Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed.
Beverley Holden Johns writes:
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NCLB required all students to be proficient on State tests by 2014.
Failure of the public schools to reach that goal has been widely
viewed as the failure of public education, requiring movement
to Charter Schools and even increasing the talk of Vouchers in the name of Choice.
Now Arne Duncan seeks to require ALL students with disabilities to
demonstrate proficiency or advanced mastery of challenging
subject matter on the NAEP tests?
As this is impossible (students without disabilities do not
come close to doing it and are making very little progress
toward meeting that goal), what will be the impact on special ed?
Special education will be deemed to be an utter failure, and
some will urge Response to Intervention, RTI, often called MTSS,
and Full Inclusion for all (although there is no evidence that will
cause students to meet the NAEP goal).
What is wrong with using NAEP?
(1) National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was not designed for any such purpose, or validated for any such purpose.
(2) NAEP is given at only a few schools in each State to get
a sample of how the State is doing in the 4th and 8th grades
in math and reading every 2 years.
NAEP makes no pretense of testing all children or all schools.
So NAEP offers no accountability whatsoever at the vast majority
of schools in each State.
(3) There have been consistent problems on whether students
with disabilities even take the NAEP, and on whether the NAEP
tests will offer accommodations for students with disabilities
(on which each State has made tremendously varying decisions).
So the percentage of students with disabilities in each State
taking the NAEP varies tremendously from State to State
(making State to State comparisons totally invalid).
(4) NAEP is not aligned with the Common Core so it does
not reflect what may be taught in the classroom.
What does Arne Duncan state that the goal of special ed Results Driven Accountability is?
“While the goal is to ensure that ALL Children with
Disabilities demonstrate proficient or advanced mastery
of challenging subject matter, we recognize that States
may need to take intermediate steps to reach this benchmark.”
(emphasis added)
Please see footnote 7 at
Click to access 2014_part_b_htdmd.pdf
Can anyone provide a complete description of this accountability
system that parents and educators can understand?
On August 4, 2014, all 8 Republicans on the U.S. Senate
education committee in a 3 page letter asked Arne Duncan
detailed questions about this special ed Results Driven Accountability:
“It is troubling that the department made unilateral changes
to the [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance
framework without seeking legislative approval, disregarded
congressional intent, and appears to have violated the clear letter of the law.”
“The changes spelled out in your ‘Results-Driven Accountability’
framework clearly amount to federal influence on the standards
and assessments states and school districts use to direct the
education program of students with disabilities and would give
the federal government authority to use students proficiency as
measured by the NAEP to evaluate and either reward or
sanction school districts.”
No Child Left Behind, the joint product of George W. Bush and
Ted Kennedy, has positives and negatives, but overall it has
been a disaster for the public schools because it had unrealistic
and utopian goals.
We cannot allow special ed Results Driven Accountability
to be a similar disaster.
Bev Johns
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Designed for FAILURE! This is the education policy of the Obama administration.
An excellent example of how the education establishment aka education “reform movement” aka “the new civil rights movement of our time”—
Mouths the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” but puts its muscle behind the “hard bigotry of mandated failure.”
High rhetoric that drives predictable disasters. And of course numbers will be attached to it. Metrics will be used to rank the [few] winners and [many] losers. With literally no reality-based suggestions for how to reach such fantastical goals.
From THE ESSENTIAL DEMING (2013, pp. 56-57):
[start quote]
The worst example of numerical goals came out of our own Department of Education. We did it. On the 18th of April, 1991: Numerical goals. No method. No method suggested. Just numerical goals drawn out of the sky. Such nonsense in high places. think of the harm done by those numerical goals put out by our Department of Education. Unwitting, innocent people read them and do not understand what is wrong. The harm done cannot be measured. The high school graduation rate will increase to 90 percent. Why stop at 90? If you don’t have to have a method, why not make it 95? 98?
Every school free of drugs.We should hope so, but where’s the method?
