Disability Futures

As a result of the high academic expectation for all students required by NCLB, students with disabilities have made dramatic and critically important academic progress. In 2012, 64% of students with disabilities graduated from high school with a standard diploma as opposed to the 48% of students with disabilities who graduated with a standard high school diploma in 2001. Students with disabilities also made significant gains in their reading and math scores. From 2000 to 2013 students with disabilities in the fourth grade made a 20 point gain in math and a 17 point gain in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments. Students with disabilities in the eighth grade gained 19 points in math from 2000 to 2013 and 7 points in reading from 1998 to 2013 according to the National Center for Education Statistics. High school dropout rates also decreased dramatically. From 2001 to 2012 the dropout rate for students with disabilities decreased by more than 20%.

Students with disabilities are doing better but they still lag behind their peers without disabilities. We must demand that Congress enact a law that includes robust accountability measures. We must ensure that all students, including students with disabilities, become independent, integrated and competitively employed members of society. To do otherwise would ignore the original intent of ESEA, to kindle a "revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance."