New exam rules in New Orleans mean that special education students will face a tougher testing hurdle:
Looking toward adulthood, 15-year-old Rebecca Hulse holds to a simple aspiration: to one day sell hot dogs at the Superdome.
The bright-eyed eighth-grader from Metairie, mentally disabled since her birth, is resigned to a life within limits. She speaks clearly and answers questions deliberately, but such basics as counting change or writing full sentences remain outside her grasp.
Yet between now and March, Hulse's teachers at V.C. Haynes Middle School are charged with preparing her for the high-stakes LEAP test.
She and as many as 5,000 other special-education students in the state are expected to lose their eligibility this year for easier exams tailored to their disabilities.
Those easier exams may have originally set the bar too low, and resulted in misclassification of students. But testing opponents say the new tests are "cruel" for children who will never have a chance at passing them:
Severely disabled students remain eligible for an alternate test. Those with disabilities categorized as mild or mild/moderate will be assessed in the spring with regular education students on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the LEAP, or Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, test.
Although Hulse can write only a few select phrases, in March she will be expected to compose short essays. Her math skills, limited to addition with single-digit numbers, will be challenged with algebra.
"It's only going to totally frustrate her and ruin the progress we've been making with her," said Ann Hulse, a 29-year special-education teacher who adopted Rebecca three years ago when the girl was a student in her class at Ella Dolhonde Elementary School. "She's now at a kindergarten or first-grade level . . . In her lifetime she will never be on an eighth-grade level. Never."
Perhaps this just reveals my ignorance of the special education classifications, but why is an eighth-grader who is performing at the kindergarten level labeled as having a mild or mild-to-moderate disability? My God, how poorly does a child have to perform to get the label of severe disability? This seems wrong to me. The only way children who are this incapable of learning get diagnosed with mild to moderate disabilities is if kids who are two, or three, or four grades behind are diagnosed as having mild to no disability.
Has the school system pendulum swung from being too quick to label underperformers as disabled to being too willing to accept those performing two grade levels behind as "normal"?
That much said, the prior exams were geared towards the grade level at which the students were performing, which sounds right to me. It's odd that as the federal government is relaxing special education testing rules, Louisiana is tightening them.
State officials claim many school districts gave the easier tests too freely, to students who should have taken the regular tests. That effectively padded school performance scores and, Beridon said, shortchanged students who could accomplish more in life if challenged.
By mixing the disabled students' test results with those of regular education students, thereby including them in the performance scores, the state hopes to prod educators who might otherwise shunt their disabled students to the side.
Although overall student dropout rates have fallen in recent years, the percentage of Louisiana students who fail to earn a diploma is among the worst in the nation. Beridon said that low ranking will linger as long as thousands of special-education students are pre-emptively diverted from the diploma track.
That rank is 43rd out of 50, according to this table. My home state of South Carolina actually has the worst graduation rate - only 48% of ninth-graders graduate within four years.
Posted by kswygert at December 29, 2003 09:47 AM