And we decided that American schools were expected to produce extraordinary gains in student learning. Performance standards. Could anything be worse? Individual schools that make notable progress deserve to be rewarded. Do they? What would happen?
[end quote]
And never say things can’t get worse. Imagine Deming’s surprise to learn that, decades after he wrote the above, by 2014 all students in the USofA were to be proficient by NAEP standards—standards that are literally set up not to permit any such thing!
I prefer my own formulation: we’re being sucker punched. That’s what CCSS and high-stakes standardized testing and the rest of the “education reform” program boil down to.
And don’t expect the charterite/privatizer crowd to ever realize that that is what they are doing. From the Potemkin Villages of the now-vanished Soviet Union to the late but not lamented stack ranking at Microsoft, they just double down when they fail—
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.” [Dorothy Parker]
😎
P.S. Sometimes the choices are simple and clear. Tavis Smiley Show? Diane Ravitch? John Deasy?
There is a better than 98% “satisfactory” chance of certainty [thank you, Bill Gates!] that I’m with Ravitch on this one.
😉
“Multiple Choice”
Smiley, Tavis
Sensible Ravitch
Crazy Deasy*
Choice is easy
*Not to be confused with the band (though they do perform some of the same songs)
I would like to forward Bev Johns comments to my school board. Were her comments in response to a blog post or is there a separate publication? The Board might pay more attention to it independently of the blog, especially since she is a “hometown” (Illinois) expert and highly respected as well.
Doesn’t Duncan actually know anyone with a child with disabilities? My social circle is pretty small, yet my family of origin is very close with two different families who have had children with disabilities and now my cousin has a child with Rubenstein-Tabies. By no means does this limited exposure make me an expert, but I do know enough to realize that none of these kids is ever going to score “proficient” on the NAEP and that it would be cruel to force them to try to do so. That would overlook who they are as human beings. Their gifts to the world don’t lie in the academic arena, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have gifts to offer or that their gifts are any less worthy.
Click to access keynote1.pdf
this is the presentation of Melody Musgrove. note in particular the slide where she states “disrupt the assumptions of IEP teams”…..
also they have an algorithm that speaks to the “expected performance” of a special needs student…. is that some kind of magic sauce I have never learned in grad school?
having participated in the early Chapter 766 legislation before I/D/E/A I think we have a good understanding of special education needs. Ms. Musgrove’s “Disruption” is more of the ed reform destructive stuff they teach at PEPG/Harvard/Fordham Institute when they train their leaders for schools.
Please call her office and tell Melody Musgrove of your dissatisfaction with implementation of Duncan’s policies… She is signing the letters that go out to the states to tell them they are not in compliance.
copied here from Diane Ravitch, May 26,, 2012
“Musgrove said we could call her anytime a 205-245-8020 or e-mail her at melody.musgrove@ed.gov. She added, we might not like what we hear…”
I called her office and of course I got no response.
&, even if you did, you probably would “not (have) like(d) what (you) hear(d).” That having been said, we WILL fight this–state by state.
That adage about hell being wrought by a woman scorned? Just wait till the D.o.Ed. gets a taste of what will be wrought by sped parents!
When a democracy changes to a plutocracy this is the kind of madness that can ensue. Intelligent understanding is supplanted by ignorant and/or political short sightedness. One can only wonder where this will all lead.
I agree wholeheartedly with this post, and with the letter that the Republican Senators sent to Arne Duncan. However, I’ve read that the DoE is saying that the use of the NAEP is only temporary until the transition to the PARCC/SBAC. Many of the objections to the use of the NAEP will not apply, but the outcome will be even worse for special ed students. Someone has to set Arne straight. Who is he listening to? Not any teacher who has actually worked with students with diagnosed cognitive/sensory/neurological differences. Non-standard students can never be validly and reliably tested by mass administered standardized assessments. That in no way means they are not being challenged and not learning and developing to their greatest potential. I hope Congress reins in Duncan and his henchpeople and prevents them from dismantling 40 years of progress (with still a long way to go) for students with disabilities.
