NAEP: Accommodating Academic Testing for Disabled Children

As the parent of a child with a disability, it is important to investigate well the academic options for your child. In many cases, parents of disabled children simply opt to place their child into the school in closest public school district which, may, happen to be a poor child for the child and the associated disability the child lives with. For many parents, selecting a home location is often not based upon the academic setting or offerings in the area but, for parent so disabled children, it is an important consideration that should be made.

If your child is disabled, the academic setting will determine, to some extent, the long term outcome of your child's intellectual and social development. Because of this, one of your greatest tools in assessing the school and academic settings in your area may be the reports on academic performance released under the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP. With the NAEP data, you can assess the performance of your school as compared to other states, districts and even among private and public schools.

Within the NAEP reports, students with disabilities are statistically portrayed, providing parents with disabled children a more comprehensive view of the performance of the schools in your community and the academic offerings to children with disabilities. While children with disabilities generally do not perform as well, academically, as their non-disabled peers, the NAEP report does provide a specific look at how well the disabled children in the school district are performing and compares those results with prior years. This, in essence, provides a graph or chart that can indicate whether the school is making academic progress in the education of disabled children, of if the school is lacking in performance.

The specific elements of the NAEP report provide for an even greater advantage to parents of disabled children. Within the NAEP, each subject matter is broken down into specific performance areas. For example, the NAEP allows for testing of disabled children in a structured environment that permits instructions and questions to be read aloud, provides extended time by which to achieve completion of the tests, and allows tests to be administered in one-on-one sessions or in small groups. While the test does measure performance on reading and other specific subject matter, there are some accommodations that can not be met. The point to these varying dynamics, here, it so understand the specific environment under which the children in your local school may have been tested so as to ensure you understand how well your child may be educated and what, if any, accommodations can be made for your child's disability.

The NAEP is just one of many resource tools available to parents of children with disabilities. While many school districts fail to provide NAEP reports to the parents who may be moving into their school district, you can contact the local school administration and request the information. The key to your child's successful education, despite the disability, lies in finding a program that can accommodate and provide testing that is conducive for learning and achieving the best results possible.