Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Achievement Gaps For Special Ed Kids: Report by the National Center For Education Outcomes #achievement gap

As most of you would assume, there continues to be an achievement gap between children with IEPs and others. The National Center for Educational Outcomes recently issued a report on the achievement gaps for kids on IEPs as compared to others and for  ELL kids as compared to others. Although there are problems with the way that the data is collected by the various states, the report is an important read.

Among the conclusions for the 2012-2013 school year is the following:
The achievement gaps between students with and without IEPs in reading and mathematics continue. This report presented average achievement gaps for elementary, middle school, and high school levels. As in past reports, there were smaller overall gaps in elementary reading and mathematics than at the middle school and high school levels. At the middle school and high school levels, for reading and mathematics, the average gaps across states spanned from 36 percentage points to 41 percentage points for 2012-13. Because states vary in the methods they use to publicly report data, this influences the achievement gaps reported. As would be expected, those states with “all students” as the comparison group tended to show smaller gaps compared to states using students without IEPs” as the comparison group. Other factors that influence the size of achievement gaps include whether a state has an AA-MAS, the percentage of students taking an AA-MAS in lieu of the general assessment, and how these data are reported. 

You can read the entire report here.  Other valuable information is available on the NCEO website here.

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