“Someone has to set Arne straight.”
Yeah, straight to hell!
Duane–see my comment above (written before I read yours).
P.L. 94-142? Parents. IDEA? Parents. They (& we) shall prevail!
A question for any constitutional lawyer.
In 2001, Congress enacted an education law (NCLB) knowing that it would be absolutely impossible for any school district in the country to comply with (100% proficiency). We now have proof positive that this is true because virtually every school district in the nation was deemed out of compliance by the end of the school year. It would seem that such a law, should be considered to be unconstitutional and consequently should be repealed. Is this so?
One question for Mr. Duncan from the parent of a special needs student.
How?
How will students with disabilities learn to show proficiency on any of these tests?
Seriously. How?
Have you and your experts done research on this, Mr. Duncan? Because according to actual educational experts working with students with disabilities, the knowledge or techniques to do this simply doesn’t exist. Unless Mr. Duncan, you are hiding this knowledge and just want teachers, schools, parents and students to ‘guess’ how to get them to be proficient on tests. Clearly, if you threaten people, they will miraculously figure out how to make these kids proficient. Without modifications, of course. That’s what accountability is, right?
So, please, if you have some secret knowledge that will demonstrate exactly how to teach our kids to show proficiency on these tests, please share it. If not, please take your tests and your comments that we’re all failures and just leave our kids alone.
What Duncan really means is that 40% must be proficient, 30% above proficient, and 40% double, secret super proficient in math.
Since the most common areas of qualification for a label of disability, such as Learning Disabilities and Intellectual Disabilities, are those which require evidence that the student performs significantly below grade level on standardized tests in order to give the child the label, I would find it more concerning if we discovered that most of these students did, in fact, score at grade level on standardized testing. Such a finding would indicate that we were applying disability labels without the proper evidence, or were holding students on special education rosters in order to draw federal funding without following legal protocols to exit students who no longer qualify for services The ethical implications of labeling students as disabled who do not meet the criteria are an even greater concern
I am so tired of people making decisions with no background whatsoever, no hands on experience with special education. I went into this field way back in the 70’s. I have a masters’ degree and more than 20 years of teaching experience with private industry in the middle and 30+ units for extra certifications and state credentials.
I now take orders from a superior who knows nothing from the frontline. It is highly insulting, unprofessional and degrading. In addition, I am the mother of a young woman who is now 24 who fought and worked every night for her while with LAUSD. They never got it. I get it, but for her it is not a visible disability.
Most students who I have worked with over the years from K-12, emotionally disturbed, learning disabled, autistic and more, from mild to moderate can not test well or at their grade level because of their disability. They mature at different rates. Some go to college, some get jobs, but most have to learn in their own time and in their own way (learning style).
The idea that these students must become proficient at tests at a certain grade level, is in direct opposition to an “individualized educational plan”. Unfortunately, these plans, unless questioned by a knowledgeable advocate for the parents, are merely rubber stamps that glorify paper. Compliance is simply a word used that is tracked by computers and entered into a grid that is the same almost for all. Stupid people do stupid things!
We, as special educators, fight obstacles everyday just to provide the services that we know our students need. The truly dedicated are ridiculed for digging through student records to find out what the disability is. Most of the time the real disability isn’t found until high school. By then, it is almost too late. No matter what we do,what we are “allowed” or (maybe not allowed to do) to service the students’ needs, it never conforms to administers
think we should do.
One size does not fit all. Duncan should be sued or jailed for violation of federal law. I didn’t play basketball, therefore I do not teach it.
Here is my thought after reading so many good ones here… As educators we know that students with special needs are supposed to be placed in the “least restrictive environment” as possible. So all this testing serves as a giant RESTRICTION to these students. I mean really, Arne… requiring a student missing half of his brain stem to take a high stakes test? Or a student dying from cancer and in hospital taking a test? Could you be more of a fool? Does this not fly in the face of regulations? Oh, I forgot Duncan can “break the law” and “escape repercussions” to do as he pleases!
