- Bill Would Require D.C. To Evaluate Special Education Students More Quickly
- States’ special education services face tighter oversight by the Obama administration
- Wallace Foundation aims to help school leaders get better, donates $30 million
Bill Would Require D.C. To Evaluate Special Education Students More Quickly
WAMU
By Martin Austermuhle
June 20, 2014
In D.C., children with special needs have to wait longer than their peers in any state to receive an evaluation by the city’s school system, but this week the D.C. Council debated a bill that would cut that wait time in half.
Under current D.C. law, a student suspected of having a learning disability has to be evaluated within 120 days, longer than anywhere else in the country. Advocates say that the four-month-wait delays access to vital special education services and leaves children behind their peers.
"The school took the full 120 days to complete her evaluation," said Judith Sandalow, the executive director of the Children's Law Center, of one of her clients. She was speaking at a hearing on a bill that would require the evaluations to be completed within 60 days, on par with nearby Fairfax County.
"At that point, much of Eva’s first-grade year had passed. She’s now almost a full year behind in reading," said Sandalow, who helped Council member David Catania (I-At Large) write the bill.
Catania, who is running for mayor, included the provision in a trio of bills targeting the city's special education system, which serves 13,000 students. (There are 84,000 students in D.C.'s public and charter schools.) The bills would expand the criteria for early interventions, clarify the responsibilities at public and charter schools, and make it easier for parents to challenge their child's evaluation.
"Students are often not getting the support that they need, families often feel powerless in ensuring appropriate services for their children, teachers and principals, likewise, often don’t have the training and resources they need," said Catania.
Advocates for the bills said that special education students — who post lower graduation and proficiency rates than their peers — need to be identified earlier and be offered necessary services so that they don't fall behind.
Katrina Johnson, a Ward 8 resident, spoke of her son Ryan, whose evaluation by a charter school came late, delaying services he needed.
"My son is really behind because of all the missed services. He is four years old and has the speech ability of a 2-year-old. The school has done a disservice to my son this year, and I am still not confident that my son is receiving all of the services that he is supposed to be receiving," she said.
Dr. Nathaniel Beers, who heads special education services for D.C. Public Schools, said that while the school system has improved how it identified and educates students with learning differences, he was concerned with how portions of the bill would be implemented.
"Currently, we know that more than 50 percent of our evaluations are completed within 90 days or less, so we are on our way to making this the norm programmatically," he said. "The condensed evaluation timeline will require a specific adjustment to our policies and procedures... we will need two years from the date of the passage of this bill to successfully implement."
Charter school officials said they were more concerned with provisions shifting the burden of proof during hearings over special education evaluations and services, saying that it could lead to frivolous lawsuits.
Parents and advocates have long complained of the quality of the services that special education students receive, and for years D.C. placed students in private schools as required by a federal law. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Mayor Vince Gray have moved to place more students in public or charter schools, and in late 2012 a federal judge lifted oversight of the city's busing of students to private schools inside and out of the city.
In 2013, over 1,800 special education students remained in private schools, down from over 2,000 in recent years. Still, less than 40 percent of special education students currently graduate on time.
States’ special education services face tighter oversight by the Obama administration
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 24, 2014
The Obama administration is tightening its oversight of the way states educate special-needs students, applying more-stringent criteria that drop the number of states in compliance with federal law from 41 to 18.
Under the new criteria, Maryland is among the states that no longer meet federal requirements, joining the District, which has been out of compliance for the past eight years. Virginia meets the demands of federal law under the new rules, as it did last year under the old accounting system.
The 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that public schools meet the educational needs of students with disabilities who require special services to make progress in school. The law requires that students be given a “free and appropriate” education in the least restrictive environment. An estimated 7 million students between ages 3 and 21 fit that description.
The Education Department distributes $11.5 billion annually to states to help pay for special education and is required by law to monitor how well they are performing in that area.
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.
