Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) flexibility requires states to develop and implement teacher effectiveness measures that consider student assessment results, including assessment results for students with disabilities participating in general and alternate assessments. We describe how alternate assessment results for students with…

Champions of students with disabilities have long complained that those students are often an afterthought in state testing plans. Only after a test design is completed are educators asked to go back and adapt the questions for a student who is blind, who needs help accessing text or calculating numbers, or who must use a specialized device to…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

Although most assessment developers have a sense of the nature of the general student population, they often lack an understanding of the characteristics of special education students and English Language Learners (ELLs) who will participate in the assessment. The Race-to-the-Top Assessment Consortia have the rare opportunity to know who these…

As the Race-to-the-Top Assessment Consortia develop their assessments, they will need to develop shared accommodations policies to ensure that their tests are used in consistent ways across the participating states. Developing a common set of accommodations policies will require that Consortium members recognize the divergent viewpoints that…

Special education administrators must be prepared for their leadership roles in inclusive, culturally diverse, standards-based school settings. These challenges create the need for new skills, required for effective special education leaders in the 21st century. In this article, the authors examine the standards used to prepare special education…

Established in 1972, the Ohio Coalition for the Education of Children with Disabilities (OCECD) is a statewide, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the educational interests of children with disabilities. OCECD endorses and promotes efforts to provide appropriate quality education for children and youth with disabilities in the belief…