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INCLUSION UP SLIGHTLY, STUDENTS RECEIVING SERVICES UP 3%, DEPT. OF EDUCATION SAYSApril 11, 2000WASHINGTON -- The percentage of students with special needs being taught in general education classrooms is at an all-time high, the U.S. Department of Education said today, and the number of students receiving services is also continuing an upward trend. According to the department's 21st Annual Report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 46.2 percent of students with disabilities ages 3 through 21 spent at least 80 percent of their time in regular classrooms in the 1996-97 school year, up from 45.9 percent a year earlier. In addition, the number of students being served by IDEA programs rose 3 percent in that time. Though the department's Office of Special Education Programs hailed both improvements as significant progress, Assistant Secretary of Education Judy Heumann said the department wants more students mainstreamed. She stopped short of setting a specific goal for an inclusion rate, however. "We do believe there are many more children that can be spending much more time in regular classrooms," Heuman said. "I think in part what we're looking at is, as teachers are receiving appropriate training, as students and educators are being successful in educating children in inclusive classroom settings, that also will be an emphasis for children being appropriately placed." Emphasis on Educators Teacher training, in fact, is one of the biggest areas needing improvement, according to the annual report. In addition to the well documented teacher shortage, which the department says remains a problem, the report highlights two specific areas that need more attention. Paraprofessionals are undertrained and underutilized in general ed. classrooms, OSEP says, and training and higher education opportunities for teachers of students with visual impairments are profoundly lacking. Less than half the departments of education in the states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories have standards or guidelines for paraprofessionals, the report says, even though schools in every state are becoming increasingly reliant on them. The rules for employing these educators, their roles and responsibilities, where they should be placed and how they should be trained and supervised are vague or nonexistent in many school districts. In addition, few teacher education programs include courses to prepare teachers to work with paraprofessionals, assess their skills and further train them on the job. Heightening the problem is a lack of accurate data on paraeducators and the impact they have. Without this, OSEP says, state and local education agencies have a difficult time planning and implementing programs to train paraeducators and improve the quality of their work. Meanwhile, teachers of blind and visually impaired students are both in short supply and unlikely to emerge from the university system in any significant quantities soon. This is largely because there are not enough doctoral-level faculty members or programs to train educators in this specialized field, the report says. OSEP has spent more than $5 million in the last four years on distance learning programs for teachers who provide services to children with visual impairments, but the agency says more work and more collaboration are needed between OSEP, the Council for Exceptional Children and the American Foundation for the Blind. In 1996-97, 25,739 students ages 6 through 21 with visual impairments were served under IDEA. Less than half of them were served in regular classrooms. Over the past 10 years, the number of students with visual impairments has increased 16.07 percent, according to the report. General Teacher Shortage Continues Though teachers of blind and visually handicapped are among those in shortest supply, the annual report also acknowledges the overall shortage of teachers across all special education disciplines continues. To combat this, Heumann said, the Department of Education continues to press Congress each year for more State Improvement Grant money, which targets programs to train both special ed and general ed teachers to address students with special needs. The department is continuing the campaign this year as the fiscal year 2001 budget moves through Congress. In addition to the State Improvement Grants, the department's Office for Post-secondary Education is pushing for better teacher training programs in the universities. "One of the things we're trying to do is get states and institutes of higher education to look at the issue of professional development in a more comprehensive way, so that we're dealing both with teacher shortages but also dealing with making sure we have a better trained population of both general and special educators," Heumann said. The department is also promoting a new Online Academy pilot program operated by the University of Kansas and incorporating 11 other universities. The program provides teachers distance learning opportunities via the Internet in reading instruction, behavior management and the use of technology in the classroom. Finally, the department wants to see better training for special educators in general curriculum areas, OSEP Director Ken Warlick said. "Now that all children are included in large-scale assessments, and we're seeking to have greater access for all children to a rich general curriculum, it is important for special educators to have training that will enhance their expertise in content areas as well," he said. Services Are Reaching Children Earlier Among the report's more positive findings, according to OSEP, is the fact that more children than ever before are getting services before they enter elementary school. The number of children from birth through three years old receiving early childhood intervention services increased 19 percent from December 1994 to December 1997, with 197,376 children in IDEA programs by the end of 1997. The annual rate of increase has ranged from 5 to 7 percent during