Experts: Retaining disabled students can breed failure

Holding back students with disabilities for failing the FCAT leads to frustration and a higher dropout rate, some educators say.

Third-graders with disabilities fail the state's standardized reading test at twice the rate of their nondisabled peers.

In the high-stakes world of testing in Florida public schools, that unsurprising fact takes on greater significance:

It means the type of student most likely to be held back from the fourth grade is a child whose struggle to learn is caught up in a battle against physical impairment or learning disability.

"We had some kids taking the test who could barely write their names," said Carol Thomas, assistant superintendent for Pinellas County schools.

For the second year in a row, thousands of Florida's third-graders are facing the fact that a low score on the reading test could prevent their promotion to the fourth grade.

For 8,300 of them, this is the second year they have flunked the test. More than half of those students have a disability, according to preliminary figures from state Department of Education spokesman MacKay Jimeson.

In Pasco County, 68 percent of the third-graders who flunked the test two years in a row are diagnosed with some type of disability. (Pasco was the only district in the Tampa Bay area to sort the data with such specificity.)

"They're being asked to take a difficult test that expects them to perform like an average child," said Judie Bortness, of Pasco's Exceptional Student Education (ESE) division. "While that sounds like an admirable goal, it's not realistic when we're dealing with children who are diagnosed with learning disabilities.

"(Disabled) children, because of their disabilities, have experienced a great deal of failure ... To retain them and call them a failure again just adds to their sense of frustration."

All is not lost for disabled students who fail the test.

A loophole in the state's mandatory third-grade retention law holds that special education students who already have been retained one year and have received intensive remediation are eligible to be promoted, even if they flunk the test a second time.

But that policy raises another question.

"What's the point of holding them back in the first place?" said Jane Browning, executive director of the Learning Disabilities Association of America.

Gov. Jeb Bush and the state's educational leaders say retention helps put an end to the "social promotion" of poor-performing students, who end up in high school without basic learning skills. This is the second year for enforcement of a state law that says students who flunk the state's standardized reading test are not allowed into the fourth grade until they can establish improved proficiency.

But critics cite research showing the practice can lead to increased dropout rates without necessarily improving performance.

Special education is a designation for students with learning disabilities, mental and emotional handicaps, visual, hearing and language impairments and other physical disabilities. Jimeson, the state Department of Education spokesman, said the high numbers of special education students who failed the reading test twice does not discredit the need for a year's retention.

He put the responsibility for low test results back on the local districts: "Have all these children been given the intensive remediation they need?"

Last year, in the first round of third-grade reading tests, 52 percent of special education students flunked, compared with 23 percent of all students.

Jimeson suggested such numbers are not always what they seem.

"Many of these students are often misidentified as ESE and they truly can learn," Jimeson said. Students sometimes are identified for special education because they are lagging in basic skills, for example.

A recent study of Chicago schools, however, suggests that retention programs like Florida's may in themselves lead schools to categorize more students as in need of special education.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research found that 20 percent of third- and sixth-graders there who were retained after failing a reading test were placed in special education programs within two years.

Authors of the study hypothesized that one contributing factor could have been a loophole similar to Florida's, that enables special education students to progress to the next grade despite failing scores.

"Special education could have been used as a means of getting struggling students around the policy and removing them from the accountability system," they wrote. But they noted other possible explanations: perhaps, after students failed, teachers identified previously undiagnosed learning disabilities; perhaps students were misdiagnosed because teachers lacked another explanation for their pupils' difficulties.

Jimeson said he didn't think the situation in Chicago could be fairly compared to Florida, because the promotion mechanisms are not identical.

Susan Rine, administrative assistant over Pasco elementary schools, said the district would be looking to see whether Pasco has experienced trends similar to those found in the study.

Anecdotal evidence, she said, suggests parents are more likely to demand their children be tested for special education services after learning their children are at risk of being held back a year.

Overall, the number of Florida students with special education needs has grown 54 percent in the past decade, more than double the growth of the student population as a whole. Students with disabilities make up 15 percent of Florida's total public school enrollment.

With state and federal laws requiring more special education students to take standardized tests, educators say disagreements over high-stakes testing for disabled students are a long way from being resolved.

Students with disabilities who are required to take the FCAT are allowed to employ keyboards, braille, digital tape recorders, specially-lined paper, pointing devices, magnifiers and switches, among other things, to help them get through the test.

"What are we doing?" said Carolyn Tavel, an executive director for the Florida chapter of the Learning Disabilities Association. "Yes, we want successful adults, but are we penalizing our students more than it's worth?"

Rine said she agrees with Jimeson's suggestion that intensive remediation should be directed at struggling readers, but that doesn't necessarily mean retention is in order: "In my opinion, there's no reason we can't offer a third-grade curriculum in a high school if that's what's needed (to meet some students' needs)."

Rine worries that holding exceptional students back a grade or two is more likely to frustrate them, thwart learning and ultimately foster poor citizenship.

"I just don't know how many times you can hit somebody over the head and say, "You're not good at this, you're not good at this,"' Rine said.

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