Evaluating New York State Special Education Services

Introduction

The New York State Education Department is responsible for providing high-quality educational services to well over a million students in the New York City school system, and a significant percentage of these students have profound learning disabilities that require individualized and specialized services. Because an enormous amount of scarce resources are being allocated for these educational services, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions over time. To this end, this paper reviews the relevant literature to determine the extent to which federal and state mandates are being satisfied, and offers an evaluation of the effectiveness of the New York State Education Department's special education services in meeting the needs of its students and parents. A summary of the research and important findings are presented in the conclusion.

According to Greenwood, Walker, Hornbeck, Hebbeler, and Spiker (2007), following the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), there have been increasing calls for accountability for student learning outcomes in K–12 education. Likewise, Rous, McCormick, Gooden, and Townley (2007) report that the need for improved accountability in education has been the result of a number of reform initiatives in recent years, including the reauthorization of Title I, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and President Bush's Good Start Grow Smart Early Childhood Initiative of 2002. In addition, early childhood education programs in the United States have also been affected by other federal mandates, including the Governmental Performance Reporting Act (GPRA) and the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). Both of these initiatives require that all federal programs — such as Head Start, childcare, and programs for children with disabilities — must provide data concerning progress made toward meeting program goals, which in turn are used to formulate federal budget allocations (Rous et al., 2007).

Meeting Student Needs: Program Rationale and Federal Mandates

Much of the impetus for these initiatives was based on the findings of an internal government review of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) that revealed a paucity of evidence concerning the effectiveness of early childhood programs. Consequently, beginning in 2005, OSEP mandated that all states receiving IDEA Part C and Part B (Section 619) funds would be required to submit annual data concerning the progress of children receiving a minimum of six months of educational services (Rous et al., 2007). In response to this new mandate, states:

1. Filed their State Performance Plan (SPP) with OSEP in December 2005;
2. Reported data on children's status at entry in their Annual Performance Report (APR) in February 2007; and
3. Are required to report data on children's progress between program entry and exit in February 2008 and annually thereafter (Greenwood et al., 2007).

Pursuant to these and other federal and state mandates, the New York Office of Special Education is tasked with the provision of equitable educational services for students with disabilities as follows:

1. Oversee the implementation of federal and state laws and policy for students with disabilities.
2. Provide general supervision and monitoring of all public and private schools serving New York State preschool and school-age students with disabilities.
3. Establish a broad network of technical assistance centers and providers to work directly with parents and school districts to provide current information, high-quality professional development, and technical assistance to improve results for students with disabilities.
4. Ensure a system of due process, including special education mediation and impartial hearings.
5. Meet with stakeholders through the Commissioner's Advisory Panel for Special Education Services (Office of Special Education, 2011).

This framework for the administration and oversight of disability-related student programs is provided by the New York City Education Department within the larger State Education Department framework. According to the New York City Department of Education's official website, "The New York City Department of Education is the largest system of public schools in the United States, serving about 1.1 million students in nearly 1,700 schools" (About us, 2011, para. 1). Not surprisingly, the department is also the recipient of an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars. The department's website notes that "for the school year 2011–12, the Department of Education's total budget is $23.9 billion, including $4.7 billion to pay pensions and interest on Capital Plan debt" (About us, 2011, para. 2). The percentage of the budget allocated to student instructional needs in the New York City school districts (approximately $4.8 billion for academic year 2011–2012) is funded differently from schools in District 75 and programs in District 79 because of their highly differentiated instructional models (Overview, 2011).

While the statistics to date indicate that New York City school districts are underperforming compared to state averages, these across-the-board comparisons fail to take into account a number of important socioeconomic variables that have been shown to be particularly relevant to academic performance by students with disabilities in urban settings. Notwithstanding these constraints, it is possible to discern the effectiveness of programs implemented by the state in satisfying federal and state mandates at the local level, including those used in New York City school districts.

