Diploma must signify high standard for all
The Boston Herald
By Richard Robison and Paul Reville
May 18, 2003
We are parents of children with special needs who likely will never pass the two sections of the MCAS required for graduation. Like all parents, we are protective of our children and want the best for them, including access to the same high-quality education as their peers without special needs.
We want their heroic efforts and progress recognized on graduation day. Nevertheless, we support Massachusetts' high graduation standards and we want our children's progress to be measured against them.
If our children should achieve these standards, they should receive a full diploma like all those who have mastered the learning. If not, they should receive ample recognition, respect for their work and as much extra help as they need for as long as they need it to come as close as possible to achieving the standard.
However, we don't need them to receive a diploma that pretends to represent skill and knowledge to which they have not been exposed or have not yet mastered.
Not only are we advocates for our children, but we are advocates for education reform and the benefits it provides for all children. We are delighted that education reform in Massachusetts, for the first time ever, means that our children's schools are held to the same high standards as other schools. Under these reforms, all students are expected to make regular progress toward achieving a high standard of learning. And all means all, including our kids and other groups of children who have historically been ignored, discriminated against or underestimated.
We have spent a decade making sure they have access to the same curriculum as their non-disabled peers. If you take away the high standard by setting lower expectations for our children, their education will go on the back burner again. They won't matter. They will be the exception. We will again rationalize a system of discriminatory low expectations that condemns children with special needs to being kept busy while other children and their teachers are held accountable for learning outcomes.
More than 70 percent of our children's special needs peers have attained the new graduation standard. Five years ago, no one would have thought such levels of achievement possible. Not only would a low-expectation diploma be a slap in the face to these youngsters with special needs who have proudly attained the standard, but it would prevent us from learning how much more progress schools could make with these children in the next five years. It would be giving up on them.
We have had low-grade diplomas before. All too often, students with special needs who completed their education and were granted diplomas under perform local standards still lacked basic skills even for entry-level employment. Historically, unemployment rates for individuals with disabilities have remained consistently at roughly 75 percent. Lowering the standard for these students isn't going to improve their employability. We don't want a return to the learning conditions that systematically failed children like ours.
We want our children's academic performance to count for them and for their teachers and schools. If we exempt them from the diploma requirements that apply to other children, we make it a matter of official state policy that we are going to expect less of some categories of students. A policy of differing expectations is the injustice that standards-based reform is trying to correct.
Such a policy is not only bad for our children, it would set a dangerous policy precedent and undermine the considerable progress Massachusetts has made toward raising standards for all children and getting serious about delivering on the promise of access, equity and excellence for all.
Low-grade diplomas raise profound moral and policy questions: Which category of students will be next for low expectations? Who should be the judge of which children merit high expectations and which do not? Why is it fair that we have high expectations for some children and not for others? In this era of scarcity, what school will justify providing targeted resources to students whose scores do not count?
We know our children have intellectual limitations - as, at some level, we all do. But we have a right to expect steady progress toward a high standard. They may or may not get to that standard, but the beauty of life comes in the quest. In misguided sympathy for our children, some well-intentioned policymakers want to deny our children the opportunity to try by doing us a favor we don't want.
We do know that a policy of low expectations will yield poor results. We urge policymakers to reconsider this retreat from the goal of high standards for all.
Richard Robison is executive director of the Federation for Children with Special Needs. Paul Reville is the executive director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
