[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 113 (Monday, September 20, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9378-S9379]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IMPLEMENTATION OF ACCOUNTABILITY PROVISIONS FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL
NEEDS
Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, I rise to bring an important matter to
the attention of my colleagues. As we all know, the No Child Left
Behind Act, NCLB, requires an important shift in accountability for our
Nation's public schools. It requires our schools to look at the
achievement of all students, including students in several
traditionally under-performing subgroups such as students with special
needs.
Our goal in passing this law was to make sure that no child was left
behind to send a clear message that all American children deserve a
world-class education. To do that, we required accountability for
results, expanded local control and flexibility, emphasized the
importance of valid and reliable educational tools, and expanded
parental involvement. We also required schools to show, through
transparent processes, sufficient progress for all students, including
minorities, low-income students and students with disabilities.
Today I am submitting for the record an August 30, 2004, New York
Times article that contains troubling information about how NCLB is
being implemented for students with special needs. This article,
``School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled,'' by Diana
Jean Schemo, illustrates that some States are skirting the law in ways
that are leaving students with disabilities behind.
According to Schemo and the education officials who corroborated her
observations, some States have raised the minimum number of disabled
students that must be enrolled before the school has to report on their
progress as a separate group. And some States do not break down the
test scores for disabled students on school report cards. A number of
States even classify special education schools as programs, not
schools, therefore exempting them from accountability.
This report is deeply troubling because it makes it impossible for
parents to evaluate the effectiveness of their children's schools, and
ultimately, could lead to children with special needs being ignored as
they too often were in the past.
Over 25 years ago, Congress enacted the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act, a landmark education and civil rights law that ensured
that all students--including the 6 million with disabilities--receive
quality services in our Nation's public schools. This body has worked
hard to reauthorize the IDEA because we continue to believe strongly in
the notion that every child with special needs has the right to a free,
appropriate, public education. The spirit and the letter of the No
Child Left Behind Act builds on that promise, and it is my hope that
with better implementation, it will be realized.
I ask unanimous consent that the New York Times article be printed in
the Record.
There being no objection, the following material was ordered to be
printed in the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Aug. 30, 2004]
School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled
(By Diana Jean Schemo)
The first time Tyler Brenneise, a 10-year-old who is
autistic and mildly retarded, took the same state achievement
tests as California's nondisabled children, his mother,
Allison, anxiously awaited the results, along with the state
report card on his special education school, the Del Sol
Academy, in San Diego. But when the California Department of
Education issued its annual report on school performance
several months later, Del Sol Academy was nowhere to be
found. Ms. Brenneise wrote state officials asking why. ``They
wrote back,'' she said, ``that the school doesn't exist.''
That is because San Diego labels Del Sol a program, not a
school, said Karen Bachoffer, spokeswoman for the San Diego
schools. And like most other states, California does not
provide report cards for programs that educate disabled
children.
``He doesn't count,'' Ms. Brenneise said. ``He's left
behind.''
The problem is not confined to California. Around the
country, states and school districts are sidestepping the
spirit, and sometimes the letter, of the federal No Child
Left Behind Education Act when it comes to recording their
successes and failures in teaching disabled youngsters.
Federal officials have acknowledged permitting a growing
number of states to exclude many special education students
from reports on school progress, on the grounds that they
account for only a small portion of enrollment.
But a review of state education records shows that some
states and districts are going far beyond this measure to
avoid disclosing the quality of the education they provide to
such students.
Some exempt schools for disabled students. Still others
simply do not disclose basic information required by the
federal law, for example the percentage of disabled education
students who graduate from high school, and about 10 states
have not been fully reporting how students do on achievement
tests tailored to disabled students, federal officials say.
New York City's all-special-education district of 20,000
mentally or physically disabled students, District 75, gives
only fragments of the information the federal law requires
for accountability, reporting schools ``in good standing''
despite dismal results.
