Friday, November 27, 2009
Disability gaps (eighth grade this time)
Matching my earlier post on fourth grade results, here's how Kentucky's most recent NAEP performance stacks up when results for students with and without disabilities are shown separately:
Once again, Kentucky's gaps are major grounds for concern, with our weaknesses either in line with the nation or somewhate smaller than the national average.
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ReplyDelete"Once again, the nation's gaps are major grounds for concern."
Also, anyone who thinks that children with disabilities' test scores should be as high or higher than children without disabilities is not only ignorant, but extremely selfish.
LS,
ReplyDeleteI'm writing this blog for a Kentucky audience, and our gaps are the ones we can reduce.
Anyone who thinks we need to settle for our current results for students with disabilities hasn't spent enough time working with those students or listening to their parents and advocates. It isn't just that essentially all students can master the basics far better when taught well. It's that some of them have tremendous potential for advanced work and adult leadership that is being lost because we serve them so poorly.
I'm delighted that growing numbers of Kentucky educators are working out how to differentiate their work so that all students succeed at higher levels, and entirely convinced that students who currently have the weakest performance will be the biggest beneficiaries.
I'm happily impatient to see that commitment spread to our entire teacher workforce.