IDEA/Testimony of Dr. D. Carnine

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Committee on Education and the Workforce
Hearings

Testimony of Dr. Douglas Carnine

“IDEA: Focusing on Improving Results for Children with Disabilities”

Hearing before the
Subcommittee on Education Reform
Committee on Education and the Workforce
United States House of Representatives

March 13, 2003

Good Morning Chairman Castle, Congresswoman Woolsey and Members of
the Committee. I am honored to be here and would like to thank you
for the opportunity to appear before you and discuss the
reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA). I am Doug Carnine, director of the National Center to
Improve the Tools of Educators and a professor at the University of
Oregon. Today, I would like to discuss with the Committee the topic
of specific learning disabilities and appropriate methods of
identifying children with these disabilities.

What We Know
First, let me start by saying that learning disabilities (LD) are
real. Today, 2.9 million students are diagnosed with LD and receive
special education services in our schools. Learning disabilities
require early and accurate identification and effective intervention
if students with LD are to succeed in school and life; and, 80
percent of students with LD have problems in the area of reading.
Learning disabilities have distinct characteristics and should not
be confused with mental retardation, autism, deafness, blindness, or
behavioral disorders. Twenty-seven percent of students identified
with LD drop out of high school and only 14 percent of students with
LD go on to seek a 2 or 4-year degree after high school. Low self-
esteem is a common and debilitating consequence of LD. Undetected or
untreated, LD impairs 50-80 percent of adults with severe literacy
problems.

Yet, unlike many other disabilities, learning disabilities are
difficult to diagnose. A learning disability, as defined in statute,
is a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes
involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written,
which disorder may manifest itself in imperfect ability to listen,
think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations.
However, since these are neurological disorders that affect how the
brain processes information, we cannot rely on a medical model:
there are no x-rays, CAT scans, MRI’s, or PET scans that
definitively show that a child has a learning disability.

The Current Approach to Identifying Students with SLD
Under the current IDEA regulations, the discrepancy formula is the
basis for determining when a child will be eligible for special
education services under the category of specific learning
disability (SLD). The formula makes eligibility for services
dependent on a discrepancy between an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in
the normal range and an achievement level that is generally two or
more years below grade level. Once a discrepancy is established, the
student can be eligible for special education services as a child
with a specific learning disability. It is well known from a large
number of studies that the scientific basis for IQ-discrepancy is
weak.

Discrepancy does not predict intervention outcomes or prognosis, is
not related to genetic factors in LD, and is not associated with a
unique profile in brain imaging studies. But the major problem is
that most students have to reach third grade before the IQ-
achievement test can show performance two years below grade level.
The IQ-achievement discrepancy formula forces children to fail for
several years before they are eligible for services. It is because
of the typical requirement to have a two year achievement gap that
there are almost three times more students currently receiving
special education services at ages 9-11 than at ages 6-8. The
children at ages 9 to 11 do not “catch” a disability when they are
older—rather they have had to accumulate enough failure to
demonstrate the discrepancy.

Early Reading: A Predictor of Students Most At Risk for SLD
Reading is a strong example and area of concern for as many as 80%
of the students with a learning disability. We can predict as early
as January of the kindergarten year which children will have
difficulty learning to read, a known risk factor in children who are
found to and may have a learning disabilitiesy. There are Nnumerous
studies that have shown that scientifically-based methods for
teaching reading can reduce or even prevent the failure. But with
the IQ-achievement discrepancy formula as a criterion, this
kindergarten child might have to wait till third grade before being
eligible for special education services.

For many children we can lessen the impact of a learning disability
by providing early, scientifically-based interventions . and by
dismantling the artificial IQ-achievement barrier that denies help
to students before they experience weeks, months and even years of
frustration and failure. It is not surprising that longitudinal data
from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(NICHD) show clearly that the majority of children who are poor
readers at age nine or older never read at grade level with their
peers and continue to have reading difficulties into adulthood. Not
providing this instruction is a disservice not only to the child and
the child’s family but also to society as a whole.