The testing isn’t appropriate for children with much less dire disabilities. for instance, I have always wondered how extended time helped the vast majority of learning disabled students. Most of my students finished within time and had no mental energy left to review their work. What they needed was shorter sessions spaced out over several days. Who hasn’t run across a student who does well on the first half of a test and then tanks on the rest? Or how about the student who can walk you through material who then blows a test because the material is pulled apart and presented in a multitude of testing formats in a totally random order? The test becomes a barrier to demonstrating their knowledge.
I should add that I do consider Duncan responsible for these absurd situations mentioned above. If his policies are applying such pressure to administrators around the country that they are losing sight of reason… than YES he is directly responsible for providing reforms creating the MOST RESTRICTIVE (downright abusive) environment to an extremely vulnerable student population!
“Students with disabilities” do not come in one size. Some students with severe learning or cognitive disabilities will never do well on these tests and, as people here have correctly noted, it is unfair at the least to subject them to the tests at all. However, others, with appropriate intervention, should be able to do well. Throwing them all into one batch labeled “can’t possibly succeed at tests” (yes, I’m using hyperbole) doesn’t serve anyone’s interests.
Judith: why is it that people don’t understand what you have stated so clearly?
I am concerned that there is a new consortium building more “tests” for our students: one “fiscal agent’ gets the contract awarded from the feds; the money goes through that pipeline to the other states in the consortium; my claim is that it is a good way to hide the trips to London to visit Pearson et al when the Commissioner of Mass can send the bill to another state and the auditors in our state don’t see it.
quote: “The National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC) received a $45 million award. Nineteen (19) member states/jurisdictions include Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Pacific Assessment Consortium (PAC-6), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming …”
This system of awards through a fiscal agent makes the money pipeline go through one state and perhaps they choose the state with the fewest restrictions on contracts and audits??? Yes, I am skeptical enough to believe they do this…. put the money through FLorida where there won’t be any regulators looking over the shoulders (this is my pick on FL because they have so much fraud in charter schools)…
my email just sen to Weigert at Ed.gov
I just shared my concerns with the Governor of Mass through an email that , because we have had so much difficulty with the PARCC implementation, Massachusetts must be skeptical about ANY new consortia…. I have also shared my concerns with the Boston Globe and the social media.
The implementation of the PARCC and SBACC testing has gone so badly I worry that it will destroy everything we have ever built in special education. I have called Melody Musgrove’s office to share my concerns as well.
Having participated in the origination of Chapter 766 with Commissoner Anrig at the time, before I/D/E/A/ had taken shape, I am concerned that Ms. Musgrove states we wants to attack the “local school IEP teams”…. To me this is just plain arrogance when she speaks of anything we have constructed in Massachusetts. I believe we have the best teacher training programs in the world and yet we are constantly under attack from the federal bureaucrats and you have distorted our implementation. I am assuming that the Educational Commissioner will follow the career path of the others in the nation and he will accept a position with PARCC or some corporate firm… and the teachers, like my cohort generation and the next two generations will have to reconstruct the
pieces after the damage has been left behind by career bureaucrats and opportunists.
You should see what I sent to the Boston Globe it is is even worse than this.
———————————————————————————————————
P.S. to any friends on this blog I really appreciate edits
I’m a retired teacher of the deaf in RI. Did the Globe print your article? Is there a link? THANKS!
