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5 - Individualizing Assessment and Opportunity to Learn

Lessons from the Education of Students with Disabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Diana C. Pullin
Edited by
Pamela A. Moss ,
Diana C. Pullin ,
James Paul Gee ,
Edward H. Haertel  and
Lauren Jones Young
Diana C. Pullin
Affiliation:
Professor in the Lynch School of Education and an affiliate professor of law, Boston College
Pamela A. Moss
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Diana C. Pullin
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
James Paul Gee
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Edward H. Haertel
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Lauren Jones Young
Affiliation:
The Spencer Foundation, Chicago
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Summary

Students with disabilities are a group for whom opportunity to learn (OTL) and educational assessment present special issues of public policy and challenges for educational research and practice. These challenges highlight both the powerful prospects for improving schools and the significant limitations inherent in current practice. One commentator has suggested that “when read critically, special education provides the structural and cultural insights that are necessary to begin reconstructing public education for the historical conditions of the twenty-first century and, ultimately, for reconciling it with its democratic ideals” (Skrtic 1991, 206).

Children with disabilities were a group long excluded from our nation's schools. In 1974, Congress estimated that more than a million children with disabilities were not in school (Hehir and Gamm 1999; Pullin 1999). When a commitment was made to educate this population, it was embedded in a series of state and federal legal protections that define access to educational opportunity in a manner quite different from the opportunities afforded to students without disabilities. Although our system of educating students with disabilities is far from perfect in either design or implementation, examination of the treatment of students with disabilities affords a different lens for viewing the challenges associated with providing every child with a full and fair opportunity to learn utilizing appropriate and meaningful testing and assessment.

Almost nine percent of the students in the country, more than six million children and youth, received special education services in 2002 under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA); almost half of these students were those placed in the category of individuals with specific learning disabilities (U.S. Department of Education 2004).

Type
Chapter
Information
Assessment, Equity, and Opportunity to Learn , pp. 109 - 135
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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