Current calls to
close the achievement gap between students with disabilities and those
without not only ignore reality but, argues Mr. Kauffman, also pose a
real threat to special education students and their teachers.
YOU MAY forgive yourself if you chuckled silently as you read the title
of this article. The idea that someone would have tried to wave to Ray
Charles during his lifetime is funny simply because everyone knew that
he couldn't see anyone waving to him. Indeed, waving to any blind person
is humorous, but it is par-ticularly funny to think of someone waving
to a blind person who is known throughout the world to be blind. Perhaps
the humor resides in our seeing the naivete of a child in the social
unawareness of an adult. However, anyone who waves to a blind person
demonstrates a misunderstanding of facts.
Laughing at
something funny might be an appropriate initial response. But some funny
events are also dangerous, and besides laughing we need to respond
seriously to the danger. Unfortunately, too often we neither laugh at
the funny-but-dangerous nor take appropriate corrective action. We then
fail in two ways: first by not laughing at funny things and second by
not trying to stop something dangerous. Our failures then demonstrate
our willingness to ignore reality.
Among the laughable but
dangerous assumptions of many who should know better is that there need
be no gap between the achievement of students with disabilities and the
achievement of those who do not have disabilities. This assumption may
be implicit in policy or even explicit in policy documents. Either way,
it shows that someone has apparently missed the meaning of "disability."
In education, students with disabilities are those who score low on
tests because of their disability. Trying to close this gap is like
waving to Ray Charles. But educators are led in this misunderstanding of
facts by the United States Department of Education.
President
Bush appointed the President's Commission on Excellence in Special
Education (PCESE) in October 2001. In July 2002, the commission filed
its report, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and
their Families.1 Among the bizarre statements included is this one: "The
ultimate test of the value of special education is that, once
identified, children close the achievement gap with their peers" (p. 4).
Of course, the gap to which the PCESE refers is not closable, for
reasons obvious to anyone with an understanding of statistics and
disability. Moreover, the federal rules that pertain to scores from
alternative assessments under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act ignore
the fact that far more than 1% of schoolchildren have disabilities that
depress their test scores.
We would all like to see higher
achievement for students with and without disabilities. Nevertheless,
students with disabilities, as a group, score lower on tests than do
students without disabilities. That is, their average will always be
lower, even though some individuals with disabilities will score at or
above the average for the general population. However, the PCESE did not
define the achievement gap as the difference between what students with
disabilities could achieve and what they do achieve -- a gap we could
and should close. Nor did the PCESE refer to the difference between what
students with disabilities achieve with, versus without, special
education. That is another closable gap that we should address. But the
gap between the average achievement for students in special education
and the average achievement for students in general education cannot be
closed without eliminating the top achievers in general education or the
lowest achievers in special education -- or both.
Students in
general education are the wrong comparison group for assessing the
effectiveness of special education. The appropriate comparison would be
between students with disabilities who receive special education and
students with disabilities who do not, given that students in the two
groups are similar in other ways. …