Sheila: the Globe doesn’t print anything I send but i send it anyway…. the only time the newspaper quoted me was when I complained about the Hitler Moustache on President Obama at the Town Hall meeting with my rep (being on the grounds there probably got some attention????? they don’t print anything else.)
disappointed but not surprised–pretty much the same with sending anything to the Providence Journal
I too have typo’s. I thought I edited, however, the passion overtook me. Thank you for you incredible insights and sincere endeavors to
fight.
this is the other of the two consortia for special education testing: (I listed the one first that had MA as a member state)
quoting news release:
“in 2010 the Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education offered competitive grants to spur the development of a new generation of assessments for students with disabilities to be jointly developed and used by groups of states. Grants were awarded to two consortia — the Dynamic Learning Maps Alternate Assessment Consortium (DLM) and the National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC). These new alternate assessments will be aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and are expected to fit cohesively within the comprehensive assessment systems under development PARCC and SBAC. Both DLM and NCSC are to be ready for use by the 2014-15 school year, the same year in which the comprehensive assessment systems will be operational.
• The Dynamic Learning Maps Alternate Assessment Consortium (DLM) received a $22 million award. Thirteen (13) member states include Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin serving
1 At the May Governing Board Meeting in San Antonio, a hard copy report was distributed that contains detailed information about each of the five assessment consortia. The April 2012 report, Coming Together to Raise Achievement: New Assessments for the Common Core State Standards, was published by the Center for K–12 Assessment & Performance Management at ETS, is also available on the Internet at http://www.k12center.org/rsc/pdf/Coming_Together_April_2012_Final.PDF.
———————
this was projected for about 150000 special needs students
Do you trust them?????? I don’t!!!!!!
I think that there are a lot of issues wrapped up in this blog and the comments and it’s difficult to untangle them, but here’s a stab. The U.S. Department of Education’s Results Driven Accountibility initiative is designed to improve educational outcomes for students with disabilities, the vast majority of whom do not have cognitive disabilities that prevent them from learning on grade-level. There may be a lot of questions about the use of NAEP scores in making ‘determinations’ (the determinations are required by law), but it is one thing to object to the use of NAEP scores in this process and quite another to condemn the entire process, which has been in place since 2006. Students with disabilities can learn with appropriate instruction, just like all students can. We have come quite a ways since the public schools opened their doors to students with disabilities in the mid-1970s, but we still have a ways to go to ensure that all students achieve to their maximum capabilities. Don’t base your knowledge of students with disabilities on the one or two children that you know. There are 6 million identified students with disabilities in this country and they are all individuals, with individual needs, just like the rest of us.
Excuse me, I’ve known over 200 -300 students. How many do you know? And what are you on?
What is Arne Duncan on? is he taking something magical, like peyote?
My reaction when Duncan came out with this announcement was a sigh and a groan. There are close to 6 million students classified as disabled in the United States. Their abilities range vastly, just as in the typical population. Some classified students are in the very superior intelligence category. For them, passing any test is no problem. Getting in assignments on time and completing long-term assignments, on the other hand, can pose a huge problem for many of those 2e and ADHD students with executive function deficit. So how will testing ever reflect whether the students have learned strategies to overcome the negative effects of executive function deficit? Then there is the other end of the spectrum; the nonverbal, nonambulatory severely intellectually impaired student. For that child, learning a skill that might increase their independence even by a nominal increment could could represent a most remarkable achievement that that NAEP can’t measure. So, for those students, Duncan’s pronouncement demonstrates – I don’t know – evidence that the man isn’t thinking clearly or, in eduspeak, critically. Aside from the academic argument that the law requires design of education responding to the individual unique needs of students under the IDEA, Duncan’s broad-brush approach defies logic. Completely.
Earth to Arnie.
“…….ALL Children with
Disabilities demonstrate proficient or advanced mastery
of challenging subject matter,…”
2016….Adios Arnie….Bye…..
There is something for everyone Arnie…BUT IT IS NOT THE “ONE SIZE FITS ALL” that you are so hell bent on ….Wake up…….Arnie needs to step down. This is becoming more ludicrous each and everyday. We are talking about PEOPLE here not some factory soda can.
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
This article states that 95% of students with disabilities who took the Common Core test last spring failed the test. This is a clear sign this line of thought with Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, just doesn’t work in terms of students with disabilities.