NCEO’s next Teleconference is set for Monday, February 6 at 11:30 a.m. Pacific, 12:30 p.m. Mountain, 1:30 p.m. Central, 2:30 p.m. Eastern (your formal invitation will be e-mailed in early January).

NCEO is continuing our telephone conferences on hot topics of inclusive assessment and accountability systems. As the Department of Education announces new options and flexibility in implementation of NCLB provisions, it will be increasingly important to ensure that options selected have the intended positive consequences. In February we will begin the series with a focus on what state staff can do now to work with policy leaders and stakeholders to support flexibility in assessing all students, identify areas of improvement for the existing system, and "drill down" into existing achievement data to understand how students currently are performing, and why.

In the February 6 call, we will provide an annotated bibliography of studies that have analyzed what occurs in schools where all of the subgroups are achieving at high levels based on NCLB assessments. Our research partners will report on current strategies for analyzing NCLB and IDEA required reporting to better understand who the lowest performing students are, and what options are available to address their needs. In this call and throughout the series, we will have state partners discuss what they are doing to understand the reality of schooling "behind the numbers" of student performance and participation in order to design effective options for instruction and for assessment. This may include data analyses, monitoring functions, awards programs, mini-studies, and partnerships with university based researchers. The second call in the series is tentatively set for April.

The University of Minnesota’s National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) and its collaborators, the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), received funding to support another five years of technical assistance to States on improving results for students with disabilities in the context of NCLB and IDEA. We are pleased to continue offering assistance on issues such as increasing participation of students with disabilities in assessment and accountability systems, improving the quality of assessment and accountability systems, improving the capacity of States to meet data collection and reporting requirements, and strengthening accountability for results.

The technical assistance role will continue to be central to our NCEO mission, and as before, we will continue to host various other related research projects, including the Partnership for Accessible Reading Assessment Project, the Development Techniques for Universally Designed Assessments Project, and the Instructional Strategies for English Language Learners with Disabilities Project. Many of NCEO’s technical assistance activities will remain the same as in the past five year period. We will continue to produce StateLinks to provide quarterly updates on our activities, products, and events. NCEO will benefit from the advice of its newly formed Research to Practice Panel, which will ensure that technical assistance is based on empirical research and best practices, a National Advisory Committee of diverse stakeholders, and a Technical Work Group to review the scientific rigor of information included in materials produced by NCEO.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) recently released two new documents to provide support for accommodation decision making. The first is: Accommodations Manual: How to Select, Administer, and Evaluate Use of Accommodations for Instruction and Assessment of Students with Disabilities. The second is a related Professional Development Guide. A PowerPoint presentation is also available to accompany the Professional Development Guide.

The Accommodations Manual is geared for individualized educational program (IEP) teams, 504 plan committees, special education teachers, general education teachers, administrators, and district level assessment staff. It recommends a five-step process to use in the selection, administration, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the use of instructional and assessment accommodations by students with disabilities. The focus is on students with disabilities who participate in large-scale assessments and the instruction they receive.

The five steps include the following:

The Accommodations Manual can be "personalized" by inserting state-specific information and policies related to content standards, assessments, and accommodations. In this way, states can assure the information in this manual is consistent with their most current state policies. This training module was developed to establish guidelines for states to use in the selection, administration, and evaluation of accommodations for instruction and assessment of students with disabilities, but there is some variability among states with implementation practices.

There are several small-group and large-group training activities, teacher checklists, and templates of possible forms that can be adapted for use by particular states or districts. Accommodations Manual: How to Select, Administer, and Evaluate Use of Accommodations for Instruction and Assessment of Students with Disabilities authored by Sandra J. Thompson, Amanda B. Morse, Michael Sharpe, and Sharon Hall (August 2005) was developed by the CCSSO State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS), Assessing Special Education Students (ASES).

The manual is available at the CCSSO Web site, on the ASES SCASS page, in both Word and PDF format. The direct link is: http:// www.ccsso.org/Projects/SCASS/Projects/Assessing_Special_Education_Students/.

On December 14, 2005, USDOE Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the release of a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on the 2% flexibility. The official NPRM was posted in the Federal Register on December 15, 2005, and is available at http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20051800/edocket.access .gpo.gov/2005/pdf/05-24083.pdf.

Information related to the NPRM is available at http://www.ed
.gov/admins/lead/speced/toolkit/index.html. Comments on the NPRM are due 75 days from the NPRM release (on or before February 28, 2006).