The trend toward avoiding accountability is alarming
advocates for the nation's six million disabled students, who
see it as an erosion of the education act's disclosure
requirements. In them, parents and advocates say, they saw a
crucial lever for helping their children meet higher academic
standards, and a way of finding out which schools were
meeting the challenge.
``The reporting system is a shambles,'' said James Wendorf,
executive director of the National Center for Learning
Disabilities. Without full disclosure, Mr. Wendorf said,
parents have no handy way of knowing what kinds of services
schools are providing each day and how the schools, as a
whole, measure up. ``It's like flying a plane without
instruments,'' he said. ``How does a parent know where the
plane is expected to land if they don't have that kind of
information?''
Federal officials say that aside from the 10 or so states
not fully reporting scores on achievement tests tailored to
disabled students, most have made great strides to satisfy
the complex new law, but they say they are monitoring to see
that states follow through. Under the law, schools must
report on the test scores of disabled children to show they
are making adequate progress toward proficiency in reading
and math by 2014. The states are left to determine what is
proficient. Eugene W. Hickok, the under secretary of
education, acknowledged that many schools that exclusively
serve disabled children were not issuing report cards. But he
said that in such cases, the test scores of children in those
schools were instead reported at the school district level
and, if not there, at the state level.
``Every child is part of an accountability system,'' Mr.
Hickok said. ``That doesn't mean there aren't people who are
trying to
[[Page S9379]]
find ways to get around the law.'' State officials deny any
effort to shortchange disabled students. Rather, many say
they were overwhelmed by the new law and could not initially
meet some of its more cumbersome reporting provisions.
In some states, like New York, officials said that local
and statewide systems did not meet the federal law's demands
and that they had not entirely worked out the conflicts. New
York officials pledged to correct the problems but also
expressed misgivings about the value of report cards for some
schools.
Particularly in the city's special education district, said
Lori Mei, executive director of the division of
accountability for the city's public schools, ``you really
can't have a cookie-cutter approach.'' Ms. Mei added, ``it
may be that we have to have different kinds of outcome
measures that are not really tests.''
To close the achievement gap, the federal law requires
schools to report test scores separately for various groups
of students, including African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants
and low-income and disabled children.
Schools must show sufficient progress by each of these
groups or face steadily tougher consequences that can
ultimately include closing.
But states are skirting the law in a range of ways. About a
dozen have raised the minimum number of disabled students
that must be enrolled before the school has to report on
their progress as a separate group. In Maine, school report
cards, available on the state's Web site, do not break down
test scores for groups like disabled students or report the
percentage that took the exams. Nor do they in New Mexico,
Colorado or Arkansas, while in Michigan, report cards say
only whether particular groups, like disabled students, met
targets for proficiency and 95 percent participation in
exams.
About 10 states, including Missouri, Utah, Delaware,
Colorado and Hawaii, have failed to properly report the
scores of disabled children on the special achievement tests
and are receiving federal money under ``special conditions''
obligating them to do so in the future, federal officials
say.
Most states are not issuing public report cards on special
education schools. Like California, states generally contend
that these are not schools, but programs, and thus are exempt
from the federal law, an argument largely accepted by
officials in Washington. In California, the determination of
what is a program and not a school can be made at the local
level, but it is often made by states or a consortium of
school districts.
As a result, the scores for students attending special
education schools are frequently mixed in with the larger
pool of scores of disabled students from throughout the
districts, making it impossible for parents to get a snapshot
of achievement at the institution their children actually
attend each day, and for taxpayers to judge their
effectiveness.
Dee Alpert, a lawyer who has researched the issue
extensively for her newsletter, The Special Education
Muckraker, said that parents of children who must attend
special education schools, usually those with severe
disabilities, must ``go through 97 different steps'' to get
information that is readily available to parents of normal
children.
``Being the parent of a kid with a disability is tough
enough,'' said Ms. Alpert, whose son was in special
education. ``Trying to be an informed involved parent of a
kid with a disability is tougher, by far.''
