Tuesday, I posted about Senate Republicans taking the U.S. Department of Education to task over its 鈥渞esults-driven accountability鈥� process that evaluates states on how well they are teaching students with disabilities.
Among the concerns of the GOP members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee: States are being graded in part based on the gap between the scores of students with disabilities and their typically developing peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Using the test that way turns the NAEP into a high-stakes assessment that it was never intended to be, lawmakers wrote in an , which demands that department officials explain their decision-making process.
But in an interview with my colleague Lauren Camera, an Education Department official said that the NAEP scores will be used only until all states have adopted assessments that are 鈥渁ligned with college and career standards.鈥� The official also noted that states are evaluated on multiple measures, and that only a fraction of the points that a state could earn through the new evaluation system鈥�12 out of a total of 42鈥攁re related to NAEP scores ( , click on the link under each state鈥檚 name labeled 鈥渕atrix.鈥� )
Since the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, states have been required to collect and report data to the Education Department, which in turn rates them on whether they are meeting the requirements of the federal law. The federal government has the authority to pull its federal funding from a state based on continued low ratings, but to this point, that has not happened.
Prior to this year, states were only rated on compliance data, such as whether they evaluated students in timely fashion, or met prescribed deadlines for conducting due process hearings. From this year on, states will be graded both on a combination of compliance factors and on the actual academic performance of students with disabilities.
As might be expected, as they had under the old process, but the department held that up as an indication that they were enacting appropriately tough standards.
This isn鈥檛 the first time that concerns have been raised about using NAEP scores as part of the evaluation system. The National Association of State Directors of Special Education, based in Alexandria, Va., when the accountability system was still on the drawing board. Among NASDSE鈥檚 concerns: Students with disabilities have traditionally been underrepresented among students who take the test; the test isn鈥檛 yet aligned to the Common Core, so it might not reflect what students are learning in the classroom, and it鈥檚 only given every two years, so there鈥檚 a lag in the results.
鈥淲e were not opposed to the focus on outcomes, but the devil is in the details, as they say,鈥� said Nancy Reder, NASDSE鈥檚 deputy executive director for governmental relations, in an interview. 鈥淚f [the department] is using NAEP as a placeholder, then maybe they shouldn鈥檛 have used it at all.鈥