Dive Brief:
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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) placed an overall 1% cap on the rate of special education students in each state who can be given alternate tests. The accommodations can only be given to those students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, but U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has granted waivers to 19 of the 23 states that exceeded the cap, according to Education Week.
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Special education advocates say that granting so many waivers, without making recommendations on how to lower the rate of students needing accommodations in the first place, is worrisome.
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Part of the problem, they say, is that the cap is by state, rather than by district or even school. Some districts may legitimately need a higher cap, pulling the already extremely limited number of spots of alternate testing from other districts. Monitoring may fall to a district’s education departments, circumventing the special education departments, which need to be involved in fixing the overall issue.
Dive Insight:
Lawmakers now seem to be stating that DeVos is being too lenient, when a year ago she was thought to be taking too hard of a line with the states. Devos has maintained that she plans to give authority back to the states when it comes to education, and that she wishes ESSA would have done more to make that happen.
This isn’t the first time DeVos and the special education community have clashed. DeVos recently rescinded 72 memos concerning the rights of disabled students because she deemed them “outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective.” She also has reversed President Obama’s Title IX rules relating to college campus sexual assault. According to The Washington Post, Department of Education press secretary Elizabeth Hill said: “There are absolutely no policy implications to these rescissions. Students with disabilities and their advocates will see no impact on services provided.”
Texas has a particular special education cap issue. After a 15-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Education found in January that Texas had violated federal law by effectively capping the number of students with disabilities who could receive special education services and then failing to ensure the students who were turned away were properly educated. Now the state will be spending $84.5 million to resolve the situation. The plan includes outreach to parents whose children had been denied services.
