School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO, NY TIMES, August 30, 2004

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The first time Tyler Brenneise, a 10-year-old who is autistic and mildly retarded, took the same state achievement tests as California's nondisabled children, his mother, Allison, anxiously awaited the results, along with the state report card on his special education school, the Del Sol Academy, in San Diego. But when the California Department of Education issued its annual report on school performance several months later, Del Sol Academy was nowhere to be found. Ms. Brenneise wrote state officials asking why. "They wrote back," she said, "that the school doesn't exist."

That is because San Diego labels Del Sol a program, not a school, said Karen Bachoffer, spokeswoman for the San Diego schools. And like most other states, California does not provide report cards for programs that educate disabled children.

"He doesn't count," Ms. Brenneise said. "He's left behind."

The problem is not confined to California. Around the country, states and school districts are sidestepping the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of the federal No Child Left Behind Education Act when it comes to recording their successes and failures in teaching disabled youngsters.

Federal officials have acknowledged permitting a growing number of states to exclude many special education students from reports on school progress, on the grounds that they account for only a small portion of enrollment.

But a review of state education records shows that some states and districts are going far beyond this measure to avoid disclosing the quality of the education they provide to such students.

Some exempt schools for disabled students. Still others simply do not disclose basic information required by the federal law, for example the percentage of disabled education students who graduate from high school, and about 10 states have not been fully reporting how students do on achievement tests tailored to disabled students, federal officials say. New York City's all-special-education district of 20,000 mentally or physically disabled students, District 75, gives only fragments of the information the federal law requires for accountability, reporting schools "in good standing" despite dismal results.

The trend toward avoiding accountability is alarming advocates for the nation's six million disabled students, who see it as an erosion of the education act's disclosure requirements. In them, parents and advocates say, they saw a crucial lever for helping their children meet higher academic standards, and a way of finding out which schools were meeting the challenge.

"The reporting system is a shambles," said James Wendorf, executive director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities. Without full disclosure, Mr. Wendorf said, parents have no handy way of knowing what kinds of services schools are providing each day and how the schools, as a whole, measure up. "It's like flying a plane without instruments,'' he said. "How does a parent know where the plane is expected to land if they don't have that kind of information?"

Federal officials say that aside from the 10 or so states not fully reporting scores on achievement tests tailored to disabled students, most have made great strides to satisfy the complex new law, but they say they are monitoring to see that states follow through. Under the law, schools must report on the test scores of disabled children to show they are making adequate progress toward proficiency in reading and math by 2014. The states are left to determine what is proficient.

Eugene W. Hickok, the under secretary of education, acknowledged that many schools that exclusively serve disabled children were not issuing report cards. But he said that in such cases, the test scores of children in those schools were instead reported at the school district level and, if not there, at the state level.

"Every child is part of an accountability system," Mr. Hickok said. "That doesn't mean there aren't people who are trying to find ways to get around the law."

State officials deny any effort to shortchange disabled students. Rather, many say they were overwhelmed by the new law and could not initially meet some of its more cumbersome reporting provisions.

In some states, like New York, officials said that local and statewide systems did not meet the federal law's demands and that they had not entirely worked out the conflicts. New York officials pledged to correct the problems but also expressed misgivings about the value of report cards for some schools.

Particularly in the city's special education district, said Lori Mei, executive director of the division of accountability for the city's public schools, "you really can't have a cookie-cutter approach." Ms. Mei added, "It may be that we have to have different kinds of outcome measures that are not really tests."

To close the achievement gap, the federal law requires schools to report test scores separately for various groups of students, including African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants and low-income and disabled children.

Schools must show sufficient progress by each of these groups or face steadily tougher consequences that can ultimately include closing.

But states are skirting the law in a range of ways. About a dozen have raised the minimum number of disabled students that must be enrolled before the school has to report on their progress as a separate group. In Maine, school report cards, available on the state's Web site, do not break down test scores for groups like disabled students or report the percentage that took the exams. Nor do they in New Mexico, Colorado or Arkansas, while in Michigan, report cards say only whether particular groups, like disabled students, met targets for proficiency and 95 percent participation in exams.

About 10 states, including Missouri, Utah, Delaware, Colorado and Hawaii, have failed to properly report the scores of disabled children on the special achievement tests and are receiving federal money under "special conditions" obligating them to do so in the future, federal officials say.

Most states are not issuing public report cards on special education schools. Like California, states generally contend that these are not schools, but programs, and thus are exempt from the federal law, an argument largely accepted by officials in Washington. In California, the determination of what is a program and not a school can be made at the local level, but it is often made by states or a consortium of school districts.

