Evaluating states on the academic performance of students with disabilities鈥攔ather than focusing on how states comply with deadlines and paperwork鈥攊s an important shift away from 鈥渃omplacency,鈥� said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a press call Tuesday.
The department is continuing its media rollout of a revised evaluation process that it calls results-driven accountability. The 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that states submit data to the Education Department about how students with disabilities are doing. But before this year鈥檚 annual report, states were only graded on what are called 鈥渃ompliance鈥� indicators, such as whether students were evaluated for special education in the appropriate amount of time, or whether due process complaints were resolved in a timely fashion.
Under that assessment regime, most states were meeting the department鈥檚 standards.
But now, states are being checked on factors such as test scores of students with disabilities, and the gap between those scores and the scores of children in the general population, in addition to compliance, Duncan explained. The effect has been to put many more states in the category of 鈥渘eeding assistance鈥� to meet achievement goals, as shown in a map released by the Education Department.
Duncan said that states should not look at the change as an additional reporting burden, but as a chance to focus on the changes that really matter for students with disabilities. 鈥淥ur department is not asking states to do more, we鈥檙e asking them to do things differently,鈥� he said .
He was joined on the press call by state education chiefs Mitchell Chester of Massachusetts and Kevin Huffman of Tennessee. Massachusetts has the highest performance of students with disabilities, while Tennessee is seeing the fastest improvement, Duncan said.
鈥淲e鈥檝e done a better job at ensuring procedural compliance,鈥� Chester said, 鈥渂ut it was never clear to me we were doing as well as we can in preparing students well for their future.鈥�
Huffman added: 鈥淲e don鈥檛 want students winding up in special education just because we did not do a good job in teaching them in their early years.鈥� Referring to the proportion of students in Tennessee that receive special education services, he said, 鈥淲e can鈥檛 duck the results for 14 percent of our students. We have to own the results for 14 percent of our students.鈥�
States are being evaluated, in part, on their scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a new use for that particular test, administered every two years in reading and math. The NAEP administrators have been working to ensure that more students with disabilities take the test, but states still have discretion to exclude some students with disabilities. In 2013, Maryland excluded 60 percent of students with disabilities from the 8th grade reading test.
In an interview, Nancy Reder, the deputy director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, said that the organization was on board with the changes. 鈥淏ut I wish there had been a little more discussion about what outcome indicators to use,鈥� she said, referring to NAEP.
Kim Hymes, the senior director of policy for the Council for Exceptional Children, said the shift was 鈥渟ignificant鈥� for states. The department noted that under the previous method of evaluating states, most would have fallen into the 鈥渕eets requirements鈥� category.
鈥淭he approach the department has taken is a step in the right direction,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut we want to make sure we do something really useful with the information that was released today, and that it serves as a trigger to look deeper into the data.鈥