandated to do. State education “experts” act like astrologers pretending to do science.

At our high school, disabled students are learning to cook, swim, use PowerPoint, garden, bag groceries, climb rock walls, use Metro, paddle canoes, manage recycling, surf the Internet, do pottery and woodcrafts. We’d love to produce meaningful portfolios that respect the richness of what our students accomplish.

Anonymous comments on Grytting’s op-ed question whether students in special education should be receiving diplomas at all, and whether parents should be responsible for all life-long costs of their children. Many of the posts are hostile.

See related post here.

From the Washington Post:

A new report from the Montgomery County [Maryland] school system says the county’s special-education teachers are having so much trouble administering an alternative version of the Maryland School Assessment to severely disabled students that nearly one-fifth of students tested last year failed solely because of errors committed by the teachers.

The finding is significant because of the difficulty Montgomery and other counties have had in meeting annual targets under the No Child Left Behind Act for special-education students.

Special education was a factor for 15 of the 21 Montgomery schools that missed annual targets last year under the education law. Four elementary and four middle schools missed adequate progress goals solely because of special-education scores.

Among the report’s recommendations: mandatory training for teachers who give the test.

‘No Child Left Behind’ is credited with pushing many to higher levels of achievement

By Maria Glod in the Washington Post

See related post: Students in the mainstream, but isolated

Parents of students with disabilities hail the federal No Child Left Behind law as an important ally in their efforts to secure the best education possible for their children. It appears that Congress could soon revive stalled efforts to renew it. Disability rights activists are urging quick action amid concerns that a delay until the next administration would put the measure on the back burner.

Glod visits with Stephen Sabia, a Montgomery County ninth-grader who is reading “Romeo and Juliet” and studying the Holocaust and World War II for honors history and English. Stephen has Down syndrome. Ricki Sabia, Stephen’s mother, says the law “really pushed the envelope for expectations for Stephen.”

The six-year-old law’s requirement to raise student achievement across the board has forced schools to pay attention as never before to special-needs children who too often had been written off as incapable of handling the same lessons as peers in mainstream classrooms. Students with disabilities have made some strides in math and reading on state and national tests in recent years, although experts debate whether the law is responsible.

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