The U.S. Department of Education has announced new steps to help close the achievement gap for students with disabilities by moving away from a one-size-fits-all, compliance-focused approach to a more balanced system that looks at how well students are being educated, in addition to continued efforts to protect their rights.
To date, most federal monitoring has focused more attention on procedural requirements, and less on outcome indicators like increasing academic performance or graduation rates for students with disabilities.
Throughout the coming year, the Department will work closely with stakeholders to develop and implement a new review system that takes a more results-driven approach to assessing how states are educating students with disabilities and better targets monitoring to where it’s needed most.
Due to the policy shift, the Department will not carry out the visits scheduled for the 2012-13 school year. Instead, it will focus on developing a new and more effective system of monitoring. The Department will continue to review annual performance reports, and will monitor state supervision systems.
