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Left out, not just behind

By Jim Waters

Since its inception, holding schools accountable for educating our children has been the principle focus of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. As a consequence, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has responded to this nationwide challenge by insisting that most learning-disabled students be left out of the process altogether.

As outrageous as this may sound, KDE’s strategy is seemingly designed to avoid reporting the academic performances of children with learning disabilities. Why? So parents of these children will not discover the degree to which Kentucky public schools are failing to properly educate their children who happen to have learning disabilities.

We question KDE’s priorities. Should it function to protect the woeful academic reputation of some of its schools? Or, should it uncover obstacles to genuine achievement that advance their academic rigorousness?

A recently released report by the Bluegrass Institute, “CATS: An inadequate NCLB basis for school improvement,” asserts that KDE’s policies resulted in no NCLB protection for about half – or around 50,000 – learning-disabled public-school students in the state during 2004.

The department’s relatively new “10/60/15 rule” is the source of most of the exclusions. Simply stated, it exempts students in certain “groups” from NCLB’s purview if there are (1) Fewer than 10 in a “group” (2) Fewer than 60 of that “group” in a school’s tested grades or (3) if that “group” represents less than 15 percent of the school’s total enrollment. “Groups” are comprised of minority and learning-disabled students. At issue is how they potentially score on the Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT), which is used to determine Kentucky’s Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) scores.

If this sounds rather complicated, we wonder whether such avoidance is being done on purpose. For instance, the 60-rule requirement greatly reduces the reporting of minority groups’ test scores because Kentucky’s system tests only two grades in most elementary schools. This means most of the commonwealth’s schools must have an average of 30 learning-disabled students in each grade before the group’s scores are reported.

As a result, many of the state’s smaller – usually rural – schools conveniently avoid accountability for how their learning-disabled children perform. After careful analysis, the Bluegrass Institute “CATS” study reveals that only 59 of the state’s 648 elementary schools reported scores that tested reading comprehension among their learning-disabled students for both 2003 and 2004.

This finding clearly stands opposed to the standards and spirit of NCLB as a majority of learning-disabled children in Kentucky are left behind. In addition, this enormous exclusion demonstrates a failure by the education establishment to make progress toward fulfilling the principles established by the highly acclaimed Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA).

The first page of the KERA law states emphatically: “Schools shall expect a high level of achievement of all students.” If “all” really means “all,” why can officials entrusted with overseeing KERA’s implementation tolerate the exclusion of most of our state’s neediest kids from the protections afforded by NCLB?

Meanwhile, the actual number of learning-disabled students sitting in our classrooms –and the number not being reported under NCLB – continues to swell. Between 1992 – during KERA’s early days – and 2003, the number of children designated as “learning disabled” by Kentucky’s public schools grew nearly 25 percent.

Nearly all Kentucky public schools have students with learning disabilities. Yet in 2005, more than 81 percent of the state’s elementary schools, 56 percent of its middle schools and nearly 75 percent of its high schools were not held accountable for their learning-disabled populations.

According to Richard Innes, the author of the new Bluegrass Institute report, there are some quantifiable ways to include these students and maintain the transparency of NCLB.

“Addressing the issue of properly accounting for learning-disabled children has already been provided for at the federal level,” Innes said. “For example, when NCLB was implemented, the U.S. Department of Education explicitly advised states that they could use up to three consecutive years of test scores to improve coverage of student subgroups, including students with learning disabilities.”

The KDE already uses multi-year averaging when doing so benefits them. Don’t our learning-disabled children deserve the same consideration?

Innes estimates at least 426 of the 507 elementary schools that did not report the reading scores of learning-disabled kids in 2004 could have done so had three-year averaging – with a 10-student minimum – been utilized.

It’s bad enough that many of Kentucky’s students are being left behind their peers in other states – and even other nations – in the crucial areas of math, reading and science. But to totally leave so many disadvantaged children out of the accountability process altogether is an inexcusable practice that must cease.

Jim Waters is director of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

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