WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Education Department is paying more attention to whether special-education students achieve academically, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday. The change in standards placed Arkansas and 35 other states and territories in the department's "needs assistance" category.
In a call with reporters, Duncan said the department has historically focused on whether states complied with the procedural requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which ensures a "free and appropriate" education for children with disabilities.
The law requires that schools identify and offer services to students with special needs and that parents be given a voice in the decision-making.
Starting this year, the department also now will weigh whether special-education students achieve academically, considering how well they perform on standardized tests and whether they graduate.
"Basic compliance does not transform students' lives by providing them with real educational opportunities," Duncan said. "It's not enough for a state to be compliant if students can't read or do math at the levels necessary to graduate from high school prepared for adult life."
The U.S. Education Department is required to gauge annually how effectively states and territories comply with the law and sort them into four categories each year: meets requirements, needs assistance, needs intervention or needs substantial intervention.
If a state needs assistance for two years in a row, the department can require the state to get extra training assistance or can identify the state as a high-risk grant recipient. If a state needs intervention for three years in a row, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates that the Department require the state to prepare a corrective action plan, enter into a compliance agreement or, ultimately, withhold a portion of the state's funding, according to the department.
Under the new standard, only 18 states and territories meet the law's requirements, down from 41 states and territories in 2013.
"This change in accountability represents a very significant and, frankly, long overdue raising of the bar for special education," Duncan said. He stressed that the majority of special-needs students don't have major cognitive problems and would perform better academically if challenged to do so.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, of the 431,343 students who attended public school in Arkansas in 2011, 51,909, or 12 percent, had a disability. Nationally, 13 percent of the nearly 45 million public-school students had a disability in 2011.
Under the law, a disability includes speech or language impairment, learning disabilities, autism and intellectual disabilities among other challenges.
In Arkansas and nationally the largest portion of students with a disability have learning disabilities or speech or language impairments, according to the department.
Judging states based on compliance data alone was misleading, he said.
"We believe this led parents, educators, stakeholders and students to believe that everything was fine. That complacency is not in our students' best interest and in fact, it's frankly destructive," he said. "In too many states, the outcome for students with disabilities are simply too low."
Questions submitted to an Arkansas Department of Education spokesman Tuesday afternoon about how the change will affect Arkansas education were not answered by close of business. Spokesman Kimberly Friedman said the department's special-education program manager was out of the office and referred a reporter to a news release from the National Association of State Directors of Special Education Inc.
In the release, association Executive Director Bill East acknowledged that several states saw their classifications change.
"We are optimistic that the new system will provide states with the knowledge of where to focus their strategic initiatives to help local education agencies improve outcomes for their students with disabilities," he said.
For the 2014 classification, the Department used data on the participation of children with disabilities on regular statewide assessments; the proficiency gap between children with disabilities and all children on those assessments; and the performance of children with disabilities on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a biennial nationwide test of academic skills, according to the department.
Documents and data showing how the department made the determination on Arkansas' classification show that of children who were categorized under the disabilities law when they left high school, 18.4 percent had enrolled in higher education within one year of high school, 43.9 percent had either enrolled in higher education or were "competitively" employed within a year, and 58.1 percent had enrolled in higher education, a training program or were employed.
Nationally when students with disabilities took the normal statewide assessments in math and reading/language arts in the 2012-2013 school year, they lagged behind. The nationwide data exclude 11 states and territories because of questionable data quality.
That school year, 86 percent of fourth-graders with disabilities took a general statewide reading and language arts assessment. Of those, 38 percent received a proficient score. Of the 83 percent of eighth-graders with disabilities who took the general statewide reading and language arts assessment, 21 percent received a proficient score. At the high school level, 72 percent of students with disabilities took that assessment, and 12 percent got proficient scores.
Math tests in the 2012-13 school year had similar results. The data show 86 percent of fourth-graders with disabilities took the assessment and 44 percent got a proficient score. That year, 83 percent of eighth-graders with disabilities took the test and 15 percent received a proficient score, and 52 percent of such high school students took the math assessment and 41 percent got a proficient score.
Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville, a former state legislator who just finished seven years on the state Board of Education, said the change in standards is needed. She has advocated for children with disabilities for decades.
"It's absolutely essential, because that is the whole purpose of [the disabilities law]," she said. "[The law requires] an appropriate education for an individual child. We look at a child and assess them and say 'What can we do to help this child?'"
Gullett said the test will be whether the change is designed to make people feel better about special education or if it is really intended to help children with disabilities achieve as much as they can.
"When you are a parent of a child with disabilities, it's very hard to talk about what a dark diagnosis that is," Gullett said, adding that parents want to assume their child will overcome a disability. "A parent has to be very knowledgeable and very determined to go to most public schools in Arkansas and fight for what their child needs and what the law provides for them."
Front on 06/25/2014