US Department of Education Announces a New "Common Sense" Approach to Implementing NCLB

(April 2005)

In April, the U.S. Department of Education announced a new "commonsense" approach to implementing the No Child Left Behind Act. At that time, Secretary Spellings outlined a new policy to be applied to students with disabilities. Briefly, this policy is:

States may develop modified academic achievement standards and use alternate assessments based on those modified achievement standards for some students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. States may include proficient scores from such assessments in making adequate yearly progress (AYP) decisions but those scores will be capped at 2.0% of the total tested population. This provision does not limit how many students may be assessed against modified achievement standards. Individualized education program (IEP) teams will make the decision about which individual students should take such an assessment.

This week, the Department reiterated and clarified some elements of this new policy.

First, states have to show that they are eligible to take advantage of this new policy. To establish eligibility, states must:

1. show that they comply with NCLB core principles such as having statewide assessment participation rates for students with disabilities at 95% or above;
2. provide information on actions taken to raise achievement for students with disabilities; and
3. provide the Department with information and a time line for activities it will take to improve its assessments for the full range of students with disabilities, in particular alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards and those based on alternate achievement standards.

The Department is working on drafting rules for long-term implementation of this policy. In the meantime, there are short term options available for eligible states. These will apply to 2005-06 AYP based on 2004-05 assessments.

Option 1: Eligible States without modified achievement standards may choose this option, or may propose an alternate approach. This option applies only to schools and districts that did not make AYP based solely on the students with disabilities subgroup scores. This option allows a State to make a mathematical adjustment to the proficiency rate in order to provide additional credit to schools or districts that missed the AYP target solely based on the achievement of students with disabilities. Broadly speaking, this option allows the district or school to count two percent of the scores of all students assessed as proficient and to apply them to the disability subgroup. Then the disability subgroup scores are re-examined to see if the additional proficient scores allow that group to make AYP.

Option 2: This approach applies to eligible States that have assessments based on modified achievement standards. States must have administered a well-established modified assessment statewide for two years or more; established clear guidelines for its use; employed a validated standard-setting process to define the modified achievement standards; and adopted the modified achievement standards and provided appropriate training for teachers and IEP teams.

This new policy may bring some deaf schools that did not make AYP into the "made AYP" category. I encourage you to read the Department's guidance at www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2005/05/05102005.html and contact your State Department of Education to see how this new policy will be implemented in your state. If you have any questions, please contact me at baraimondo@earthlink.net.

-Barbara Raimondo

Barbara Raimondo, Esq.
Government Relations Liaison
Conference of Educational Administrators of
Schools and Programs for the Deaf