that three-year period, the report says. The number of children identified for services in the first year of their lives increased most dramatically, up 10 percent from 1996 to 1997 compared to 5 percent increases for children between one and three years old. However, that first-year group is still not being identified for services as quickly as those ages 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 years, OSEP said. On a state-by-state basis, the department also saw reason for encouragement. More than half of all states reported increases in children identified for services in all preschool age groups. About 66 percent of the states in 1997 provided IDEA services for at least 1 to 2 percent of the state's total population of children from birth to two years old, up from 60 percent of the states in 1995. Similarly, the percentage of states serving less than 1 percent of the birth-through-two population dropped from 19 percent in 1995 to 14 percent in 1996 and 13 percent in 1997. OSEP calls these early childhood improvements a classic example of the power of focusing attention and resources on one specific goal. More children are being serviced, Warlick said, primarily because states are doing a better job of identifying them -- they are looking at children more closely than before. While OSEP sees services for 1 to 2 percent of the total early childhood population as a key benchmark, Warlick noted many states are actually reaching 3 to 5 percent of that group, and some even provide services to 7 percent. An increased commitment to preschool programs in general has also made IDEA's "child find" programs more successful, Heumann said. The more children enter organized preschool programs, the easier it is for states to evaluate and identify children with special needs. These preschool programs are finding it easier to steer such children toward services even if they are uncertain of the specific type of disability the children may have, Warlick noted, because OSEP has relaxed its definition of "developmental delay" to act as something of a catch-all disability category. For example, he said, "With learning disabilities, where you have to have a discrepancy between cognitive ability and academic achievement, obviously that doesn't fit when you're dealing with children who are at a preacademic level. But many of those children would have developmental delay so that they would be able to receive services through the program, whereas if they had to wait until they were identified as a child with a learning disability, they might be in the third or fourth grade before they got services." That general term is now viewed as an acceptable diagnosis for a child up to age nine, making it easier for both parents and service providers to get children preventative or early intervention help. "Parents don't necessarily want to put a label on their child yet. Professionals don't necessarily want to label a child, because they're not sure," Heumann added. "So I think that the developmental delay and the extension to the age nine, I think it doesn't prevent a child from being identified as a blind student or a deaf student, [for example], but it does also allow you to just look at what the specific delays are."
"States clearly differ in their graduation requirements for students with disabilities, and these differences appear to affect the percentage of students graduating with a diploma," the report states. Most notably, states that require students to pass a high school exit examination tend to graduate fewer students with disabilities than states that do not. As previously reported, questions about appropriate testing accommodations for students with various disabilities continue to challenge school systems and educators, particularly when standardized or state-wide exam scores are tied to state evaluations of school performance. According to the OSEP report, when exit examinations are at issue, graduation rates vary most widely for students with speech and language impairments. "States adopting or revising graduation requirements should be cognizant of the effects these requirements have on the graduation rates of students with disabilities," the report said. Minnesota, Connecticut and Nebraska posted the highest graduation rates for students with disabilities, with Minnesota reporting 38.2 percent receiving diplomas and the other two reporting 36.5 percent rates. South Carolina, Delaware, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and Mississippi had the worst graduation records in 1996-97, ranging from 10.8 percent for South Carolina to a low of 6.8 percent for Mississippi. Though the variations seem stark, the report warns, "It is difficult to interpret comparisons of graduation rates across states" because many states have different graduation requirements for students with disabilities. Some states, for example, require students to meet the same graduation requirements as students without disabilities to qualify for a standard diploma. In some of those states, students with disabilities can earn a modified diploma or a certificate of completion if they meet their individualized education program objectives, but they are not eligible for standard diplomas without meeting the general ed. requirements for graduation. On the other hand, some states award a standard diploma to students with disabilities if they meet their IEP objectives, even if they do not meet other graduation requirements, the report said. "Students were less likely to graduate if they resided in states that required completion of IEP objectives than if they resided in States that required only the completion of class credits," the report noted. Graduation also varied by type of disability. In 1996-97, 35 percent of students with speech and language impairments, 30 percent of students with traumatic brain injury and 30 percent of students with visual impairments graduated with a diploma. Students with autism and students with multiple disabilities had the lowest graduation rates, at 7.5 percent and 9 percent, respectively.8 |