As a result, the scores for students attending special education schools are frequently mixed in with the larger pool of scores of disabled students from throughout the districts, making it impossible for parents to get a snapshot of achievement at the institution their children actually attend each day, and for taxpayers to judge their effectiveness.

Dee Alpert, a lawyer who has researched the issue extensively for her newsletter, The Special Education Muckraker, said that parents of children who must attend special education schools, usually those with severe disabilities, must "go through 97 different steps" to get information that is readily available to parents of normal children.

"Being the parent of a kid with a disability is tough enough," said Ms. Alpert, whose son was in special education. "Trying to be an informed involved parent of a kid with a disability is tougher, by far."

But Mitchell Chester, the assistant superintendent for policy and accountability in Ohio, said there were sound reasons for attributing disabled children's performance to their home districts, as Ohio does.

"We think districts have to remain accountable for whether or not those children are served," Dr. Chester said. "So districts can't just make the decisions to farm kids out and wash their hands of their progress."

Officials in Colorado, Maine and New Mexico said they would release the breakdown of scores of disabled students on standardized tests in the coming months. In Colorado, officials said they had just begun reporting scores on the special tests tailored to the disabled, while Delaware said it had been reporting such scores, but not in the way the federal law requires. Both said they were now complying with the requirement.

In Michigan, Ed Roeber, the director for assessment and accountability, said school report cards did not detail performance by particular groups like disabled students because it "would be confusing to people." Michigan grades schools based on 11 indicators, only one of which is test scores for the school as a whole. But reporting on separate groups of students would be "misleading," he said, because test scores were unreliable indicators at that level. "To me, that's a major fault with the No Child Left Behind Act," Mr. Roeber added.

Ms. Brenneise, who is the chairwoman of a special education advisory committee to the San Diego Board of Education, said many schools were reluctant to honestly disclose their record in educating disabled students, believing that these students by definition cannot reach the same academic heights as other students, and thus will always drag down the school as a whole. Aside from discovering that no report card existed for her son's school, she said that she never officially received his test results. Eventually, Ms. Brenneise said, she filed a formal records request and a district employee gave her a slip of paper on which she had written what she said were the son's test scores. Ms. Brenneise is now home schooling her son.

But much sidestepping of the law appears independent of the intellectual disability involved. In Ohio, as in New York, Oregon and many other states, public schools for the deaf and the blind issue no reports on how well their students are performing. Ohio officials acknowledge that deafness and blindness do not typically imply lower intelligence, and said they would release report cards for these schools next year.

In New York, state education officials acknowledged that the city's special education district was not fully reporting on student achievement. Many of the district's schools exclude more than half their students from the state's standardized tests and do not report how they do on the special achievement tests. Nor do they report how many graduate or drop out.

Though Albany issues report cards for many schools, state officials said District 75 preferred to report its performance to the public in a report card of its own design.

"Clearly, it was less than perfect, but I don't think it was intentional," said Martha P. Musser, director of information reporting services for the State Education Department. "New York City never had to deal with these accountability issues for District 75 before." Ms. Musser added that the state had ordered District 75 to improve its public disclosure.

The failure to report leaves parents like Martin Schwartzman of Queens to make decisions in a vacuum. The state recently ordered Mr. Schwartzman's 11-year-old son, Robby, who is autistic, to leave the private school he had attended at taxpayer expense since first grade and return to public school, along with 75 classmates.

"How can I get a measure of what's out there when there's so little data available for District 75?" Mr. Schwartzman asked.

Ms. Alpert, the lawyer, contends that the reticence to report school results is too pervasive to be accidental, and said the information being withheld was crucial for parents and advocates.

Several years ago, she represented a boy with attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities whom the city wanted to place in one of the special education district schools. The boy was talented in math, and his parents believed that with extra support, he could earn a Regents diploma at a regular high school, she said.

Using online school report cards that showed its reading scores had fallen 20 percentile points in three years, while math scores stagnated, Ms. Alpert refuted claims that the school offered any "foreseeable benefit" for her client.

"We won the hearing," Ms. Alpert said. Within a year, she added, the cumulative scores disappeared from the city's school report cards.

"That's what score and graduation-dropout information does for parents of kids with disabilities," she said, "and that's why school, district," regional programs and state education officials "don't want to publish it."
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And when the "true" test scores for every student are released, many parents are surprised to find that their school is now 'failing', that we have been duped by school officials, and that indeed, many students have not been included in the quest for achievement. False claims hurt kids.

