I serve on the Nebraska Results-Driven Accountability Stakeholder group in an advisory capacity to the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) Special Education Office. The Stakeholder group has been working with NDE to put together a state plan that will meet the new federal requirements.
The goal of Results Driven Accountability is to decrease the gap in proficiency between students in special education and student in general education, in other words increase the number of special education students that are passing state assessments.
From the U.S. Department of Education- “To improve the educational outcomes of America’s 6.5 million children and youth with disabilities, the U.S. Department of Education is implementing a major shift in the way it oversees the effectiveness of states’ special education programs. Until now, the Department’s primary focus was to determine whether states were meeting procedural requirements such as timelines for evaluations, due process hearings and transitioning children into preschool services. While these compliance indicators remain important to children and families, under the new framework known as Results-Driven Accountability (RDA), the Department will also include educational results and outcomes for students with disabilities in making each state’s annual determination under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).”
The Nebraska Plan has decided on the following Improvement Strategy-
To improve the reading proficiency of 3rd grade students within the identified cohort, Nebraska will work to ensure school districts are implementing increasingly intensive evidence-based reading methodologies. This will be accomplished through the use of effective implementation of the newly integrated MTSS framework and continuing to align infrastructure within the state.
The identified cohort will be schools that are involved in Nebraska MTSS and PBIS, and have selected reading as the area for improvement on their school Targeted improvement plan. Bancroft-Rosalie fits all of these requirements. That is probably why I was selected to be a member of the Stakeholder group.
This change at the federal level is a good thing, looking at trying to improve student proficiency by implementing a particular strategy in a select group of schools with the plan to eventually take it statewide rather than looking only paperwork compliance like has been done in the past.
