Schools Complain About New Special Education Rules

The Department of Education will implement new student testing rules next week as part of the No Child Left Behind Act and school administrators are strongly complaining in one regard. The regulations will require that most special education students be tested at the same grade level as their non-special ed counterparts. Because an upper limit has been placed on the number of students eligible for the special testing, those schools that exceed the limit of special ed students must administer to those students the same test that the other students see. Or, the school administrators can appeal to have the number modified to include testing of a greater number of special ed students.

In a nutshell, schools are complaining that they may have to give standard tests to special students, but they have the ability to get the numbers changed, so it seems there shouldn't be a problem.

I'll admit general ignorance on the subject and I don't have a horse in this race. The reason I'm writing this post is that I was floored by one part of the linked article.

The main complaint from school officials has been how the remainder [above the limit established by the Department of Education] of special education students are tested.

Those students must now take the same test as others at the grade level appropriate to their age. So, if a mentally retarded eighth-grader is reading at the second-grade level, he still must take the eighth-grade PSSA [Pennsylvania System of School Assessment which is the non-special ed testing].

Once again, I'll plead ignorance, but it sure doesn't make any sense to have a student classified as an eighth-grader when the student reads at a second-grade level.

The determination of grade level for a special ed student apparently doesn't include reading skills, and, by extension, writing skills since both encompass words on paper. If reading and writing are thrown out of the mix in evaluating student performance, that just leaves math and, what, maybe attendance? It seems that the current system must somehow use creatively-derived or student-specific performance criteria to determine if a special ed student deserves to be awarded a diploma. I can't even imagine what the criteria would be.

Since taxpayer funds are surely involved, federal oversight is understandable, however, I'm not a big fan of the federal government sticking its nose in local issues and it appears that, in the area of special education, they may be doing more harm than good.