Good Schools or Bad? Ratings Baffle Parents
By SAM DILLON, NY TIMES, September 5, 2004

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DARIEN, Ill.- Students are returning to classes across the nation amid a cacophony of contradictory messages about the quality of their education, as thousands of schools with vaunted reputations have been rated in recent weeks as low-performing under a federal law.

School ratings issued under the terms of the president's No Child Left Behind law have clashed with school report card systems administered by some states, leaving parents unsure which level of government to believe or whether to transfer their children, an option offered by the law.

In North Carolina, which pioneered one of the nation's most sophisticated accountability systems, more than 32 schools ranked as excellent by the state failed to meet Washington's criteria for academic progress. In California, 317 schools showed tremendous academic growth on the state's performance index, yet the federal law labeled them low-performing.

Here in Darien, the Hinsdale South High School is one of a dozen prestigious high schools in prosperous Chicago suburbs that failed to meet a federal target and were obligated to send letters to parents explaining their shortcomings and offering to transfer children to other schools.

The conflict between state and federal evaluations has confused hundreds of communities since early August, when class bells began ringing for the fall term in several Southern states. In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush announced that the state had rated more than two-thirds of Florida's 3,100 schools as high-performing. But three-quarters were rated as low-performing under the federal law.

"We have a school down here that is absolutely extraordinary - all the kids take Advanced Placement courses,'' said Jane Gallucci, chairwoman of the Pinellas County School Board and a past president of the Florida School Boards Association, "and the feds called it a failing school. Now that's ludicrous."

The mixed messages are creating headaches for hundreds of thousands of American parents considering whether to transfer their children, an option available when a school is declared low-performing for two years in a row because it missed the targets of the federal law, which President Bush signed in January 2002.

Many affluent communities where gaining entrance to elite colleges is nearly an obsession have been rattled by the law's verdict on their schools, which can fall short if not enough students show up for a test or because mentally retarded students do not perform at grade level.

In Darien, Hinsdale South missed one federal target based on low test scores by a handful of disabled students, and the school district, as required by law, sent letters to parents.

Betsy Levy, whose daughter Samantha is a junior, said she found the letter so confusing, she had to reread it several times. "Our school has been very good for us, and seeing it labeled a failure is hard to take," Mrs. Levy said.

When she met with four other Hinsdale South mothers to discuss the problem, she wondered aloud whether colleges would now look down on Hinsdale South applicants. And a friend, Donna Siefer, voiced another worry: How would real estate agents finesse the bad news to potential home buyers? That rang bells for Diane Bolos, president of a Hinsdale South fund-raising group.

"Yeah, did Congress consider what labeling a school would do to property values?" Mrs. Bolos asked.

The law aims to allow children to transfer to better schools, thereby encouraging all schools to improve. But parents at Hinsdale South expressed little interest in moving their children, complaining instead that the law's yardstick was faulty. That was a view shared by Representative Judy Biggert, a Republican who represents the district.

"I never expected to see all these suburban schools on the watch list," said Ms. Biggert, who started her political career as president of the Hinsdale school board in the 1980's and helped write the federal law. She said she was astonished at the list of schools with excellent reputations in wealthy Chicago suburbs slapped with the low-performing label.

"I've been in all these schools and know how good they are and have concerns that so many schools of this caliber are getting labeled," she said.

It is a sign of the law's sweeping influence that the mood in schoolhouses across the nation seems closely tied to its annual verdict on academic progress. In schools like Cumberland Trace Elementary in Bowling Green, Ky., where students met their test targets, "Life is good," said Patrice McCrary, who teaches kindergarten. "Our classes have jelled nicely this fall."

In contrast, at the Arnall Middle School in Newnan, Ga., where students with limited English skills failed to meet the law's targets, morale is low, said Lorraine Johnson, who was a national Teacher of the Year finalist in 2003. "Teachers are feeling pressure and frustration because Arnall has been labeled."

Eugene Hickok, deputy United States secretary of education, acknowledged that the law had put many schools with great reputations on probation because one or more groups of students had insufficient progress on standardized tests.

"But the point of the law is not to label schools," Mr. Hickok said. "The point is to find out which students are not performing well, and to do something about it." Furthermore, achievement at many schools placed on academic probation last fall has risen since because educators have become more focused, he said.

Among the criteria that have caused thousands of schools to fall short are requirements that disabled students pass the same tests as other students and that 95 percent of students in a school and in every ethnic group be tested. Many states measure schools by other yardsticks, for instance commending schools that help low-scoring students progress rapidly to higher academic levels. But judging how well schools are performing by federal standards is becoming trickier, as rules have changed in recent months. Starting last December, after an outcry from local educators and lawmakers, especially in Republican-governed states, Education Secretary Rod Paige relaxed some regulations considered arbitrary and unfair.