To determine the effectiveness of its efforts in satisfying federal and state mandates concerning the provision of educational services to disabled students, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) uses a series of indicators that track relevant performance metrics. The first indicator — "School Indicator 1: Percent of youth with individualized education programs (IEPs) graduating from high school with a regular diploma" — provides an overall indication of the effectiveness of the school system's programs administered pursuant to 20 U.S.C. 1416(a)(3)(A) (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011). The results of the most recent report for Indicator 1, graduation rates, showed that as of August 2008, the NYSED fell just short of its stated goal of 44% of students with IEPs graduating from high school with a regular diploma within a four-year period, achieving 43.6%. Despite this 0.4% discrepancy, the NYSED notes that progress was made in other areas. For instance, the department reports that "the 2008–09 graduation rate demonstrates an improvement of 2.4 percentage points higher than the 2007–08 actual target data graduation rate of 41.2 percent" (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011, para. 2).

This 2.4% improvement was regarded as especially significant because of the additional number of disabled students administered by the school system during this period. In this regard, the NYSED adds that "this improvement is significant because there were 2,724 more students with disabilities in the 2004 total cohort compared to the 2003 total cohort" (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011, para. 2). The 43.6% graduation rate for students with IEPs compares with the state's overall graduation rate of 44.4%, an increase of 0.8% compared to 2008–2009 (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011).

These findings, however, raise concerns about the underlying ambition of setting a graduation goal of just four in ten disabled students. After all, No Child Left Behind does not mean that approximately 60% will be left behind. Moreover, the NYSED's characterization of a modest 2.4% improvement in graduation rates does not include any indication of how many additional special educators were involved, nor does it address other relevant factors such as the level of disabilities or students' income levels — information that must be gleaned from individual indicator reports where available. This means that these modest gains may have been achieved only through a disproportionately high expenditure of scarce educational resources.

To its credit, the NYSED indicates that more rigorous standards are in the process of being formulated. In the meantime, public schools in New York City have lower graduation rates and test scores compared to their counterparts in other New York school districts (Dunn & Derthick, 2007). According to Dunn and Derthick, part of the problem lies in the socioeconomic conditions facing New York City public school students themselves. These authors report that such students "suffer from poverty, homelessness, poor health, teen pregnancy, and frequent change of residence. Such obstacles raise the question of whether the lower 'outputs' of the school system are the result of inadequate 'inputs'" (Dunn & Derthick, 2007, p. 69).

Compliance with Federal and State Mandates

The NYSED's response to the mandates established by Public Law 108-446, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2004, includes developing and submitting a six-year State Performance Plan (SPP) to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) at the U.S. Department of Education (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011). The SPP is intended to assess the state's efforts to implement the requirements and purposes of IDEA and to identify ways in which improvement will be achieved. To date, OSEP has identified three monitoring priorities and 20 indicators corresponding to these three priority areas that are reported in the SPP. For each of the 20 indicators, the state is required to establish measurable targets and identify improvement activities for a six-year period (Overview of the annual performance report development, 2011). These 20 indicators are set forth in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Progress Indicators to Track Compliance with Mandates

Indicator 1 — Graduation Rates
Indicator 2 — Drop-out Rates
Indicator 3 — Participation and Performance on Statewide Assessments
Indicator 4 — Rates of Suspension and Expulsion
Indicator 5 — Least Restrictive Environment: School Age
Indicator 6 — Least Restrictive Environment: Preschool
Indicator 7 — Preschool Outcomes
Indicator 8 — Parental Involvement
Indicator 9 — Disproportionality in Special Education by Race/Ethnicity
Indicator 10 — Disproportionality in Classification/Placement by Race/Ethnicity
Indicator 11 — Child Find
Indicator 12 — Early Childhood Transition
Indicator 13 — Secondary Transition
Indicator 14 — Post-School Outcomes
Indicator 15 — Identification and Correction of Noncompliance
Indicator 16 — Complaint Timelines
Indicator 17 — Due Process Timelines
Indicator 18 — Hearing Requests Resolved by Resolution Session
Indicator 19 — Mediation Agreements
Indicator 20 — State Reported Data

Conclusion

The research showed that with more than one million students in its public school systems, the New York City Education Department is tasked with delivering high-quality educational services to more students than the population of many major cities in the United States — with a budget to match — and a significant percentage of these students are challenged by severe learning or physical disabilities, or both. This creates profound challenges for educators, parents, and students alike. In response to numerous federal and state mandates, the New York State Education Department has implemented a broad-based evaluation framework that provides timely feedback concerning the progress — or lack thereof — being made in any indicator area of interest.