NCLB Misses the Target in Special Education

The ideal that NCLB would "shake out" teachers who are not qualified while rewarding teachers who are may fall short of the mark in the mainstream due to a lack of strength in underlying assumptions about the educational landscape. In the Special Education community, this core misunderstanding may miss the target altogether.

The NCLB solution to teacher turnover is to pull "highly qualified" teachers from the general pool of adults with bachelors degrees in required subject areas, supply them with professional development and plug them into the educational system at the point of perceived failure.

In the case of Special Education teachers we already have a smaller pool from which school administrators have already drawn heavily. We have a student population for whom the core subject area may not be the highest priority challenge to surmount. Additionally, the higher incidences of disability tend to be in areas where resources are thin, the poor and under privileges communities where disabilities due to language deficits, inadequate prenatal care, drug abuse and parental educational apathy are higher.

Given these conditions, it is unreasonable, in my opinion, to apply a single solution to the entire nation of pupils and their teachers.

Reference:
Brownell, M., Bishop, A., & Sindelar, P. (2005). NCLB and the Demand for Highly Qualified Teachers: Challenges and Solutions for Rural Schools. Rural Special Education Quarterly, 24(1), 9-15. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

Grading the MCAS-Alt on a Scale

In the State of Massachusetts, children are subjected to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) in accordance with federal No Child Left Behind mandates. Assuming that the MCAS tests are state of the art student evaluations, then by it's formulation, which includes exceptions to the rule, the MCAS already accepts that notion that standardized tests cannot adequately evaluate the entire spectrum of pupils. Within the MCAS specification is method for the evaluation of the profoundly disabled student known as the MCAS-Alt. My proposal is that if the bottom of the curve deserves a special method of evaluation, perhaps the top of the curve does as well. I would propose a specification called the MCAS-exception which allows educators to nominate exceptional or gifted children who may not adapt well to standard test environments to be tested according to a more subjective guideline and to provide a method by which students and their parents could apply for this more subjective form of evaluation within the standardized testing framework. Perhaps in "Race To The Top, Part Deux"?