Public schools are required to provide the educational resources to meet the needs of students with disabilities can make progress in school. Today, the Obama Administration announced that they were tightening oversight and the rules for assessing whether schools were doing what they are meant to do under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Part of today’s announcement was an assessment of the status of various state’s programs according to the new guidelines.
Until now, the agency considered how long states took to evaluate students for special needs and whether they followed due process and other procedures spelled out in the law.
On Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that in judging state performance, his department would now also consider outcomes — how well special education students score on standardized tests, the gap in test scores between students with and without disabilities, the high school graduation rate for disabled students and other measures of achievement.
In that reassessment, Delaware falls into the “Needs Intervention” category.
If a state needs assistance for two years in a row, IDEA requires the department to order the state to obtain technical assistance or label the state “high risk,” which means federal dollars could be withheld. States that need intervention for three consecutive years face other consequences, from being required to file a corrective plan to losing some federal money.
I’m not going to pretend to know much about this subject, but this categorization doesn’t look good at all (and the article doesn’t give you any idea of what the historical categorization was for any state). So what does this mean for Delaware’s Special Education students and parents?