ABSTRACT
Mrs. Black is struggling with delivering instruction to two students in her inclusive math class. At the end of the fi rst 9-week marking period, two students are falling behind the other students and seem to struggle in both problems solving ability and computational skills. Mrs. Black asks for a meeting with the special education teacher, Mr. Walker, to try to determine a course of action. During the meeting Mrs. Black describes both students as well behaved, but also points out that they do not do their homework and have little parental support at home. Additionally, she provides both students extra time for tests and allows them to use calculators. She reiterates that they are not making appropriate progress in the core math curriculum as demonstrated by the students’ grades on the last four chapter tests which both students failed and the last 10 uncompleted homework assignments. Mr. Walker asks Mrs. Black if she has any other data to demonstrate their lack of progress and what instructional approaches have been used with the students. Mrs. Black is a bit confused as to what other data she would have and explains that she has attempted multiple strategies with the students that included motivational contracts for completing homework, parental contacts, after school homework sessions, reducing the number of homework problems, and extra time for tests. Mr. Walker suggests that the fi rst step is to set up a progress monitoring system to monitor the students’ performance in math. Mrs. Black isn’t quite sure what that means, but is willing to work together with Mr. Walker to set up the system. (See Appendix for illustrative study involving Mrs, Black and Mr. Walker.)
Introduction
“In today’s educational climate, school success is defi ned as ensuring achievement for every student” (Safer & Fleischman, 2005, p. 81). The most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),
commonly referred to as No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), mandates that schools must now demonstrate adequate yearly progress of all students or risk serious sanctions. To ensure that progress is indeed made by all students, schools are required to disaggregate student data from standardized tests for students traditionally most at-risk: students whose primary language is not English, students from minority backgrounds, students from low socio-economic status families, and students with disabilities. The most recent reauthorization of The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) also requires schools to show that students with disabilities are progressing at the same rate as their typically developing peers to the greatest extent possible. This accountability of academic progress of students with disabilities is relatively new. As Lindstrom mentioned in the previous chapter, historically, students with disabilities have not been included in high-stakes testing (Thurlow, Elliott, & Ysseldyke, 1998) and legislative mandates only required that students with disabilities have access to the general education curriculum.
