The United States Department of Education (USDOE) has announced that it will begin to look at graduation rates, test scores, and other measures of academic performance to help determine whether states are meeting the needs of students with disabilities.
The focus on Results Driven Accountability (RDA) marks a major shift in the ways in which the USDOE assesses special education programs, moving away from procedural requirements and compliance to focus on academic and achievement outcomes such as graduation rates as well as math and reading scores for students with disabilities. Until now, these benchmarks have not been stringently applied to special education students.
States that fail to meet the more stringent benchmarks for three or more years could face the loss of some of their federal funding for special education.
Under the old system, 41 states and territories met the requirements, which focused more on meeting procedural requirements. New Jersey is one of 15 states that meets the new requirements under IDEA in 2014 (http://www2.ed.gov/fund/data/report/idea/2014-chart-1.pdf).
As part of the shift to RDA, the USDOE will fund a new $50M technical assistance center to help states leverage $11.5 billon in federal special education dollars earmarked to help students with disabilities achieve better outcomes.
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