Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S6

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end are crucial. But if it's only
about increasing that bottom
band, then it's not all kids."
How well assessments reflect
the special needs of the students
who sit down at computers nationwide
to take them in 2015
will be manifested in the results.
Educators are already bracing for
a drop in the scores of students
without special needs, so the mission
of making the tests accessible
for subgroups such as children
with disabilities has taken on an
added urgency in two multistate
consortia that are designing the
general tests for the standards:
the Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium and the Part-
nership for Assessment of Readiness
for College and Careers, or
PARCC.
'Universal' Testing
The two groups are building their
tests according to the principles of
"universal design," which incorporate
students' special needs from
the beginning, rather than making a
test that must be retrofitted. They're
building in tactile graphics, closed
captioning, text-to-speech readers,
and pop-up glossaries that display
translations. (See story, Page S26.)
But even such built-in accommodations
might not be enough for
some students, who are used to as-
sistive technologies that might not
dovetail well with the consortium
tests. Advocates for special-needs
students worry that those children's
test performance could be compromised
if they're not allowed to use
the supports they're accustomed to.
An area of particular controversy
in the test design has been the decision
to permit, with conditions,
using the "read-aloud accommodation."
Allowing passages to be
read to visually impaired students
undermines the measurement of
some English/language arts skills,
some argue. But that leaves special
educators with a dilemma: how to
gauge their students' reading progress
on the new standards?
We explore those and other assessment
issues in this report
about bringing the common standards
to special populations. We
also take a look at a few issues bedeviling
common-core instruction
for special groups.
Creating individualized education
programs, or IEPs, for instance,
grew more challenging when
the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act made it clear that
teachers must expose their special
education students to the same academic
standards as their peers. But
the common core has made writing
those "standards-based IEPs" even
tougher, advocates say. Teams must
scrutinize the standards to set
grade-appropriate goals their students
should reach. Those academic
goal posts, however, feel far away to
those tasked with teaching special
ADVERTISEMENT
IS IT GOOD FOR THE KIDS?
Paying the Price
By Gene R. Carter, Executive Director, ASCD
As October began, the first federal government shutdown in 17 years captured the globe's
attention as an example of government failure unworthy of the world's foremost democratic
republic. Together, this dysfunction and funding myopia are poised to do untold damage to the
U.S. education system.
In 2009, federal education programs
received an unprecedented $100 billion
in economic stimulus funds to help states
address their budget deficits, forestall
teacher layoffs, and promote education
reform. Schools received the money
primarily to infuse it into the economy
as fast as possible and help stave off an
economic depression. Federal officials
warned schools to spend the money
quickly and avoid recurring costs because
there wouldn't be equally large investments
in the future. They were right.
Since then, federal education funding
has declined precipitously, and cuts are
expected to continue for the foreseeable
future. Even worse is the nonsensical way
that this attrition in education funding
has occurred.
Since 1997, Congress has shirked its
core responsibility to enact yearlong
appropriations for all government agencies
by the start of the federal fiscal year
on October 1 and has instead relied on
a series of stopgap and short-term funding
measures to keep the government
running. This means that for the past 16
years, our federal lawmakers have set
education funding levels without regard
for strategic decision making, program
effectiveness, and current needs.
That's bad enough. But two years
ago, Congress introduced a new word
to the national lexicon: sequestration.
Our nation's lawmakers decided that if
they couldn't agree on a long-term deficit
reduction plan, a series of deep and
automatic spending cuts to both defense
and domestic federal programs-known
as sequestration-would be triggered.
The idea was that the cuts would be so
painful that they would be ample incentive
to ensure a bipartisan solution to
the nation's budget outlook. Of course,
Congress failed to strike a deal and the
effects of that failure are now reverberating
across the nation, with children and
the poor being especially hard hit.
The first cuts to education went
into effect this school year and slashed
approximately 5 percent from all education
programs, including a loss of $726
million to Title I funding for disadvantaged
students and $579 million to special
education. The cuts are indiscriminate,
leaving lawmakers with no decision-making
power about what programs to spare.
