Are We There Yet in Special Education

The article I chose to read is titled "Are We There Yet? Accountability for the Performance of Students with Disabilities." The article was published by the National Center on Educational Outcomes. Prepared by Sara Bolt, Jane Krentz and Martha Thurlow.

This article discusses the accountability systems that are being put in place to provide rewards, sanctions or assistance to schools based on student assessment outcomes. Student achievement outcomes are playing a significant role in the way resources are apportioned to schools. Many states are attaching consequences to students for their performance on assessments as well as attaching consequences to schools and school districts for the overall performance of all students. School accreditation is being based on test scores, student performance and school improvement. As states proceed in restructuring their student, school and school district accountability systems, federal requirements have made it apparent that students with disabilities must be included in accountability.

The state of Montana falls under the label of schools identified for improvement. School improvement emphasizes enhanced achievement for all students but determining the assessment of students with special needs demands special consideration. The assessments of the progress of students with special needs requires understanding their growth process particularly in social and emotional development. For example students with special needs are easily distracted by assessment procedures and have little or no personal interest in being assessed. Given these characteristics, how can educators determine what students with special needs know and can do? Problems arise from the kind of curriculum that is appropriate for students with special needs. Traditional assessment processes accepted and used for all students are not developmentally appropriate or sufficiently informative for assessing students with special needs. Standardized achievement tests alone cannot fulfill the major purposes of assessment in programs for students with special needs. Some of those purposes are instructional planning and communicating with parents, identification of students with special needs and program evaluation. The assessment program for students with special needs should be based upon appropriate expectations for the learning and development of special needs students. Like curriculum standards, assessment standards should be expressed so that the entire school experience is planned as a cooperative whole.

As a special education teacher I am pressured in giving students with special needs experience with assessment tests, for example, standardized tests. I am obligated to administer the testing even though I have concerns about such tests. No Child Left Behind relies almost entirely on testing and believes that the tests can lead to accurate inferences about students, school and school districts achievement and accountability. Alternative, performance-based assessment requires observation, recording and narrative reports of students with special needs progress and many teachers may believe their workload is already too great with out additional assessment tasks. It is imperative that as teachers we undertake a new approach in assessing students with special needs that will demand new skills, new knowledge and more time for meaningful assessments to determine whether and how much students with special needs have learned and whether school programs are accountable.

This article expresses the concern that many educators share when determining accountability of student assessments. The idea of including students with special needs in the overall outcome and then pointing fingers at teachers, schools and school districts without taking into account the meaning of all students is discouraging from an educators point of view. This article agrees with educators feeling of discouragement and the accountability issue. I agree with this article. I found many articles that discussed the accountability issue including assessing students with special needs. With many articles out there stating the same assessment and accountability concern, when and who will take the lead to change the meaning of all students to provide the opportunity of better assessing students with special needs.

Bibliographic Information:

National Center on Educational Outcomes. Bolt, Sara, Krentz, Jane and Thurlow, Martha. “Are We There Yet? Accountability for the Performance of Students with Disabilities.”