Sandra Thompson and Martha Thurlow, National Center on Educational Outcomes
December 2003
This piece is primarily a compilation of survey data culled from state directors of special education; it offers little in the way of conclusions or recommendations and may bore those outside special ed. For those in the field, however, it offers a variety of information on states' reactions to No Child Left Behind - specifically, their standards, assessments, and processes. You can read about states' differences with respect to grade promotion, their use of graduation tests, alternate assessments, how they group students, and more. It provides specific information and examples from states as well as summaries of the data. (For example, 24 states require special ed students to pass a graduation test to earn a high school diploma, while only six use assessment results for grade promotion.) What one won't find here, surprisingly, are pleas to diminish the demands of NCLB. From a group facing perhaps the stiffest of education challenges, the collective response here is that there are "more positive than negative consequences of the participation of students with disabilities in standards, assessments, and accountability." We hear that the MCAS results in Massachusetts now document that view: the overwhelming majority of disabled youngsters are passing those tests. You can find the report online at http://education.umn.edu/nceo/OnlinePubs/2003StateReport.htm.
