Closing the Achievement Gap
for Students with LD
By Kalman Hettleman
There are many reasons for the huge academic gap between students with disabilities and other students. The least understood but most important reason, however, is the low level of goals and services established in most Individual Education Programs (IEP). All too often they are vague and ill-defined, leaving them open to interpretation, which usually translates into expectations for academic progress that are far below students’ abilities.
Take John, for example. He’s a fifth-grade student with dyslexia (who has probably been retained once). He has an IEP goal to raise his reading from the current second-grade level to the third-grade level. But because services are inadequate, John—and the overwhelming majority of such students—will fail to make one year’s progress. Many do not even come close. And even if John gains twelve months, he will not close the gap between his performance level and his grade level—he will still be three years behind.
One Year Plus
In the Baltimore City public school system, where I work pro bono for students with disabilities, there is an unprecedented, exciting effort underway to address this issue and raise the academic achievement of students with LD and other disabilities.
The starting point for reform in Baltimore, under the leadership of the system’s CEO Andres Alonso, is to direct that students receive goals that entitle them not only to twelve months’ progress but to reasonable additional progress that closes the gap between their performance level and their grade level. The directive is called “One Year Plus.”
Of course, just setting the goal doesn’t guarantee progress. But if implemented as intended, the school system will be forced to provide more and better instructional and support services so that students attain progress of one year plus. In short, raising the bar on goals raises the bar for the quality of services.
Back to John. At best he has been making six months’ progress in reading each year (for the two or three years that he has been receiving special education), which accounts for why he is so far behind. So if he is going to make one year plus progress—say two years’ progress in one year—the services he receives will have to be substantially increased and improved. It will almost surely require many additional hours of instruction in a small group of no more than four students, using research-based reading intervention taught by a well-trained teacher.
System-Wide Changes
This is a steep incline for special education systems that are short of resources. For one thing, money to pay for teacher training and expensive small group instruction is scarce. But even more important, educators have not been trained to recognize or apply research on the most effective instructional programs for students with disabilities.
The academic potential of most special education students is underestimated: low expectations underlie low goals.
Retraining staff to replace old misconceptions with research-based IEPs will be slow and arduous. And a fresh supply of trained reading teachers must be found to deliver the services. Nothing less than a transformation of the system is necessary, but the payoffs could be enormous. Most students with LD could be lifted to new heights of academic achievement and post-school success.
I believe that Baltimore is on the cutting edge of this transformation, and hopefully it will become a model for the nation. I welcome feedback from others. Does the need for something like One Year Plus make sense to you? Could it be advocated for and undertaken in your school district?
Kalman Hettleman is a public-interest attorney who has played an important role in educational research and policy, in addition to serving as a Baltimore school board member and deputy mayor for education, and as the Maryland cabinet secretary for social welfare programs. He is the author most recently of “It’s the Classroom, Stupid: A Plan to Save America’s Schoolchildren.”
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I applaud lofty goals for students with learning disabilities. However, if these students truly have a learning disability, it may require more time to catch up. Some of these students will not be ready to read until they are a bit older, Many students with dyslexia don’t read until puberty. To set such time restraints will make these youngsters feel like failures if they are not reading like their age mates within a year’s time. We need to take into consideration developmental asynchrony, anxiety, and other real issues that may interfere progress.
June 23rd, 2010 at 11:31 am
HI Buzzy:
Thanks for all of your great work on behalf of students with disabilities in Baltimore. I believe your initiative – One Year Plus – is essential if we are to right the ship of special education, which has been cruising aimlessly for decades.
The latest iteration of the IDEA clearly states that special education is, in fact, specially designed instruction which involves “adapting, as appropriate to the child’s needs, the content, methodology, or delivery of instruction to address the unique needs of the child that result from the child’s disability to ensure access of the child to the general education curriculum, so that the child can meet the educational standards within the jurisdiction of the public agency that apply to all children.”
The last part of that definition is critical – “so that the child can meet the educational standards within the jurisdiction of the public agency that apply to all children” – meaning that special education services should be designed to provide the additional growth needed to get students to – or close to – proficiency on state assessments (which are based on the state’s educational standards.) For too long parents have accepted IEPs formulated to provide little if any accelerated progress – despite this statement that appeared in the 2006 release of the federal regulations for IDEA: ““Accelerated growth toward, and mastery of State-approved grade-level standards are goals of special education.”
Let’s hope that Baltimore is using some of its millions of additional IDEA federal funds from the Recovery Act to address the needs you point out.
And let’s hope that parents and advocates across the country will stop settling for the dismal academic achievement of students with learning disabilities. One helpful approach is to develop “standards-based IEPs” which are designed to identify achievement gaps against state standards and write goals that aim to close that gap. The Advocacy Institute wrote a guide to Standards-based IEPs for the National Center for Learning Disabilities. Its available via our Web site’s Resources section [www.advocacyinstitute.org/resources].
Keep up the fine work in Baltimore!
August 16th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Many years ago I worked at length with a direct instruction remedial reading program that did improve low reading achievement readers’ scores more than one year, sometimes in as little as 5-6 months. There were always a very few students, about 1.5% that were very slow in their advancement/development of effective reading skills. NIH, under G.Reid Lyon and many others completed substantial research that mostly supports something close to my experience. Given instructionally appropriate/effective reading skill development support, even by para-pros, the majority of children can learn to read. Now that’s where the magic is. Appropriate/effective instruction. I believe that’s where it will get interesting in Baltimore, amid defining individual needs, and budget cuts, it will get very interesting to follow closely what actually happens day to day in instructional interventions given (observed by some human), and student gains made. Let’s follow this together, if the system will open up to public support and observation. By the way, in that school district long ago and far away, only about 1.5-3% of the student body was technically defined as having a learning disability.