For example, the rule requiring 95 percent participation on standardized tests has been relaxed for some states to allow them to meet the rule by averaging participation over several years. In recent months, federal officials have allowed more than 40 states to amend their school accountability systems in ways that have often made it easier to meet the federal standards, said Patricia Sullivan, deputy executive director at the Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents state superintendents of education.

It is too soon to tell exactly what impact this will have on the number of schools labeled low-performing. Despite a federal rule requiring states to identify schools missing federal targets before the resumption of classes each year, many states have missed the deadline. A year ago, the law labeled 26,000 of the nation's 93,000 public schools as low-performing. So far this year, 26 states have reported their numbers. Last year in those states, 13,423 schools missed the targets. This year, the number is 10,918, said Scott Young, a policy specialist for the education program at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Georgia, Delaware and Kentucky, for instance, a higher percentage of schools met goals than last year. But in other states, including Iowa, Oregon and Minnesota, the number of schools on academic probation has greatly increased.

[In New York City, the number deemed failing for the second year running dropped to 328 from 366, according to a list released Friday by officials in Albany. Many of the schools have built dazzling reputations for educating immigrant and minority students who have floundered in other schools, said Ann Cook, an expert and a co-director of Urban Academy, an innovative school with a national reputation and not on the low-performing list.

Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School, Ms. Cook said, has been doing so well reaching out to young adults, it was recently profiled on the television program "Now With Bill Moyers." Yet it is on the list.

"Calling these schools failures is like sending cancer patients who are deathly ill to Sloan-Kettering, and when they die, you say, 'Let's hold Sloan-Kettering responsible,' '' said Ms. Cook, a frequent critic of the federal law.]

Among the states that have not yet publicly identified schools falling short this year are Connecticut and New Jersey, both of which had highly regarded schools put on academic probation last year.

In Westport, Conn., the Bedford Middle School, where test scores are often among Connecticut's highest, was called low-performing because the school failed to meet the 95 percent standard for testing for the disabled by one student.

"It really bugs me that we got a black eye for a mechanical reason rather than for anything legitimate," said Dr. Elliott Landon, Westport's superintendent.

Montgomery High School in Skillman, N.J., was honored by the federal Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence in 1993, and last year its mean SAT score of 1220 was 194 points above the national average. But Montgomery, too, failed to meet federal targets last year because one student's absence brought the school afoul of the rule requiring that 95 percent of students take standardized tests.

But even some of the law's supporters are concerned about great schools being labeled as low performers this year. Former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, who now heads an institute bearing his name that studies education policy, called No Child Left Behind "a good idea that is helping us ensure that all children learn."

But Mr. Hunt took umbrage when he saw that it labeled Leesville Road High School, in Raleigh, N.C., as a low performer. North Carolina's grading system rated it an excellent and high-academic-growth school.

"I've visited Leesville, and this is one great school," Mr. Hunt said. "This business of No Child Left Behind contradicting our state systems is very confusing for parents. We need to work this out so that states aren't telling them one thing and the feds something else." (Emphasis added by parentadvocates).

Texas May Lose $7M Over Education Failures
Associated Press ^ | Sep. 04, 2004 | Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas - The U.S. Department of Education may withhold as much as $7 million from President Bush's home state for failing to tell parents whether schools performed up to standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Parents won't be able to request transfers to move their children from poorly performing schools until the information is released, and the funding may be withheld until then.

"The law states we're supposed to announce the results before school started and we did not make that deadline," Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman, told the San Antonio Express-News for its Saturday editions.

State education officials said they may not have final results until February.

Ratcliffe said the school report cards were delayed because federal education officials did not approve the state's plan for assessing progress until the end of July. Much of Texas' plan was scrapped because it didn't meet the law's requirements.

Under Bush's No Child Left Behind act, schools must demonstrate year-to-year progress. Students at schools that miss performance benchmarks two years in a row are eligible to transfer to a different school.

State education officials planned to release preliminary data to schools on Nov. 15 and the final list of failing schools on Feb. 23.

U.S. Department of Education spokeswoman D.J. Nordquist said that's not good enough.

"It won't be February," she said. "We've been working with people at the Texas Education Agency and those results will be released before that."

Ratcliffe said talks with federal officials are continuing and state educators hope for a compromise. But state officials say the money the federal government may withhold won't affect programs at the school or district level.
(parentadvocates: we don't believe this).