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An Interview with Lawrence Gloeckler on No Child Left Behind conducted by the National Center for Learning Disabilities
| 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. |
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