[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Pro and Cons of Mainstreaming LEP Students
Recently, significant changes have occurred in federal law requiring the inclusion of all children in statewide or large-scale assessment in an effort to increase educational accountability at the district and school levels. The Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), as amended in 1997, both require districts to report to state departments of education data about student progress that are complete and disaggregated by educationally significant categories, including disability groups and limited proficiency in English.
For years, many educational professionals advocated the exclusion of these students from standardized measures of student achievement, maintaining that the assessments were biased and potentially harmful to special needs students who should not be held to the proficiency norms of the general population. While some argue the assessments still raise the same issues of lack of appropriateness or cultural bias, today’s educators lament the practice of exclusion from statewide assessment. The shift in thinking regarding the assessment of students with disabilities and limited English proficiency (LEP) is largely due to the realization that students who are left out of educational assessments are too often left out of curricular reforms and program improvement efforts which increase student achievement.
The assessment policies that states adopt directly affect the curricular goals, instructional practices and educational outcomes for these students. While much has been written about the need for accountability in general, very little is specifically known about the impact current assessment policy decisions will have on the students they are intended to serve. Furthermore, little is known about how the individual, state-by-state, variations in response to the federal legislation might impact, either positively or negatively, special needs students.
In the era of accountability, states must grapple with the issue of how to enforce the “All Means All” edict while insuring..........
