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Stahl, S. (2004). The Promise of Accessible Textbooks: Increased Achievement for All Students. Wakefield, MA: National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. (Links updated 2009). Retrieved [insert date] from http://aem.cast.org/about/publications/2004/ncac-accessible-textbooks.html
The Promise of Accessible Textbooks: Increased Achievement for All Students
Just Beyond Reach—Appropriate Materials for All Students
Today’s classrooms house an increasingly diverse student population, including not only students with widely different social, economic, cultural, and language backgrounds; but also students with a wide range of physical, cognitive, and sensory disabilities. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1997 mandate increased expectations and accountability for this diverse range of students to access, participate, and progress in the general curriculum. In order to ensure that all of these students are able to achieve in the general curriculum, particularly in light of such disparate strengths and needs, teachers must individualize instruction.
One critical barrier to individualizing instruction is the curriculum itself. Rather than offering multiple gateways to learning and understanding, the “one size fits all” printed textbooks and other resources that make up the general curriculum often serve as barriers. While conventional materials are reasonably accessible to many students, they clearly present significant barriers for students with sensory or motor disabilities; they also present a challenge to students with low cognitive abilities, those with attentional and organizational problems, and more subtle, yet equally pervasive, barriers for the largest population of identified special education students—those with learning disabilities.
With fixed, uniform learning materials, teachers are left with the burden of individualizing instruction by providing supplementary adaptations or accommodations. Unfortunately, few teachers have either the time or expertise to adequately adapt the curriculum materials to meet the diverse needs of their students (Ellis & Sabornie, 1990; Moon, Callahan, & Tomlinson, 1999). Moreover, while some teachers are able to adapt materials for accessibility, it is a different matter to adapt them for instruction. Doing so requires careful attention to ensure that the goals for instruction are preserved in spite of the adaptations and to ensure that adequate learning progress has been achieved (Rose & Meyer, 2002; Edyburn, 2004). Further, teachers’ efforts sometimes are ineffective because students perceive the adaptations as “different,” feel stigmatized by them, and are therefore reluctant to use them (Ellis, 1997).
The Scope of the Challenge
In the majority of the Nation’s approximately 100,000 public and private K–12 schools, textbooks are the primary curriculum material. Eighty to ninety percent of grades 4–12 math and science classrooms use textbooks (Hudson & McMahon., 2002), and that figure is similar for reading and language arts instruction (NCREL, 2000). The average yearly expenditure for textbooks and related materials in each of these 100,000 schools is approximately $10,000 per school per year (Li, 2002).
In addition to being the principal learning resource for general education students, the use of textbooks by students with disabilities increases steadily as these students progress through the educational system. As reported from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2):
Students with learning disabilities, emotional disturbances, or speech, sensory, or other health impairments are among the most likely to use textbooks often (61% to 72% do so, compared with 41% of students with autism, p<.001 for most comparisons), at least in part because they also are the most likely to have experiences reported for academic subject classes (Levine & Wagner, 2004)
If the achievement of students with disabilities is to be assessed by the same instruments that chart the progress of general education students, these instruments need to be accessible and flexible enough to accurately chart these students’ skills. Concomitantly, the curriculum resources—textbooks—that these students are provided with to acquire these skills also need to be accessible and appropriate from the outset.
Accountability Raises the Bar
The preface to Section 1 of No Child Left Behind succinctly frames the purpose of the legislation: “To close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.”1 In the four years since its enactment, the majority of teachers, school administrators and school boards have focused on its accountability mandates while parents and advocates have attended to its provisions for choice, especially as regards school placement. Surprisingly, NCLB’s third keystone component, flexibility, received significantly less attention in the months immediately following the bill’s passage. In many cases, it wasn’t until the annual reporting mechanisms of the legislation’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements were implemented that the issue of flexibility increased in importance.
Adequate Yearly Progress is the annual benchmark against which schools are measured. All schools must provide achievement data in four separate areas: reading/language arts, mathematics, and either graduation rate (for high schools and districts) or attendance rate (for elementary and middle/junior high schools). Schools that do not meet annual progress goals (as established by individual states) in each of these three areas may be identified as “needing improvement”. Finally, AYP is also dependent upon a dis-aggregation of student achievement data by economic background, race, ethnicity, English proficiency and disability. The intent of separately assessing the progress of students in these sub-categories is to assure an eventual parity in achievement for students perceived as disadvantaged—the “achievement gap” students.2
The combination of annual progress monitoring with a deliberate emphasis on students with disabilities quickly caught the attention of school, district and state level education personnel. Between 2001 and 2004 most states had moved towards some form of large-scale assessment in order to gather the achievement data that the AYP process required; very few of these assessment initiatives adequately addressed the needs of students with disabilities, despite the fact that NCLB was specific in its intent that the majority of enrolled students were expected to participate.
(b) The assessment system required under this section must meet the following requirements:
(2) Be designed to be valid and accessible for use by the widest possible range of students, including students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency.3
Many educators presumed that the majority of students with disabilities would qualify for “alternate” assessments, and this perception led to a qualification from the U.S. Department of Education in December of 2003. The Department clarified that NCLB limits participation in alternate assessment to 1% of the total student population4 (approximately 9% of identified special education students) and that the majority of special education students were expected to participate in the same assessments as their non-disabled peers.
In contrast to previous statutes (PL94-142; IDEA; Section 504; ADA) which mandated either unique services or equal access but left compliance to be shaped by the complaints or litigation of the very individuals these laws sought to protect, accountability under NCLB was designed to reflect the responsiveness and quality of the educational system itself. As a consequence, classrooms, schools, districts and states must pay as much attention to the achievement of students identified as “disadvantaged” (including those with disabilities) as they pay to any other student.
Not surprisingly, the accountability mandates of NCLB have increased consideration of large-scale assessments that are designed from the beginning to be accessible to appropriate for students with disabilities (Thompson & Thurlow, 2002; Dolan & Hall, 2001; Dolan & Hall, 2003; Abell, Bauder, & Simmons, 2004). These investigations have in turn prompted a re-analysis of classroom practices (Bowe, 1999; Orkwis, 2003), the achievement standards on which they are based (McDonnell, McLaughlin, & Morison, 1997; Gloeckler, 2001; Thurlow, 2002b), and with intense scrutiny, the textbooks that create the foundation for instructional materials in the majority of the nation’s schools (Orkwis, 1999; Gordon, 2002; Perl & Gordon, 2003; Dalton, 2003).