“Every child, regardless of income, race, background, or disability can succeed if provided the opportunity to learn,” Duncan said in a statement. “We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to the general curriculum in the regular classroom, they excel. We must be honest about student performance, so that we can give all students the supports and services they need to succeed.”
Less than 10 percent of eighth-graders receiving special education services are considered proficient in reading, according to Michael Yudin, acting assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services.
The new criteria are designed to produce “a more comprehensive and thorough picture of the performance of children with disabilities in each state,” according to the department.
Duncan is expected to announce that he is creating a new $50 million technical assistance center within his department to help states more effectively spend the federal funds they receive each year to educate special-needs students.
Under IDEA, the Education Department is required to annually sort states into four categories: meets requirements, needs assistance, needs intervention or needs substantial intervention.
Using the new criteria, the department announced these rankings based on data from the 2012-2013 school year:
Meets requirements: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau
Needs assistance: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, Guam, Puerto Rico
Needs intervention: California, Delaware, the District, Texas, the Bureau of Indian Education, the Virgin Islands
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.
D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the Education Committee, has said special education is in crisis in the District. Catania, who is running for mayor, says the achievement gap between special education students and others has been growing and that special-needs students should get more services. He has introduced several bills regarding special education that will be the subject of hearings this week.
Wallace Foundation aims to help school leaders get better, donates $30 million
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 23, 2014
Fourteen school systems around the country, including the District and Prince George’s County, will receive grants totaling $30 million to improve the effectiveness of unsung middle managers in large urban districts — those who supervise principals.
The five-year program, funded by the Wallace Foundation, is designed to help improve management in sprawling school bureaucracies.
The grants will allow school districts to restructure workloads so that supervisors have fewer principals to manage, more time to spend in schools and more ability to focus on mentoring and solving problems with their principals, said Jody Spiro, director of education leadership at Wallace.
The average supervisor — sometimes called assistant superintendents, instructional coaches or zone supervisors — oversees 24 principals, Spiro said.
What’s more, most of their work is making sure that schools are complying with district, state or federal policies, bureaucratic accounting that leaves little time for meaningful interaction with principals, she said.
The grants are designed to encourage school districts to rearrange responsibilities so that others in the central office assume some of the compliance duties and supervisors have more time to spend with fewer principals.
“This will allow supervisors to be frequently present in the schools, providing mentoring and guidance, particularly to new principals but also to experienced principals who need this kind of support,” Spiro said.
The Wallace Foundation, which has been focused on improving leadership in public schools, believes that the job of supervising principals has been overlooked in discussions about school improvement.
“It’s really been a neglected position,” Spiro said. “There’s no commonality throughout the country from district to district about what these people do. There are no standards of performance, no agreement about what the job is. No one had been really paying attention to it.”
Yet, research commissioned by Wallace found links between effective principals and student achievement, Spiro said. And principals who feel supported by their central administrations are happier, she said.
“One of the things we’ve learned is how lonely the job of a principal is,” Spiro said. “No one else in the school has that position. The principal is responsible for everything that goes on in that building. And that’s lonely.”
An effective mentor can make a difference, she said. “Our theory is that this will not only make a tremendous difference in how effective the principal will be, but it will also help retain the best principals,” Spiro said. “They’ll stay.”
A core group of six school districts — Long Beach (Calif.), Des Moines (Iowa), Broward County (Fla.), Minneapolis, Cleveland and DeKalb County (Ga.) — will receive four-year grants averaging about $3 million each. The foundation will spend $2.5 million on an independent evaluation of whether the grants result in more effective principals.
Wallace also is giving $700,000 to the District and $800,000 to Tulsa (Okla.) to reorganize workloads for principal supervisors and to cultivate new talent.
And it is awarding grants to six districts that are already part of an ongoing 2011 project to develop a “pipeline” of talented school principals. The six districts are Prince George’s County — which will get $700,000 — and Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina), Denver, Gwinnett County (Georgia), Hillsborough County (Fla.) and New York City. The six will receive Wallace grants ranging from $430,000 to $1 million, for a total of $4 million.