When at-risk students are not identified early and failure is not
prevented, remediation is used; students who fail in Kindergarten
through 2nd grade and then receive remediation rarely reach grade
level with their peers. And reading failure is associated with a
vast array of undesirable social outcomes including incarceration,
unemployment, substance abuse and dropping out of school. Many large-
scale clinical trials in the substance abuse and behavior disorder
research areas show that learning to read in 1st Grade is associated
with a reduced risk for these types of difficulties that persist
into adulthood.

Additionally, possible bias in IQ tests may be a contributing factor
in the disproportionate representation of ethnically and culturally
different students in special education. States vary widely in the
percentage of minority students assigned to special education
categories. And, while there is considerable variability in the rate
at which states use the LD designation, there is clear evidence that
overrepresentation of blacks and Hispanic students exists in the LD
category in some states.

Doing away with IQ-achievement discrepancy formula has broad support
from researchers, parents and advocates. Replacing this
inappropriate criterion for eligibility, which does not yield
instructionally useful data, is the ethical thing to do.

IQ-Achievement Should Not Be Used to Determine Eligibility for SLD
In August 2001, the Learning Disabilities Summit: Building a
Foundation for the Future was held in Washington, DC. This Summit
was a part of a national initiative sponsored by the Office of
Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the U.S. Department of
Education. In the final regulations for IDEA 1997, OSEP stated, “
the Department plans to carefully review research findings, expert
opinion, and practical knowledge over the next several years to
determine whether changes should be proposed to the procedures for
evaluating children suspected of having a specific learning
disability (3/12/99).”

The LD Summit provided an opportunity for stakeholders to hear and
respond to findings from a series of white papers regarding learning
disabilities. OSEP sponsored the initiative to prepare for the
reauthorization IDEA, as well as the implementation of the No Child
Left Behind Act. Researchers and policy organizations concerned
about individuals with SLD participated to review the major issues
in the field and develop statements of consensus on what is valued
and should be promoted to improve programs for the students
currently served in this category of IDEA. As a result, the
publication of the white papers prepared for the LD Initiative is
now available for purchase. The book is titled, Identification of
Learning Disabilities: Research to Practice.

In order to build on the LD Summit process, OSEP also sponsored The
Learning Disability Roundtable, which brought a group of ten
educational and advocacy organizations that represent children
served through IDEA together to propose improvements to better
identify and serve students with learning disabilities. Coordinated
by the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the Learning
Disabilities Roundtable convened on October 1, 2001, February 4 -5,
2002 and June 17-18, 2002 in Washington, D.C. The report, Specific
Learning Disabilities: Finding Common Ground was submitted to OSEP
in July 2002 which included the following key consensus statements:

Eligibility—

The achievement-discrepancy formula should not be used for
determining eligibility.
Decisions on eligibility must be made through an interdisciplinary
team, using informed clinical judgments, directed by relevant data,
and based on student needs and strengths.
Identification—

Should include a student-centered, comprehensive evaluation and
problem-solving approach that ensures students who have a specific
learning disability are efficiently identified.
General education must assume active responsibility for delivery of
high quality instruction, research-based interventions, and prompt
identification of individuals at risk while collaborating with
special education and related services personnel.
Intervention—

Schools and educators must have access to information about
scientifically based practices and promising practices that have
been validated in the settings where they are to be implemented.
Students with SLD require intensive, iterative (recursive), explicit
scientifically based instruction that is monitored on an on-going
basis to achieve academic success.
Interventions must be timely and matched to the specific learning
and behavioral needs of the student.
An intervention is most effective when it is implemented
consistently, with fidelity to its design, and at a sufficient level
of intensity and duration.
General and special education must be coordinated as part of a
coherent system which is held accountable for the educational
outcomes of students with SLD.
The field should continue to advocate for the use of scientifically
based practices. However in areas where an adequate research base
does not exist, data should be gathered on the success of promising
practices.
Professional Development—

The content of professional development must address the knowledge,
skills, and attitudes needed to increase staff and school capacity
to implement effective interventions for diverse learners.
Professional development must be structured to fit the way adults
acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
An on going, coherent, integrated system of pre-service and in-
service education must be provided.
A Better Approach to Identifying Students with SLD
Given the converging evidence and agreement in the field that we
must do something better for our children, the following model is
recommended as the basis to improve how we provide early
intervention and determine: Response to Intervention Model (RTI).

