WestEd audit on special education in MCPS released

[Anonymous]

It concludes that MCPS is in compliance with applying IDEA to IEP development and implementation, but highlights a need to better inform parents about the process.

http://www.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=9WBUCU5F9956

[Anonymous]

We are in FCPS but that really surprises me after reading about MCPS on these boards for a few years.

[Anonymous]

There are a lot of problems with this report. To start, the study design is questionable.
A huge part of the report's conclusions comes from survey results. Tthere are 17,472 students receiving special education services.
4,589 parents were offered the survey.
1,812 students were offered the survey.
There was a 10% response rate among parents who were offered the survey and a 3% response rate among students who were offered the survey.
Anyone with any basic knowledge of statistics knows they should not be creating graphs based on this information much less drawing conclusions about whether the county is in compliance with IDEA based on this limited information.

The other problem is that there are a huge number of parents who have not been able to get IEPs for their children and those families were not included in this study which could skew the results greatly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of problems with this report. To start, the study design is questionable.
A huge part of the report's conclusions comes from survey results. Tthere are 17,472 students receiving special education services.
4,589 parents were offered the survey.
1,812 students were offered the survey.
There was a 10% response rate among parents who were offered the survey and a 3% response rate among students who were offered the survey.
Anyone with any basic knowledge of statistics knows they should not be creating graphs based on this information much less drawing conclusions about whether the county is in compliance with IDEA based on this limited information.

The other problem is that there are a huge number of parents who have not been able to get IEPs for their children and those families were not included in this study which could skew the results greatly.

Totally agree. In the academic world, a response rate like this would never be published in a reputable journal because the results can't be extrapolated out to the general population. Did they look to see how their responders differed from those who did not? It sounds like the results from an audit like this would vary dramatically by school even. Ion my opinion they should have selected several schools representative of the demographics of the county and then worked to get >80% parent, teacher and student compliance in those selected schools, and also observed teachers in action across classrooms.