I'd like to help clarify some of "Raver's" comments.

"They RAGE about high school principals disolving self-contained classrooms and forcing MR students into general education classes without notifying parents, without holding federally mandated ARDs, and without any regard for the student's needs."

Actually, that was the District's call to dissolve the Self-Contained classrooms, and many teachers, including myself, think that was a short-sighted decision. The rationale was indeed to force more students into "inclusion" (which is still getting a bad rap because the majority of regular ed and special ed teachers have NOT been properly trained), but what REALLY happened is that only a handful of them went to Inclusion, and the rest of the Self-Contained students went to Functional Living Skills classes on separate campuses, out of sight and out of mind with the more severely MR students. And that, dear readers, is a totally different soapbox that I will get on in another post. Suffice it to say that yes, there should have been ARDs to justify those decisions, but just because an ARD was held doesn't make it right.

"For example, DISD now limits the number of SPED students on each campus that can be ARDed TAKS exempt to only 3% of the school's total student population."

First of all, no one is "TAKS-Exempt" anymore (except for first-year immigrant students in TAKS Reading). Even the most severely handicapped kids have to take the TAKS-Alt. And the 3% rule is frequently misquoted/ misunderstood. No Child Left Behind is who you have to thank for that, but many folks in the district misinterpreted it to mean that a school can't have more than 3% of the kids not taking the full-blown TAKS. That is NOT true. According to TEA, the Feds require a cap on the number of scores from alternate assessments that can be counted as "proficient" in the 2008 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) calculations. No Child Left Behind requires the "proficient" results from the TAKS-Alternate (TAKS-Alt) assessment to be limited to a 1% cap and "proficient" results from the TAKS-Modified (TAKS-M) limited to a 2% cap. (Now, HOW they decide which scores get picked is a matter still being debated in Texas.)

In other words, a school CAN have more Special Ed kids, but only 3% of the "proficient" (what used to be known as "Meets Expectations") will count toward AYP. So the most severe 1% of students would take the TAKS-Alt, but since a lot of those kids are shuttled off to separate campuses, that number in DISD schools may be a bit skewed. That leaves 2% of Special Ed kids to be counted with the slightly easier but still on grade level TAKS-M. The problem with TAKS-M, as many people are just now finding out, is that students who were tested on a Kindergarten level last year with the SDAA are going to flunk this year's on-grade-level TAKS-M. It's good to have higher expectations, but not so good to expect a kid to go from Kinder to 5th grade in one year. So expect many Special Ed kids to do poorly on the TAKS or TAKS-M for the next couple of years while parents and teachers scramble to get them caught up. It's our own fault for not expecting anything better of these kids, it's just really sad that the kids are the ones paying the price for it now.

And yeah, we're in a really weird mess in this district. Depending on who you talk to, we either have way too many kids in Special Ed because the teachers and principals push to get them out of regular ed, the diagnosticians are married to only one intelligence test, and the parents like those SSI checks.....OR, too many kids fall through the cracks and don't get the help they need because the Special Ed referral process is too cumbersome for well-meaning teachers to jump through all the hoops. Strangely enough, the answer is...it's both.