A RTI model would be designed to ensure that children who are
indicating a likelihood of failing in the early grades receive
scientifically based instruction as soon as possible. The
eligibility for special education services would focus on the
children who, even with these services, are not able to be
successful. The focus of RTI is on responding to the instructional
challenges caused by the disability, not on giving tests to document
the failure of the student. The model would include five major steps:

First. Determine criteria to be used beginning in Kindergarten to
determine whether the child exhibits a significant difference
between actual and expected rate of learning in one or more of the
academic domains included in the definition of specific learning
disabilities (oral expression, listening comprehension, written
expression, basic reading skill, reading comprehension, mathematics
calculation, and mathematics reasoning).

Second. Develop a plan to provide “research based intervention”
defined as appropriate and effective scientifically-based
instruction in reading, math, behavioral interventions and/or
services for addressing limited English proficiency. Ensure that a
qualified teacher teaches the child and that the teacher receives
adequate training to fully implement the intervention. This process
would be a joint responsibility of both regular and special
education.

Third. Monitor the child’s progress, documenting progress, or lack
thereof; and regularly reporting this information to parents. One
internet based system for this type of monitoring is available for a
dollar per year per child. Almost 450,000 children are in this one
system.

Fourth. In cases where the child is not progressing at a desired
rate, determine if the intervention is being implemented with
fidelity and if not, provide additional assistance to the teacher.

Fifth. Require that a lack of progress over a limited period of time
leads to a child centered evaluation conducted by the team described
in 5(b) of existing law. This process could lead to identification
of the child as having a specific learning disability and to
provision of special education services.

As compelling as the need is for early intervention for young
children, we cannot make that case at the expense of older students,
who have a unique and equally problematic set of issues. We cannot
abandon them, nor should we compromise the availability of funding
and other resources for them. Rigorous efforts at early
identification and effective intervention must be accompanied by
intensive, long-term, research-based instruction for students whose
reading or other academic difficulties are due to their learning
disability. For most students with LD, the strategies they learn in
elementary school for accessing the curriculum and managing their
disability are not sufficient to meet the increasing demands and
complexity of the middle and secondary school curriculum.

Congressional Support for RTI
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed last year creates a
strong incentive for schools to support a response to intervention
approach to identifying and serving students with learning
disabilities. For the first time in U.S. history all students with
disabilities must be included in the state accountability system.
IDEA 97 required that students with disabilities had to be assessed,
but with NCLB, the scores of students with learning disabilities
count for accountability. In fact a school could be deemed a failing
school if the school does not enable children with learning
disabilities to make AYP for two years. Inclusion in the
accountability system should motivate schools to adopt a pre-
referral models that focuses on instruction, early intervention and
building success rather than on testing to document failure. A
Mmodels that focuses on prevention and success will not only benefit
children with disabilities but the numerous other children who enter
school with limited literacy and language knowledge and who,
therefore, are at risk for failure.

Accountability for results with special education students combined
with early intervention shows promising results. The President’s
Commission on Excellence in Special Education reported that “…when
aggressive reading programs are implemented with accountability for
results, LD identifications are reduced.” They also commented on the
identification process stating “…Children should not be identified
for special education without documenting what methods have been
used to facilitate the child’s learning and adaptation to the
general education classroom. …In the absence of this documentation,
the Commission finds that many children who are placed into special
education are instructional casualties and not students with
disabilities.”

Research shows that after good reading instruction beginning in
Kindergarten and 1st Grade, students continue to match the class
average through 4th grade. In the Elk Grove school district in
California, introduction of strong core reading programs reduced the
number of students identified into special education from 13 percent
to 9 percent. After Connecticut introduced a reading blueprint in
1999 that included early intervention and progress monitoring, an
immediate and precipitous decline in identifications for special
education was observed, attributed to the equally dramatic reduction
in identifications for LD.

In these examples, many children who did not have a disability did
not require special education services while other children with a
disability received supports that led to reading success and avoided
labeling. The student who needs the protection of special education
is the student with disabilities who hasn’t been able to learn at a
reasonable rate and special education may be able to focus more
intense and individualized efforts towards remediation. The common
denominator for general and special education is continued emphasis
on the monitoring of progress and results.

