When IDEA and NCLB Collide, Schools Lose

IDEA is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Under this act, students have various rights -- including, for example, an accomodation to use calculators when taking tests including arithmetic calculation.  NCLB is of course No Child Left Behind, the federal education-improvement law.

San Diego's Wagenheim Middle School  is one of the better-perfoming middle schools in San Diego.  California uses something called  Academic Performance Index,  for school accountability; Wagenheim continues to improve.  But it is now in the dreaded "Program Improvement" Status.

Why?

Wangenheim has an enrollment of about 1300; about 117 are in Special Education.  Of those children, 26 children used calculators on the mathematics portion of the tests, and so by NCLB law, were not counted as having participated in the testing.  That meant, again by NCLB law, only 77% of children with learning disabilities participated, falling short of the required  95 percent participating.

"Program Improvement" means that parents can transfer to other schools.

In the meantime, the district is required by law to send letters to Wangenheim parents informing them that their school has failed to make adequate progress. They have the option of either transferring their students to another school or signing them up for free tutoring.

The two schools that students can transfer to have lower scores on the Academic Performance Index than Wangenheim.

 

“There are two laws that are directly contradictory to each other, both of which come from the federal government,” said Arun Ramanathan, the district's director of government relations.

Wangenheim Principal Robert Grano said not allowing modifications for disabled students is not only illegal, but also morally wrong. If his school continues to allow them, however, it would likely fail the federal participation benchmark again. Eventually, Wangenheim could be forced to replace its staff and programs.

“That puts me in a real dilemma. It's an absurdity,” Grano said.

It is crazy.

Dick Dalton has some good things to say, too. His students are not likely to be working at grade level (recall that he teaches kids with severe and profound disabilities).

The alternate assessment has historically aligned with the functional nature of our curriculum.  We take IEP goals and measure mastery from there. However, this year, presumably with IDEA 2004 and NCLB supposedly in alignment, IEP goals are either thrown out or must align to the grade-level curriculum.  

Let me reiterate that for parents: all the work you do trying to fight for the school to provide certain services is actually being undermined by NCLB. Because if you have certain goals you want worked on, and the school is under the gun to make AYP, which one of these is getting the resources and attention? Which one of these do you think the principal is going to put pressure on the teacher to do? You might want your child to learn a vocational or daily living skill that may help them live more independently. The school does not care because your child needs to demonstrate some level of proficiency in algebra, geometry, reading comprehension and writing. And these are not bad things to know, except that it takes these kids so long to learn something that the time might be better spent directly on a given skill, like dressing themselves. This is why we have IEPs in the first place. But the push and rush for AYP makes kids in special education ripe for discrimination that IDEA was supposed to remedy.