Education Policy Brief Closing the Achievement Gap Series: Part III What is the Impact of NCLB on the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities?

It has been nearly five years since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 was passed into law. The law stipulates statewide systems of accountability based upon challenging academic standards and assessment systems with content aligned to those standards. Prior to NCLB, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997 (IDEA) required the inclusion of students with disabilities in state and district assessments. Nationally, the movement toward increased accountabil-ity for all students in our schools has been primarily implemented through state man-dated standardized assessments. Student results on these assessments have become the primary indicators of success (or lack of success) for students, teachers, admin-istrators, schools, and school systems (Ward, Montague, & Linton, 2003). More importantly, NCLB requires student achievement results to be disaggregated into subgroup categories based on race/ ethnicity, income, limited English profi-ciency, and includes a subgroup category for students with disabilities. Across the country, students with disabili-ties have made progress on state assess-ments; however, many schools are not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) because of the overall academic perfor-mance of the special education subgroup measured against a set standard estab-lished by each state for all of its students. In 2005, 942 of 1,831 Indiana schools (51%) did not make AYP as required by NCLB; 719 of the 942 schools (76%) reported not making AYP in the special education subgroup (131 schools did not indicate why they did not make AYP). To say that NCLB is high impact legislation is to understate the case considerably