New assessments aligned to college- and career-ready standards are a major step forward in accessibility and accommodation features for students with disabilities and English language learners. Designed by two consortia of states--the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment…

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…

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…

Teachers of students with moderate and severe disabilities must possess the skills and knowledge to address a unique set of needs and challenges. These may include, but are not limited to, management of challenging behaviors, performance of health-related procedures, use of assistive technology, and instruction using evidence-based strategies.…

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…

This paper highlights several current collaborative activities of the National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC). There are many specific examples of TA (Technical Assistance) collaborations that take place on a regular basis; the seven examples presented here were selected to represent different types of collaboration. The…

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…

The article describes the model and principles underlying the Consortium for Citizens with Developmental Disabilities, a Washington-based coalition of national legislative lobbyists. (CL)

Describes a system of four separate but interdependent school-university consortia that have been developed as part of the special education department's reform and restructuring initiatives in a Florida university. The rationale for the consortia, barriers to their implementation, and their missions, activities, and governance structures are…

This handbook describes the development of the Advocacy Consortium for College Students with Disabilities in Rochester, New York, and provides suggestions on how to create such consortiums. It begins by discussing the following topics: the need for advocacy consortiums to assist support providers in addressing ongoing concerns about documentation…

This article describes Iowa's journey to establish and implement a unified endorsement in early childhood and early childhood special education, birth through third grade. It describes the formation of the Unified Institute of Higher Education Consortium and the support the consortium provided to help faculty make major curriculum changes.…

The Preservice Early Intervention Project of the Associated Colleges of Central Kansas (ACCK) was designed to recruit highly promising students into the preservice specialization in Early Childhood Special Education and to give them competencies from multiple disciplines to appropriately serve infants/toddlers with disabilities or developmental…

The report describes Detroit's Adaptive Physical Education Consortium Project in Michigan. Among the main objectives of the project are to coordinate all physical education and recreation services to the handicapped in the Detroit area; to facilitate the mainstreaming of capable handicapped individuals into existing "regular" physical…

The role of teachers serving as policy board members of the Metrolina Educational Consortium (MEC) in North Carolina is discussed. The MEC is concerned with teacher education programs and is composed of classroom teachers, college representatives, local education agency staff, and state education department staff. The board members are mandated to…