Children Left Behind – a Correction

Dear Editor,
   As an attorney and the editor of a national journal on No Child Left Behind, I wanted to alert you to an error in the Nov. 26 article by Rachel Proctor May ["Will AISD Crack Down on Special Ed?," News]. Ms. May reports, "Adding an extra layer of concern is the fact that the federal No Child Left Behind Act allows only 1% of a school's students to be tested below grade level, no matter how many special-ed students the school has." Actually, the 1% limitation applies at the district and state levels – not at the school level. The U.S. Department of Education specifically recognized that schools often have special programs that would cause them to break through the 1% ceiling. And even at the district and state levels, administrators can apply for a waiver to deal with specific circumstances. (For more, please see Vo. 68, No. 236 of the Federal Register, Dec. 9, 2003, p. 68,699-68,700.)
   That's not to say that complying with the 1% limit is easy, especially since the Education Department isn't being generous with waivers. A big concern is the number of so-called "gap kids" – kids who aren't so cognitively disabled that they qualify for out-of-level assessments, but who nevertheless don't have much hope of meeting grade-level standards. No one's sure how many of these students are out there. And disabilities organizations are split on what to do. For every advocate who thinks that it's regressive to suggest that "gap kids" can't meet ordinary standards, there's another who argues with equal passion that it's cruel to consign students to repeated failure. Because of this split, I'm not holding out much hope that this issue will get resolved anytime soon.
   Overall, an excellent article.