Reply to Interesting exclusion rates for NAEP for MD

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/md-exclusion-of-special-ed-students-affects-national-scores/2013/11/24/9b390054-53b2-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html?hpid=z6

What is the consensus; does MD just do things differently or was this a calculated effort to raise the scores?[/quote]

I don't know about a "calculated effort" to raise the scores, but I agree with the point of the article -- that MD offers accommodations instead of remediating. That has been our experience.  We asked many times for MD to provide remediation in certain areas.  Instead, the IEP team refused and said that the accommodation (a different one than read-aloud) would suffice.  Since we wanted our child to actually learn the skill and thought DC was capable of learning with special instruction, we removed DC from MCPS and sent him to a special ed school where he is learning the skill and can now perform without accommodation.

I am very concerned about MCPS's program of reading instruction. IME, it typically doesn't offer any direct, explicit instruction in phonic concepts except in K and the very basic letter/sound combinations.  Many kids could benefit from more explicit higher level instruction in phonic letter/sound combinations, sound segmentation, encoding/decoding, etc.  But, MCPS doesn't offer this, except thru very specific programs offered only to kids who are two or more years behind or who are falling below the basic/proficient cut score on the MAP.  The end result is that many kids who receive accommodations, haven't gotten proper direct, explicit instruction that could allow them to master reading skills.  This, to me, was the point of the article you linked.

IME, the IEP team had very low achievement standards for our child and when I expressed concern about our child not being able to get remediation and thus not being able to perform in the future on exams where certain kinds of accommodations were not allowed, their attitude was "well, we can excuse the student from that" or "we can create an alternative assessment".

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