Testimony to the No Child Left Behind Commission
By Roberta Malavenda
May 22, 2006
Atlanta

Secretary Thompson, Governor Roy E. Barnes, Commissioners,

Good afternoon. My name is Roberta Malavenda. I live in Roswell, Georgia, and my son attended the City of Atlanta and Fulton County schools. I am speaking to you today on behalf of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), a not-for-profit organization that seeks to increase opportunities for children, adolescents and adults with learning disabilities (LD) to succeed in school, work and life. NCLD works with a national network of more than 33,000 parents, teachers and individuals with LD.

I am also the parent of a 24-year-old son, Joshua, who has a math learning disability and Attention Deficit Disorder. Josh struggled to graduate high school and he was successful - at the age of 21. He is now in culinary school and continues to need support and one-on-one coaching.

Because of the individualized services, Josh's commitment to graduate, and my advocacy to eliminate barriers, Josh did graduate and will be successful in life. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, we need to ensure that EVERY child is supported and counted. Accountability is key.

Our nation's public schools currently provide special education services to six million students with disabilities -- 13½% of public school enrollment. Almost half have specific learning disabilities. We believe that these students are receiving significant benefit from the increased accountability for their performance and progress that the No Child Left Behind Act has put in place through its assessment and accountability requirements. Positive gains include higher expectations that result in students staying on track to gain a regular high school diploma and increased access to higher education opportunities.

Special education students are an important subgroup educationally and for school assessment and accountability systems. Yet, too many states have been allowed to circumvent accountability for these students through increasing the subgroup "n" size. The result of this has been to limit these students' opportunity for improved instruction and achievement.

For example, a Research Report recently released by this Commission's staff indicate that 72% of the students with disabilities in California attend a school that is not required to disaggregate and make AYP for their subgroup. This unacceptably high rate of non-accountability is accentuated by the fact that California educates 10% of the nation's students with disabilities - almost 670,000.

While unreasonably high "n" sizes do not allow schools to fully escape accountability for special education students - they must still be counted in the whole school calculations for AYP - a recent study by the Center for Assessment found that schools could feasibly ignore the performance of special education students until 2011 or so by virtue of a large "n" size.

This lack of accountability for the performance of students with disabilities is further exacerbated by the use of confidence intervals which allow some students to never achieve proficiency while ensuring that the school makes AYP. Lastly, a proposed regulation will allow schools to count the performance of students who have exited special education in AYP calculations for the sub group while not requiring that they count in the "n" size - a provision that, when combined with large "n" sizes and confidence intervals - will surely disguise the performance of most students in this important subgroup.

We urge the Commission to seriously examine the issues of minimum subgroup size, confidence intervals and other provisions that are currently being used as tools to marginalize special education students in NCLB's accountability system. We ask that the Commission make recommendations on ways the Congress can infuse NCLB with safeguards that protect and promote better accountability for our nation's six million students with disabilities. The National Center for Learning Disabilities welcomes the opportunity to assist you with the formulation of such recommendations.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today. We appreciate the work of the Commission.