Q.	With passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), what kinds of information will parents of students with disabilities now be receiving from their children's schools, in terms of their being able to track the academic progress their children are or are not making?
Gloeckler:	Under NCLB, test scores will be disaggregated, meaning that scores will be broken down from the overall average and reported separately for a number of different groups specified by the law. Children with disabilities are one of these specified, disaggregated groups, and the idea is to present a much clearer picture of how they are doing as a whole within a school district. Parents with children in special ed will be able to see very clearly if there's a discrepancy between their child and children in the other groups and between the overall general ed population. This is very important, because one of the things that I've noticed over the years is that districts that have very high-quality educational programs generally have very good special education programs. And the opposite is also true - if you have a poor educational program, you're very likely to see even poorer results for kids with disabilities. And one thing you really don't want to see is a huge gap between what's happening in general ed and what's happening for special ed students. So, clearly, NCLB now gives parents a good chance to understand and to see whether all the procedures, processes and protections students are getting through current special education requirements really translate into those students getting a solid educational program. This is particularly important now, because children with disabilities are, in increasing numbers, going on to post-secondary education and they need to have a challenging curriculum in their K to 12 years in order to be competitive.
Q.	Is this increased level of accountability one of the biggest changes being brought about by NCLB?
Gloeckler:	I think the main focus of NCLB is on accountability, both requiring reporting of results and, for the first time, requiring that schools improve the results if their students score below a certain level. For example, there are no requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that school districts report the performance data of their students in any particular way; there's no requirement in IDEA that there be improvements in performance each year. Those are all new. And, while some schools and some states had already begun to require reporting and yearly improvements, now it's something that's required nationwide. The reports also have to be broken down so that the student performance data, where it might have just been for the school district overall in the past, now has to be given for each separate school. And parents will be able to go online and see how the scores compare between the different schools in a district, listed for all of the disaggregated groups.
Q.	During your tenure as New York State Director for Special Education, were you doing many of the things that NCLB is now requiring be done on a national level?
Gloeckler:	To some extent yes, though not to quite the level of specificity that NCLB requires. What we did in New York, in the mid-90s, we had a long public dialogue about kids with disabilities; we held public hearings and in the course of this all this, I met a lot of adults with disabilities. And what I heard from a great many of them was how much they wished they could go back and have a different experience in school, because what they really felt they didn't get was the experience of being challenged. They wanted to have the opportunity to fail, like everyone else, and not have everybody try to protect them. People kept saying to me, 'We weren't challenged enough to be competitive in our adult lives, and after we left school, we had a lot of ground to make up.' So we tried to focus on several critical issues. One, who is being referred to special education? Are we sending kids to special ed simply because there are no other options available in the school district? If so, are we not, then, diluting the focus of what special ed is supposed to be and also sending kids into classrooms where they don't belong? And for the kids who do belong in special ed, we have research that shows that if you separate them out from general ed, many - though not all - are given a less-rigorous curriculum and their performance is poorer. IDEA said, essentially, that special ed should be a service rather than a place where children are sent. And that's something we came to believe in. We never debated that there shouldn't be special schools, but those should be for kids with unique situations, kids who really need a different curriculum. Overall, we found that it was almost impossible for a special school to re-create the general ed curriculum, and the further a child was separated away from the general education environment, the less likely he or she was to be getting the full general ed curriculum.
Q.	The charge is sometimes made that, because NCLB mandates that all students have to score above a certain level on assessment tests, the law will cause critical resources to be diverted from the larger general ed group to smaller subgroups, such as students with disabilities, in order to raise their achievement levels. Do you think there is any validity to this charge?
Gloeckler:	I think people have been saying that for years. Every time you talk about a group that's lagging behind, someone will say that if we put our resources there it will hurt everyone else. The issue here is that there was a growing uproar over the fact that there were groups of children in school systems across the country falling far behind the general student population. There were huge performance gaps, and the idea behind NCLB was not only to improve performance overall, but also to close those performance gaps. Will it take some resources to do that? Absolutely. Will it undermine the general ed process? I don't think so. First of all, our most capable students are doing very well and test scores, from what we can see in New York, are improving. The question is what can we do to bring up the children who are lagging behind. Because the performance gap really does exist. With students in special education who are lagging behind, some of this lag can be explained due to the disability. But when you really look closely at the disabled population, most of those students should not be that far behind academically. They simply haven't had good-quality instruction or a curriculum designed to get them up to standard. So, we have to concentrate on making sure that those kids get good instruction and get the right curriculum.
Q.	Do you have any reservations about NCLB as it now stands?
Gloeckler:	I think the intention of NCLB is very sound, and I support it wholeheartedly. We've seen in New York that the more attention focused on performance, the better student performance became. Also, the more data you gather, and the more good factual information you have on how well different subgroups are performing, the more clearly you can see where the gaps are and where you need to make the effort to close them. But I have two worries that are interrelated. One is the Adequate Yearly Progress provision - not the whole idea, because I think the idea is very sound, but I'm concerned about how the Federal government has set the guidelines up, that they might be too rigid. For example, with special ed groups - if they began at a place very far behind the general ed population, and if they're making progress but its not sufficient to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress provisions, should there not be a consideration that the progress they're making is reasonable, especially since AYP is tied to sanctions? I'm worried that this provision could place the onus for achievement on the special ed kids, and you'll end up with school administrators saying, 'Well, we're a good school district except for the special ed kids, that we can't meet our progress goals because of them.' I think we need to figure out what the best way would be to apply the Adequate Yearly Progress idea to this group, and figure out a reasonable set of benchmarks to track their progress. I also worry that the temptation will be there to take special education students out of NCLB accountability all together. This would be a terrible, terrible mistake, and would put us back 25 years. The reason we've been seeing more students with disabilities in New York State getting high school diplomas, going on to college and getting good jobs is that we are finally paying attention to their level of academic achievement and performance and because schools now have to be accountable for these kids. And if you take them out of the system, you'll be ignoring them again. So we may need to make some adjustments, but we need to make sure that these kids stay within the accountability system, that school systems will always be responsible for giving them as high-quality an education as is possible, but not setting it up in a way that makes it look as though they are the reason an entire school is failing. And that will definitely be a challenge.

Lawrence C. Gloeckler is the Executive Director of the Special Education Institute at the International Center for Leadership in Education in Rexford, New York. He also serves as Senior Policy Advisor at the Governor James B. Hunt Institute for Education Leadership and Policy at the University of North Carolina and is also a member of NCLD's Professional Advisory Board. From 1989-2003, Mr. Gloeckler was Deputy Commissioner for the New York State Education Department. In this role, he served as both State Director of Special Education and State Director of Vocational Rehabilitation as well as being responsible for administering the state's Independent Living Program. In November 1999, he received the Heritage Award, given by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of special education.