No Child Left Behind: Improving Results for Children with Disabilities

Testimony of Rosemary King Johnston

Submitted to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee

March 3, 2004

Good Morning Chairman Boehner, Mr. Miller, Mr. Van Hollen, and distinguished members of the Committee. My name is Rosemary King Johnston and I am a proud veteran of nearly 30 years in the classroom. I taught my first class of children in 1968 — at a time we refer to as before the law. I taught primary age students with disabilities in Massachusetts for a few years and  most recently taught in Harford County, Maryland for 18 years. I am a member of the National Education Association's IDEA Cadre — a group of 27 education practitioners from around the country that prepares and delivers professional development to our members specifically about instructing students with disabilities. I am also the parent of an adult with a disability and actively involved in decision making for a relative who has multiple disabilities, including a significant cognitive disability. These experiences, both personal and professional, have given me a familiarity with the issues affecting educators, parents and students with disabilities in the classroom and the community.

As this Committee is aware, the amendments to IDEA in 1997 resulted in about 6.5 million students with disabilities having access to the general curriculum. This corrected a practice that was happening all too often in our nation's schools — that students with disabilities were being taught in segregated settings, regardless of their individual capabilities to be included in general education classrooms. As a parent, an educator and an advocate, I absolutely agree with the principles embodied in No Child Left Behind that move us beyond IDEA '97 and begin to focus on how we include students, including students with disabilities, in the same accountability system.

Please allow me the opportunity to commend the Department of Education for its final regulation regarding the assessment of students with significant cognitive disabilities under No Child Left Behind. As I understand it, the final regulation allows students with disabilities to be assessed in four different ways and clarifies that the student's IEP team makes the determination regarding the most appropriate assessment instrument for the student. While this is a step in the right direction, there are additional challenges that must be addressed at the school and classroom level. 

The first is reaching all educators with information explaining this final regulation. This will be no small feat, as many states have been slow to implement some of the assessment requirements of IDEA '97, let alone the requirements of NCLB for students with disabilities. Many states have still not developed alternate assessments based upon the state content standards. There is little professional development available to teachers about how to write an effective IEP that is aligned with state content standards and how to include students with disabilities in standardized tests, particularly if the child needs to be assessed in an alternate manner than the state's standardized tests. As a cadre member, I have conducted many workshops for my colleagues, but this requires a national, state and local partnership to provide consistent and ongoing technical assistance and professional development.

To meet part of this challenge, I'd like to suggest to the Members of this Committee something that the Department of Education could do to make it easier for classroom teachers and support professionals to understand the testing regulation. The Department could issue a desktop guide for educators which looks at some sample content standards for a particular grade level and illustrates what a regular assessment of those standards looks like, what an alternate assessment based upon those standards looks like, and what an alternate assessment based upon alternate standards looks like. The desktop guide should also include an explanation of the array of accommodations that should be available for students with disabilities, based upon their individualized education program (IEP).

The second challenge we face is that many standardized tests do not include accommodations in their standard protocol, so any child that takes the regular assessment with an accommodation might not have their scores "counted" in a school's AYP measurement. For example, in many states, students who are blind had the state test read aloud to them. Their scores were invalidated because the test-maker did not include this as a protocol of the test administration. Accordingly, their scores whether they were 95, 100, or 75 were counted as zeroes in their school's AYP calculation.

I have no doubt that many schools, prior to the Department's final regulation, didn't have the opportunity to "count" scores like these in their initial AYP lists when they identified schools in need of improvement.  Therefore, I'd like to suggest that you urge the Department of Education to work with states to ensure that the AYP listings are corrected retrospectively in accordance with this new final regulation. Just as we seek to have students with disabilities included in the assessment programs, so should those students' scores be included in their school's calculations.

I'd also like to suggest that this Committee urge the Department of Education to convene a meeting of education stakeholders and national test developers to discuss what assessments are currently valid and reliable for students with various types of disabilities. The goal of this discussion should be to encourage test makers to update their protocols and expand their test offerings, so that the assessment options in the final regulation are a reality, not just a hope.

Finally, as the members of this Committee are aware, students with disabilities are a very diverse population, some with cognitive disabilities, some with physical disabilities, and some with behavioral issues. There are some children who are not significantly cognitively disabled, but who are currently performing well below grade level. The challenge with NCLB that is not addressed by the Department's final regulation is how to bring these students up to grade level in a way that is not punitive and does not damage the morale and reform efforts currently under way in many of our schools. NCLB gives no credit to a school that raises the level of achievement for this group of students by several grade levels, if that level doesn't meet the state's overall numerical target for all children. For example, what if a school improves the academic performance of a group of children — whether disabled or not — from "below basic" to "basic"? This school may still be labeled in need of improvement, which may inadvertently stigmatize those students who didn't make the AYP target. Shouldn't the school instead be required to develop improvement plans for just the subgroups or individual students who are not proficient? 

And for students with disabilities, why not incorporate a growth model into their IEPs that requires the student begin to close his own achievement gap, that is, his current performance level with grade-level expectations. The House's IDEA reauthorization bill (H.R. 1350) will require IEPs to be aligned with NCLB requirements, so incorporating a growth model into the IEP will require academic progress, but at a pace that is appropriate for the individual student. This individualized approach is the cornerstone of IDEA and can be made to work together with NCLB.

In closing, I'd like to reiterate what I and my colleagues of the National Education Association believe. We believe in the goals of No Child Left Behind. We believe in holding schools accountable for improving results for all groups of children. And we believe in providing parents and communities more information about how their schools and all of their students are doing academically. But in order to make NCLB work for all students — and especially for students with disabilities — we must be able to look at growth in student performance over time, not just a snapshot from a test given on one day of the year. Each of our students deserves the most advanced and accurate determination of their achievement levels, and I am concerned that the current interpretation of NCLB limits our schools' ability to document the real, everyday progress made by students. Our students are more than just a test score and so are our schools. A few common-sense changes to NCLB will not weaken accountability; they will make accountability work for every child. That's the goal of every educator:  great public schools for every child.