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NCLB and IDEA: Working for those who are most often forgotten
February 1, 2008
Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute
This Monday morning I joined the National Council on Disability’s (NCD) Board of Directors in releasing their new publication The No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: A Progress Report in New Orleans, a mere two days before John Edwards canned his presidential candidacy but a few blocks away, which, in turn, was only a few blocks away from where a police officer was overcome, her gun taken, and killed on Sunday morning; Bourbon Street didn’t even hiccup; I digress).
NCD, by the way, is an independent federal agency with members appointed by the President and confirmed by the US Senate to make recommendations that enhance the quality of life for all Americans with disabilities and their families (yes, that was verbatim, almost).
I was honored to serve as the Principal Investigator for this project on behalf of EPI, and worked closely with our friends at the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) to bring the project to fruition. The purpose of the project was to determine what impact the two federal laws—NCLB and IDEA—have had on students with disabilities. This is an especially important issue because, over the course of the past several years, NCLB has put a spotlight on students with disabilities due to US Department of Education requirements to put more students with disabilities into the general education curricula and in regular classrooms and also to provide modified grade-level standards for up to two percent of the general population who may be categorized with disabilities under IDEA requirements. This has caused commotion and fidgeting among state and school superintendents, who have had to figure out the mechanics of this in a relatively short period of time.
To give some perspective, students with disabilities represent approximately 14 percent of public school students in K-12 in the United States, or 6.7 million students (NCES, Condition of Education 2006, Table 8-1, page 123). About half of these students have specific learning disabilities, while others may have speech or language imprairments, mental retardation, emotion disturbances, and other disabilities. The types of disabilities are diverse, but all require special support and expertise inside the public school classroom.
Passed in 1975 and later given its current title, IDEA provides the foundation upon which students with disabilities are protected from discrimination and guaranteed to receive services designed to meet their special education and related services needs. NCLB was passed in 2002 as a mainstay of the Bush Administration to improve the quality and equity of public schools in the United States.
In a nutshell, our study found that, overall, students with disabilities have benefited from NCLB and IDEA, although the measures are clearly not perfect. The percentage of students scoring in the proficient levels of reading and mathematics at the fourth grade increased over the past few years, while the percent scoring in the below basic levels of these tests declined. All good. Unfortunately, we didn’t see these trends at the eighth-grade level, so the academic outcomes are conflicting to a certain point. Also, the trend lines are very short; thus, we cannot strongly suggest that these increases are because of NCLB, in particular.
Perhaps the most worrisome trend is that of the number of students with disabilities who drop out before or during high school. We saw a large increase in this trend line within our analysis, suggesting—but not proving—that schools may be pushing these students out of the classroom, therefore not testing them. It sounds cynical to suggest such a thing, but in several of our conversations with disability experts around the nation, there was a theme that some states and districts are “gaming” the system to score well on their “AYP,” or Annual Yearly Progress indicators.
The big push from NCLB has been on data collection at the state and local levels. This is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of NCLB, although there are many critics (including me on an odd day) that feel that the federal government has only created this myriad of 50 separate and distinct data systems that don’t talk to each other. That, too, is true. Still, in the dozens of conversations with experts and officials across the US, we found a discernable and positive improvement in the attitude about (a) NCLB and (b) its impact on students with disabilities.
For those who know policy research and analysis, it is a muddy science at best. There is very rarely anything clear cut and there are no easy answers. People outside of Washington and Ottawa don’t always understand how policy gets crafted and why it is never perfect in style or substance. Politics is always involved, which is an art form in itself. Complicating this issue is the fact that we are talking about social sciences. People don’t live in a vacuum, and nor does public policy. Thus, when we try to “measure” the impact of large-scale programs, the findings are quite often equivocal.
As a data manager at the Ohio Department of Education told us:
“Determining the causal link between a law and student achievement would be a major undertaking. As we don’t have a control group or any other elements of experimental design, most likely any attempt to link the two and show causality wouldn’t pass a rigorous test of being ‘scientifically based’.”
Still, we were taken by the optimism by people about the impact of these programs on students with disabilities, and perhaps more importantly, on the states and localities in dealing with the data issues, classroom issues, professional development, and countless other barriers that lay between failure and success. They have, with a great deal of sweat and angst, pushed both dialogue and practice forward.
In 2009, it is likely that a new president—perhaps Democrat, perhaps Republican—will have to tackle, with a new Congress, the reauthorization of NCLB. That reauthorization is due now, but in this election year it is unlikely to get passed. So it will be interesting to see how everything comes together, whether NCLB has a new name, and how it deals with the many pitfalls it has created over the past several years.
But let’s hope the optimism doesn’t evaporate and we can keep the focus on those who truly need our voices.
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