Students With Disabilities Benefit From Challenging Curricula

Dear Extra Credit:

Marcy Myers, in her Nov. 23 [Extra Credit] letter, fails to mention some very important facts about the No Child Left Behind law and students with disabilities. Many parents and special education experts across the country believe that NCLB's focus on educational accountability for all students, including students with disabilities, is a cause for celebration -- not a tragedy as claimed by Ms. Myers.

The National Center on Educational Outcomes has data confirming that students with disabilities have historically been denied full access to challenging curricula, instruction and assessments. These low expectations have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to low achievement. In spite of the persistence of low expectations and resistance to No Child Left Behind by some members of the educational community, the center reports that the law's mandates are resulting in improved achievement for these students.

Ms. Myers laments that No Child Left Behind forces her to spend more time on academics with her students instead of functional tasks like trips to the mall or grocery store. She suggests that reading and math are irrelevant for her students. However, academics are relevant for all students and should be integrated with functional skills.

My son Stephen, who has Down syndrome, is at Briggs Chaney Middle School in the eighth grade. The staff there does a wonderful job of integrating functional skills with academics. He is in all regular classes including a "gifted" English class because the extra time spent on class discussions gives him the opportunity to work on his communication goals, while also building understanding of the "big ideas" in literature that are engaging and important to young people his age.

It is true that the objectives on alternate assessments like the Alt-MSA test must be linked to the grade-level content standard. Since 1997, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has required that all students with disabilities be given meaningful access to the general curriculum of their same-age peers. No Child Left Behind regulations specifically permit these students to show what they know about the grade-level content at dramatically reduced depth, breadth and complexity from typical peers and be counted as proficient for No Child Left Behind purposes. The tasks that students are asked to perform to show proficiency can be very rudimentary, but still reflect a linkage to the "big ideas" their peers are learning.

In Maryland, the teacher is involved in the selection of the appropriate mastery objectives for each of the students. The 2006 Maryland Report Card shows that the proficiency rate for students taking the Alt-MSA is very similar to the proficiency rate for the regular MSA and is steadily improving.

It will take some time to make giant strides in achievement data given the decades of low expectations we have experienced for students with disabilities. Still, students who are participating in an alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards are showing us that higher achievement is possible when students are given meaningful opportunities to master challenging academic learning targets.

Teachers may have to learn new teaching strategies to ensure that students are successful. This is not a tragedy. The tragedy is the effect that low expectations have had on students with disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities. The tragedy is that some educators refuse to integrate functional skills with meaningful academic content because of their own habits and belief systems, instead of letting their students show just how much they can achieve when they are given a chance.

Ricki Sabia