Moving to a response to intervention model can dramatically reduce
the long-term failure that is often associated with the IQ-
achievement discrepancy formula. 70 to 90 percent of the most at
risk children in Kindergarten through 2nd grade can be brought to
the average range with effective instruction. With the most
intensive instruction, the failure rate can be reduced to about 2
percent.

RTI In Action
Instruction focused models have been put into practice by a growing
number of districts and schools over the last several years. The
positive aspects include: helping reduce the number of students
identified late; ensuring the problem is not due to poor
instruction; helping reduce the number of disproportionate
referrals; relying on data to inform instruction; and, requiring
special education services when student does not respond to
intervention. We also know that:

In no case has implementation had a negative impact upon students
and staff;
In most cases it has resulted in modest gains for students, and
improved communication among parents, educators and administrative
personnel;
In most cases the approaches have enabled teachers to take better
charge of their students’ progress and has:
built staff morale and shared responsibility for student learning
informed and improved professional development efforts, and
reallocated limited professional staff time for the benefit of ALL
students (vs. spending the vast majority of their time doing testing
and going to meetings).
Consider the following:
Long Beach, CA Unified School District – The State of California
does not allow the use of IQ-Achievement testing as a criterion for
determining eligibility for special education. Long Beach has
employed a process that focuses on instruction, rather than testing.
The district — 90,000 students and growing—enjoys one of the
lowest rates of students enrolled in special education in the
country after implementing a system that prides itself in melding
services and efforts to meet the needs of all students, including
those most likely to require special education services. The success
of the model emphasizes team approaches of general education and
special education teachers working together to help all struggling
students.

Students referred for special education are not automatically
tested. Rather interventions are implemented first. The resistance
to robust interventions is what is used to decide whether
eligibility testing should occur. Resource Room teachers work with
both students on Individual Education Program (IEP) and at-risk
students. Principals are beginning to take ownership for students
with disabilities due to the refreshing approach of standards-based
classrooms for all teachers including teachers of special needs
students. The district has also established co-enrolled preschool
classes to provide least restrictive environment (LRE) for these
students and ensure early intervention occurs as soon as possible.

Horry County, SC – Horry County has seen the amount of time devoted
to special education testing shrink from 32.5 hours per child/per
year to 2 hours per child/per year, just on evaluations alone. The
new instruction based model has allowed professionals to devote 41
more hours/child of time to hands-on instruction and interventions.
During the second year of operation, 77 percent of students
experienced success with the interventions and were not referred for
a special education evaluation. This compares to only 23 percent
using the previous model utilized by the schools.

Pennsylvania – The Instructional Support Team (IST) process utilizes
cross specialty teams working to precisely assess students with
academic and behavioral difficulties through curriculum-based
assessment and other procedures. The team provides in-class support
to the regular classroom teacher over a 50-day period to determine
whether the application of effective instructional procedures
changes the rate of learning for the student.

Students who display meaningful gains through ongoing monitoring of
their performance are not referred for an evaluation for special
education. Those students who display resistance to these
interventions are referred for evaluation, and typically are later
identified as needing special education. The data collected during
the IST process helps inform the development of the IEP for the
student to ensure special education services are appropriate for the
child’s needs. This pre-referral process has been a very effective
way of determining whether a student’s difficulties are the result
of a lack of instruction rather than a disability.

When schools in Pennsylvania implemented IST’s, 85% of the students
identified for the process did not need a further evaluation for
special education. Schools with the process saw their rates of
identification of students with disabilities either plateau or, in
many cases, decrease. In a published study on the results of this
program, Pennsylvania found that students undergoing the process
displayed improved achievement on academic learning time measures
when schools implemented the program with a high degree of fidelity.

Hartsfield Elementary School, Tallahassee, FL – During a five-year
implementation of a preventive reading instruction program designed
for children in Kindergarten through Grade 3 who performed
significantly below grade level, the percentage of children
performing below the 25th percentile at the end of the first grade
dropped from 31.8 percent to 3.7 percent. Likewise, during the five-
year implementation period, the percentage of children performing
below the 25th percentile at the end of the second grade was only
2.4 percent.