But Mitchell Chester, the assistant superintendent for
policy and accountability in Ohio, said there were sound
reasons for attributing disabled children's performance to
their home districts, as Ohio does.
``We think districts have to remain accountable for whether
or not those children are served,'' Dr. Chester said. ``So
districts can't just make the decisions to farm kids out and
wash their hands of their progress.''
Officials in Colorado, Maine and New Mexico said they would
release the breakdown of scores of disabled students on
standardized tests in the coming months. In Colorado,
officials said they had just begun reporting scores on the
special tests tailored to the disabled, while Delaware said
it had been reporting such scores, but not in the way the
federal law requires. Both said they were now complying
with the requirement.
In Michigan, Ed Roeber, the director for assessment and
accountability, said school report cards did not detail
performance by particular groups like disabled students
because it ``would be confusing to people.'' Michigan grades
schools based on 11 indicators, only one of which is test
scores for the school as a whole. But reporting on separate
groups of students would be ``misleading,'' he said, because
test scores were unreliable indicators at that level. ``To
me, that's a major fault with the No Child Left Behind Act,''
Mr. Roeber added.
Ms. Brenneise, who is the chairwoman of a special education
advisory committee to the San Diego Board of Education, said
many schools were reluctant to honestly disclose their record
in educating disabled students, believing that these students
by definition cannot reach the same academic heights as other
students, and thus will always drag down the school as a
whole. Aside from discovering that no report card existed for
her son's school, she said that she never officially received
his test results. Eventually, Ms. Brenneise said, she filed a
formal records request and a district employee gave her a
slip of paper on which she had written what she said were the
son's test scores. Ms. Brenneise is now home schooling her
son.
But much sidestepping of the law appears independent of the
intellectual disability involved. In Ohio, as in New York,
Oregon and many other states, public schools for the deaf and
the blind issue no reports on how well their students are
performing. Ohio officials acknowledge that deafness and
blindness do not typically imply lower intelligence, and said
they would release report cards for these schools next year.
In New York, state education officials acknowledged that
the city's special education district was not fully reporting
on student achievement. Many of the district's schools
exclude more than half their students from the state's
standardized tests and do not report how they do on the
special achievement tests. Nor do they report how many
graduate or drop out.
Though Albany issues report cards for many schools, state
officials said District 75 preferred to report its
performance to the public in a report card of its own design.
``Clearly, it was less than perfect, but I don't think it
was intentional,'' said Martha P. Musser, director of
information reporting services for the State Education
Department. ``New York City never had to deal with these
accountability issues for District 75 before.'' Ms. Musser
added that the state had ordered District 75 to improve its
public disclosure.
The failure to report leaves parents like Martin
Schwartzman of Queens to make decisions in a vacuum. The
state recently ordered Mr. Schwartzman's 11-year old son,
Robby, who is autistic, to leave the private school he had
attended at taxpayer expense since first grade and return to
public school, along with 75 classmates.
``How can I get a measure of what's out there when there's
so little data available for District 75?'' Mr. Schwartzman
asked.
Ms. Alpert, the lawyer, contends that the reticence to
report school results is too pervasive to be accidental, and
said the information being withheld was crucial for parents
and advocates.
Several years ago, she represented a boy with attention
deficit disorder and learning disabilities whom the city
wanted to place in one of the special education district
schools. The boy was talented in math, and his parents
believed that with extra support, he could earn a Regents
diploma at a regular high school, she said.
Using online school report cards that showed its reading
scores had fallen 20 percentile points in three years, while
math scores stagnated, Ms. Alpert refuted claims that the
school offered any ``foreseeable benefit'' for her client.
``We won the hearing,'' Ms. Alpert said. Within a year, she
added, the cumulative scores disappeared from the city's
school report cards.
``That's what score and graduation-dropout information does
for parents of kids with disabilities,'' she said, ``and
that's why school, district,'' regional programs and state
education officials ``don't want to publish it.''
____________________