states are required to establish annual benchmarks toward a goal of 100 percent student proficiency in reading and math by 2014, with students tested in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school.
The idea of "100% proficiency" has always seemed silly to me. NCLB requires that 95% of children with learning disabilities become grade-level proficient in math and reading (see
here). It ignores the reality that many children with developmental disabilities will never, ever be able to read or do math at an eighth grade level (or even a kindergarten level). Yet many or most of these children attend public schools, and they're lumped into the Proficiency Pile. If they don't pass the tests, the whole school fails.
So I wonder if the people behind NCLB don't want to accept disabled kids for who they are any more than they accept gifted kids (which, of course, is not at all).
This policy also makes me wonder how a school defines a learning disability. Some gifted kids have a learning disability, and it's reasonable to believe that they can become proficient and more. But 2E kids (say they have IQs over 130, which is 2% of the general population) are presumably only a small fraction of the LD group. who But what about kids with IQs less than 70 (again, 2% of the general population)? Unlike the 2E kids, all of them are learning disabled. Do they really only comprise 5% of the special ed population? If they do, maybe we need to re-examine how we define learning-disabled students.
Val