Heartland AEA District, Des Moines, Iowa – When first graders are
tested for early literacy skills and then given targeted instruction
for their delays, the skill level of the entire class improved over
25 percent. Students who do not respond to targeted instruction are
referred for an evaluation for special education services. Iowa
utilizes a “non-categorical” approach to special education;
therefore, the students are provided services and support
appropriate to their individual needs.

The bottom line is that after more than 25 years of hard work to
help students with LD access the services they need to succeed, we
know that the IQ-achievement discrepancy model prevents prevention.
It focuses on how to document failure through testing, not how to
build success through teaching. Students with SLD who receive
scientifically-based instruction actually undergo changes in the
brain.

Brain Imaging and Scientifically Based Instruction
I now draw your attention to the images of the brain. The images of
the brain before scientifically based instruction show little brain
activity in the left hemisphere of the brain during reading. After
intervention, there is substantial activity in the left hemisphere,
resembling that of anormal successful reader. Although there can be
other aspects of the brain that account for the learning disability
that have not been changed, we now have neurobiological evidence the
positive effects of explicit, targeted, intensive, research-based
instruction in reading. Students with SLD who receive scientifically-
based instruction actually undergo changes in the brain.

These data make a strong case for adopting a new standard for LD
eligibility, and behind these facts and figures are real children,
children like Hank a fifth grader in a rural Midwestern school
district or Toby a third grader in an inner city school district —
real children who will enter special education after years of
limited academic progress — with little prospect of regaining the
ground they have loss. Their rate of growth is likely to decline as
they proceed through middle school and into high school and if they
are fortunate enough to graduate their prospects in the job market
are dismal. These are the real lives behind the data.

Challenges With Bringing RTI to Scale
As with any other research enterprise, implementing the research-
based practice on a broad scale is difficult. In the LD area, large-
scale implementation is especially difficult because current
regulations and the focus on compliance makes schools, districts,
and states leery of doing anything that deviates from current IDEA
processes, even if it is well- established that the current
identification practices should be changed. There is no question
that current attempts to broadly expand RTI models are uneven and
not uniformly effective. But that is a problem with adult learning,
not with the research on how children learn. The issues involve
large-scale implementation, not more research on how to do response
to intervention models or whether they are effective.

Clearly, all the best intentions and new designs for improving the
identification process and delivery of scientifically-based
interventions will fall short if the professional educators,
administrators, and related and support personnel responsible for
implementing these designs do not have the knowledge, skill, will,
or resources to implement and sustain them. The LD Roundtable
participants have recommended changes in professional development “…
that will reinforce the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to
implement critical structures and processes, such as comprehensive
evaluation, interdisciplinary team problem-solving, quality delivery
of scientifically-based interventions, and collaboration among
regular and special educators and related service personnel.” The
successful RTI models each document the importance of teacher
training and improved alignment in the systems that provide pre and
in service training for professional educators.

The Finding Common Ground Report goes on to say that “…successful
implementation of this approach means that classroom teachers will
need to administer repeated measures of student progress and
interpret progress monitoring data to identify students who are not
performing commensurate with their typically-achieving peers. It
also means that special educators and related service providers will
need to engage in a range of targeted activities that assist regular
educators to select and effectively implement instructional
materials and strategies that result in improved student
performance. Formal training and ongoing technical assistance and
support will be necessary for classroom teachers and related service
providers to perform these tasks with fidelity and to use
performance data in ways that inform classroom instruction.” These
are important issues that we must address together.

Conclusion

For twenty-five years, we have used the IQ-achievement discrepancy
model, a wait-to-fail model that is known to be:

Ineffective — 75% of students receiving reading remediation after
3rd grade never read at grade level
Inefficient — the cost of late remediation is much greater than
early intervention in K-2
Irrational — no scientific research base for waiting for failure to
deepen
Immoral — it literally forces children to be left behind
Indefensible – consensus in the field that is must go.
The opportunity is before you now to do away with it. You can put
millions of students on a better trajectory toward academic success
and ensure children are given every opportunity to learn rather than
fail. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today.