New Jersey's NJ.com website has more on the recent modifications to the NCLB regulations and special education students:
Under a new provision of the law, school districts will have greater flexibility in meeting the requirements for students with disabilities, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced Tuesday...
No Child Left Behind mandates testing and proficiency for all students, including special education and limited-English proficiency students, with consequences for schools whose subgroups fail to achieve adequate yearly progress. As the first round of test results came out over the past few months, many educators complained their schools had failed to make adequate yearly progress based solely on the performance of their special education students.
Under the new provisions, states, districts and schools can count the "proficient," or highest, scores of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities who take assessments based on alternative assessment standards...
Nationally, about 9 percent of the total student population is served in special education, of which about 9 percent have the most significant cognitive disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education...
Under the new regulations, the number of students taking alternative assessments may not exceed 1 percent of all students in a school district in the grade tested. Districts can apply for an exemption from the 1-percent limit, if they can demonstrate they have a significant portion of students with cognitive disabilities.
Let's hope this removes the problematic issue of schools getting bad grades based solely on the performance of their most developmentally-delayed students.
Posted by kswygert at December 11, 2003 11:01 AM