Fortunately, many schools and dis-
tricts have absorbed the cuts without
laying off teachers or cutting services by
relying on savings and improving state
budgets to make up the shortfalls. But
some programs have fared worse than
others. For example, more than 50,000
children from low-income families have
lost access to Head Start, and many
Impact Aid districts (those situated near
military bases or tribal lands) have been
forced to eliminate positions and programming
because of sequestration.
Although most schools and districts
are so far unscathed, the prospects for
remaining this way are extremely dim.
Unless Congress comes up with a solution,
sequestration cuts are slated to
continue for the next eight years, through
2021. This is simply not sustainable. Local
savings, state money, and creative budgeting
can only go so far, which means our
students and educators will pay a steep
price for Congress's shortcomings.
Moreover, this belt tightening is hap-
pening at the same time that educators
are serving a record number of K-12 students
in schools nationwide and helping
them master more rigorous college- and
career-ready standards. This is a noble
and necessary goal, but it's unconscionable
to deprive educators of the essential
professional development and resources
they need to attain it.
Educators have become all too adept
at doing more with less. They buy basic
classroom supplies with their own money,
deal with swelling class sizes, shoulder
more responsibility when they lose their
classroom aides, make do with outdated
technology, and try to fill in the gaps when
after-school programming and extracurricular
activities fall by the wayside.
But our profession can no longer be
so accepting. We need to speak up and
tell our lawmakers to stop mortgaging our
country's future because of their penuriousness
and leadership failures. If we are
going to equip all of our children with the
knowledge and skills they need to become
productive adults and lifelong learners,
the federal government must make strategic
and substantial investments in education.
We can't build a robust tomorrow
with today's spare change.
To learn the latest about sequestration and other crucial education developments and
to receive opportunities to take action, subscribe to Capitol Connection, ASCD's free,
weekly policy e-newsletter at www.educatoradvocates.org.
educators how to fuse the common
core into lesson plans. (See story,
Page S24.)
Teachers of students learning
English face unique challenges
with the advent of the common
core. Among them are the expectations
that students be able
to engage in meaningful debate
and discourse with their peers in
all the content areas, even when
their English is still developing, as
well as acquire the "academic language"
unique to each discipline.
That's foreign enough for children
who grew up speaking English; for
those still learning the language,
it's a daunting new expectation.
(See story, Page S14.)
Teacher Roles Broaden
The new cross-disciplinary literacy
expectations of the standards
pose challenges for teachers
of English-language learners, as
well. New kinds of collaboration
are needed to help teachers of all
subjects learn techniques to impart
their content to students with
a limited command of English. The
report looks at a middle school in
Oregon where an unusually close
collaboration draws on the expertise
of the school's English-as-asecond-language
teacher to help
its math and science teachers
make their content accessible to
ELLs. (See story, Page S9.)
Gifted students, whose advocates
have long complained that they're
an afterthought in school policy
and practice, carry challenges of
their own in the common-core era.
Teachers of advanced learners say
the standards lend themselves
well to higher-level instruction. Yet
they worry that teachers don't understand
well enough how to differentiate
their instruction to get
the most out of the new standards.
And they fear that more-capable
learners won't get the focus they
need, as teachers funnel more energy
into helping the lower-achieving
students. (See story, Page S33.)
Rhetoric around teaching the
common core often points to the
standards' promise for those students
most in need of deeper, more
rigorous study. But for some educators,
conversations about how to
fulfill that promise have stalled at
a frustratingly abstract level.
Ms. Santelises, who recently over-
saw common-core implementation
as the chief academic officer in the
Baltimore schools, said it's crucial
for educators to have frank discussions
about the nitty-gritty work
of building the supports at home
and in classrooms that will enable
teachers to help their special-needs
students master the new academic
expectations.
1703 North Beauregard St. * Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA * Web: www.ascd.org
1-800-933-ASCD (2723) or 1-703-578-9600 * Fax: 1-703-575-5400 * E-mail: member@ascd.org
S6 | EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 30, 2013
n
"Unless we take seriously the implementation
challenges, then [the
common core] will have a minimum
impact," she said. "Honesty goes a
long way-like being honest about
the fact that there is no silver bullet
with which to move a student who's
three or four years behind grade
level to a standard that is now two
to three years above the one they're
currently not meeting. Those are
the elephants in the room, the discussions
that policy and practitioners
have to be willing to have." n

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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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