Teach Effectively!

Fewer students with disabilities are taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than reported earlier this year. In July of 2005, the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported that 5% of students with disabilities were not included in the NAEP for 2003, but 28 October 2005 Marnie S. Shaul (Director of the GAO section on Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues) wrote to Senator Edward Kennedy to say that 40% of students with disabilities did not take the 2002 NAEP reading assessment sample.

Two months after the report’s issuance, Education provided us with new information regarding how the NAEP data concerning the exclusion of students with disabilities should be interpreted. In reviewing this information, we determined that the exclusion rate for students with disabilities was much higher than previously reported, with about 40 percent of the students with disabilities who were part of the 2002 NAEP reading assessment sample excluded from the actual testing. In addition, the percentages of students with disabilities who were excluded from the testing varied by grade.

Why did the percentages shift so substantially? The data appear to come from different years, but Ms. Shaul’s letter does not make clear the extent to which the different years of reporting account for the differences in participation rates. Nor does the letter elaborate on what “new information” Education Department people provided.

According to an article by Ben Feller, writing for the Associated Press, the discrepency is the result of a mistake in the original report. Feller reported that the orignal report apparently used the wrong denominators in computing percentages of students with disabilities participating.

The 5 percent figure the GAO originally used reflects the number of students with disabilities who were excluded from testing when compared with the entire sample of students.

Yet when the number of disabled children who were kept out of testing is compared only with the sample of students identified with disabilities, the exclusion rates are much higher.

Links to PDFs of the original report and Ms. Shaul’s letter to Senator Kennedy and a link to Mr. Feller’s story as it appeared in the Washington Post.