Educating One and All Students with Disabilities and Standards-Based Reform (1997) / Chapter Skim
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6 RECOMMENDATIONS
6 RECOMMENDATIONS
Pages 195-210
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From page 195... ...
Under current law and practice, students with disabilities requiring special education are entitled to a free and appropriate education. The appropriate education to which these students are entitled is defined, by professional practice and by state and federal legal provisions, as containing an individual educational program (IEP)
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From page 196... ...
For example, some state content standards recommend specific curricula and instructional methods, whereas others stipulate general kinds of student outcomes, with methods left entirely to local decision makers and classroom teachers. Evidence about special education identification practices indicates that the criteria for defining some milder types of disabilities, particularly learning disabilities, vary widely from place to place and are implemented based on varying local conditions.
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From page 197... ...
States and localities that decide to implement standards-based reforms should design their common content standards, performance standards, and assessments to maximize participation of students with disabilities. To ensure that standards-based frameworks take into account the needs of students with disabilities, the committee recommends that special educators, parents, and the public participate in the development of that framework.
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From page 198... ...
The presumption should be that a student with a disability is included in all standards and assessments unless there is a compelling educational justification for moving him or her away from some aspect of the common standards and assessments. For any deviation from the common content and performance standards, a determination must be made that the alteration is individually appropriate and educationally justified.
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From page 199... ...
To the maximum extent possible, all students with disabilities should be included in the common assessments and appropriate accommodations offered to allow this participation. But when alterations are made for individual students, the committee recommends that those students' education be guided by challenging standards and valid assessments with public accountability for their educational progress.
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From page 200... ...
Information about IEP decisions should be systematically reported in a way that allows school systems to aggregate information across IEPs. Public reporting of aggregated IEP information such as degree of participation in standards and assessments or types of accommodations could inform policy and promote better accountability while still protecting the confidentiality of individual students and parents.
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From page 201... ...
Another model would produce a purely individually referenced standard that can also be objectively observed, such as evidence of growth over time in a student's mastery of various content domains. How alternate standards are set, how progress on these standards is monitored, and how decisions are made about when to move to alternate standards remain difficult questions that will require considerable professional and community consensus building.
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From page 202... ...
In deciding whether to move a student to alternate content standards and curricula, particularly at the secondary school level, the IEP team will need to consider several important criteria. First, professional practice in special education stresses the importance of considering the skills critical to an individual student's post-school success when designing his or her instructional programs.
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From page 203... ...
Decisions about disaggregation should ensure, at a minimum, that individual students are not identifiable. Although the basic principle should be to include all students in the common assessments (and to provide accommodations to enable them to do so)
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From page 204... ...
Furthermore, since many of these decisions are made by IEP teams with little or no knowledge about testing procedures, the purposes of accommodations, or their effects, implementation of the policies is also inconsistent. State guidelines often admonish educators not to provide accommodations that would undermine the validity of the assessments, but in many cases it is not clear how to make appropriate accommodations or how accommodations affect validity.
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From page 205... ...
Evidence indicates that the IEP process has not worked well for all parents, particularly minority parents and those with limited education. Surmounting the barriers to parental involvement takes on particular importance under standardsbased reform, since some parents will have to make important decisions about appropriate IEP goals, the content of instruction, and the use of alternate standards and assessments.
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From page 206... ...
If a student with a disability is to be held individually accountable for mastery of the common content standards, his or her IEP should reflect the necessary curricular goals, delivered through instructional strategies consistent with his or her educational needs and learning style. This specification of required curriculum and instruction will define the student's opportunity to learn the skills and knowledge tested on the assessment.
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From page 207... ...
In order to monitor possible unintended effects, this indicator system should consider the following measures in addition to test scores and other typical forms of accountability reporting: special education referral and identification rates; retention rates; types of disability classifications and rates of classification; parental participation in the IEP process; changes in types of instructional placements of students with disabilities; number of students not participating in the common standards and the broad categories of alternate standards under which these students are being educated; · rates of exclusion from large-scale assessments; · number and type of testing accommodations offered to students and the basis for them; · types of high school completion credentials and proportions of students with disabilities receiving each; · high school graduation and school dropout rates; and · indicators of opportunity to learn (when there are high-stakes consequences for individual students)
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From page 208... ...
Fourth, standards-based reforms should be coordinated with other related education policies such as those affecting school-to-work transitions, disadvantaged and language minority students, and teacher training and certification so that they mutually reinforce rather than contradict one another. Coordination will be particularly important with regard to school finance policy, since decisions about the allocation of resources for standards-based reforms are occurring at the same time as states are altering special education funding and finance formulas.
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From page 209... ...
Although the committee agreed that implementing standards-based reforms effectively is likely to require additional resources, there are few data to guide in making precise estimates about these potential costs. Data are needed on the costs, including opportunity costs in time lost to other schooling activities, of developing and implementing these reforms, particularly at the local level.
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From page 210... ...
· Development of alternate assessments. The development of reliable and valid alternate assessments for those students who cannot participate in the common assessments will require a greater investment in research.
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