Accounting for the performance of students with disabilities on statewide assessments.

The current study investigates school-level factors that affect the performance of students with disabilities on statewide assessments. Data were collected as part of a larger study examining the effects of education policy reform on students with disabilities. Statewide assessment data for students with disabilities from 2 school districts within 1 state were analyzed. Assessment results in reading and math in 3rd, 5th, and 8th grades across 2 school years were analyzed using a series of hierarchical linear regressions. Of the variables considered, only the performance of schools' general education students on the assessments added any predictive value to the regression model after accounting for school demographic indicators.

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The passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) signaled a new era in accountability for students with disabilities. While the 1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2001) required that students with disabilities participate in state and local assessments and that results be reported, the IDEA did not require that the results be factored into accountability indexes (McLaughlin & Thurlow, 2003). Even after passage of the 1997 amendments, state policies regarding the performance of students with disabilities were either dismissive (e.g., assessment exemptions were permitted) or undermining (e.g., scores were not included in accountability indexes because of the use of accommodations or alternate assessments; Elliott, Erickson, Thurlow, & Shriner, 2000; Thurlow, Lazarus, Thompson, & Robey, 2002). The NCLBA has reinforced the necessity of including all students in state assessments and created the mandate for universal accountability. The act and accompanying regulations require states to have a single accountability system that is based on challenging content and achievement standards in reading, language arts, and science in Grades 3 through 8. In addition, states must have an assessment that is aligned with the grade-level standards, and the results of those assessments must be reported in terms of the proportion of students who performed at basic, proficient, and advanced levels. Results must also be disaggregated and reported by specific subgroups of students, including five major racial and ethnic groups, poverty, English language learners (ELL), and disability. As part of the accountability requirements of the NCLBA, states must establish annual performance objectives for each subgroup of students that enable all students to reach the state standard of proficiency or advanced on the state assessments within 12 years. The annual progress objectives, referred to as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), require increased percentages of students within each subgroup to meet the proficient level. Failure to make AYP for any one subgroup can result in a school's facing a series of consequences (McLaughlin & Thurlow, 2003). As the requirements of the NCLBA are being implemented in school districts across the United States, the performance and progress of the subgroup of students with disabilities appears to be one of the most problematic ("Quality Counts," 2004).

In the 2002-2003 academic year, states reported varying levels of proficiency on assessments in reading and math for students with disabilities in the various grade levels with one common theme: Many were well below the initial performance objectives that had been set for them. In Washington State, for example, only 25% of the fourth-grade students met the criteria for proficiency on the math assessment, and 31% met the criteria for proficiency on the reading assessment. In Maryland, only 23% of third-grade students with disabilities met the criteria for proficiency on the reading assessment. In Wisconsin, only 31% of the eighth-grade students with disabilities met the criteria for proficiency on the math assessment. In addition, during that same school year, about a third of the schools in Maryland that failed to meet the AYP goals did so solely because of the performance of students with disabilities.

Performance deficits are only one of several challenges associated with including students with disabilities in the NCLBA. One of the more difficult issues concerns how to consider assessment accommodations within calculations of AYE While some states have adopted very permissive accommodation policies that allow individual students with disabilities to have any of a number of accommodations without affecting their scores, other states invalidate or automatically count as basic the scores of students who receive certain assessment accommodations. Another factor that contributes to the complexity of the issues surrounding students with disabilities pertains to alternate assessments and the recently released regulation concerning students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. States and local districts may now count as proficient up to 1% of the scores of students who are held to alternative achievement standards (typically through the use of an alternative assessment). Obvious from these examples is the unique complexity of including students with disabilities in the type of assessment-based accountability defined by the NCLBA.

Due to this uniqueness, the Educational Policy Reform Research Institute (EPRRI) was established in 2000 and funded by the U.S. Department of Education to investigate the impact of educational accountability reforms on students with disabilities and the programs and systems that serve them. The impact and interpretation of the NCLBA has become an important area of investigation. The EPRRI's overall program of research includes both qualitative and quantitative investigations at the state, district, and building levels and is focused on documenting performance trends among students with disabilities as well as identifying factors that affect that performance. The analyses reported here pertain to one research question: What building-level factors account for the performance of students with disabilities on statewide assessments? In this study, we set out to examine the effect of various school-level factors on the achievement of students with disabilities on statewide assessments at the building level. In framing our analyses, we chose to examine three types of school-level variables: demographic characteristics, school characteristics, and special education characteristics. In our conceptualization of factors to consider, school-level demographic characteristics (e.g., overall socioeconomic status of the school population, percentage of students who qualify as ELL) were included because they have been shown to influence student achievement above and beyond individual student characteristics (e.g., Caldas & Bankston, 1997; Ma & Klinger, 2000). In addition to school-level demographic characteristics, other school characteristics have also been shown to affect or predict student achievement at the building level. School size, for example, has been repeatedly linked to overall student achievement (e.g., Alspaugh & Gao, 2003; Borland & Howsen, 2003; Driscoll, Halcoussis, & Svorny, 2003; Ho & Willms, 1996). In addition, the level of preparation of the teaching staff (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 1997), level of parental participation (e.g., Goldring & Shapira, 1996), and levels of school funding (e.g., Namboodiri, Corwin, & Dorsten, 1993) have also all been linked to student achievement at the building ...