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Federal and state laws hold schools accountable for the achievement of all students, including those who have disabilities such as Mattox. In South Carolina, that means all third- through eighth-grade students must take the state Palmetto Assessment of State Standards. Few exceptions are permitted, and Sarah Johnson, Mattox's mother, believed it would hurt her son to take an exam for which he was unprepared. School officials said that would violate state and federal laws, but Johnson refused to do what she said amounted to putting the law before her son.

The largest Arizona teachers' union and the state's school boards association filed suit this week over a new scholarship program that pays private school tuition for children with disabilities.

Proposed changes by some Republican senators to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now called No Child Left Behind, could push more children with disabilities away from taking the same kinds of tests as their classmates. That could limit how many students with special needs are included when schools and districts are held accountable for their students' progress, the National Center on Learning Disabilities told several senators in a letter this week.

This paper contributes importantly to the growing literature on the training of special education teachers and how it translates into classroom practice and student achievement. The authors examine the impact of pre-service preparation and in-service formal and informal training on the ability of teachers to promote academic achievement among students with disabilities. Using student-level longitudinal data from Florida over a five-year span the authors estimate value-added models of student achievement. There is little support for the efficacy of in-service professional development courses focusing on special education. However, teachers with advanced degrees are more effective in boosting the math achievement of students with disabilities than are those with only a baccalaureate degree. Also pre-service preparation in special education has statistically significant and quantitatively substantial effects on the ability of teachers of special education courses to promote gains in achievement for students with disabilities, especially in reading. Certification in special education, an undergraduate major in special education, and the amount of special education coursework in college are all positively correlated with the performance of teachers in special education reading courses.

The U.S. Department of Education has evaluated states since the 2005-06 school year based on their ability to meet certain "measurable and rigorous targets" related to educating students with disabilities. This map shows the most current rating for each state's performance under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which covers students from ages 3 to 21.

Advocates for poor and minority students, students with disabilities, and others sent a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., expressing deep concerns with legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act put forth today.

Lamenting that millions of American children receive "a third world education," Mitt Romney on Wednesday called for poor and disabled students to be able to use federal funds to attend any public, private or online school they choose.

The lower enrollment of special needs students in charter schools is a fact that's been known for well over a decade. And, as the GAO report documents, the disparities are particularly stark in categories such as "intellectual disabilities" and "developmental delay." This is a problem for at least four reasons: (a) the likely denial of unique opportunities to students with special needs, (b) the increased concentration of these students in non-charters, (c) funding non-comparability, and (d) results non-comparability. Further, what's particularly troubling about the news of the GAO report was the quoted responses of charter advocates, downplaying the differences as "small" and suggesting that the cause may be over-labeling in non-charters (see http://on.wsj.com/LApPyP). This excuse-making (whatever happened to "no excuse schools"?) is as unproductive as it is objectionable. Let me briefly walk through the four problems listed above.

The type of clothing worn in a family's home, the language spoken and other cultural markers could influence whether special-education students receive taxpayer-funded private-school tuition, under a bill passed last month by the New York state Legislature. Education officials would have to consider a student's "home environment and family background" when deciding the best setting for special-education children under the bill. Currently, decisions about private-school placement have generally been based on academics and the child's disability.

Many of us have not heard of of the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Formula, Connecticut's system for allocating money to our public schools. As one father admitted at the ECS Task Force Meeting on Thursday in Bridgeport, he never gave it any thought until his child started kindergarten. Roughly, this is how the formula works. It starts with a foundation amount, which is supposed to represent how much money it takes to educate one child with no special needs. Then the amount is adjusted based on the number and needs of students in a particular district. Students living in poverty, students learning English and students with disabilities all need more resources to learn, and those resources cost money - up to four times the cost of educating a child with no needs. The formula is also supposed to consider a municipality's ability to pay. If one of these components is inaccurate, then the state is not giving the proper amount of money to a municipality for its schools. In Connecticut, all of these components are grossly inadequate.

Five months ago, Miami New Times exposed a taxpayer-funded voucher program that, even on the overblown Floridian scale of dysfunction, is a stunning boondoggle. Students who receive the John M. McKay Scholarship for disabled students are taught in public parks or not at all, the story showed. Administrators and teachers at schools given millions by the program have rap sheets that include cocaine dealing, kidnapping, witness tampering, and burglary. Kids in these schools are even sometimes paddled, a tactic outlawed in most Florida counties. Fraud is rampant. Yet over the past 12-plus school years, the state has tossed more than a billion dollars - including $150 million in the past year - at the McKay program.

The Obama administration is urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to take up an appeal from a school district ordered to provide compensatory tutoring because it failed to identify a student's disability.

As the number of private school voucher and scholarship programs for students with disabilities across the country grow, meeting a variety of challenges along the way, one lawmaker in Florida is taking a hard look at that state's program.

Disability advocates are upset that some Wisconsin school districts want to be able to cut special education spending without being punished.

Growing up in New York City nearly half a century ago, I watched my parents try to get help for my developmentally disabled brother. There was very little available and my parents were told, on multiple occasions, by education and psychiatric professionals, to dispose of their defective child in an institution. They refused, embarking instead on a long and expensive struggle. I'm not sure how much less agonizing and lonely it is today for the parents of children with special needs--last August, a woman in Maryland killed her autistic son and herself out of despair about his school situation--but I do know that there are many public resources now that were not available when our family could have desperately used them.

State school officials are proposing changes in the evaluations of thousands of students with disabilities on Long Island and elsewhere that they say would save money for hard-pressed school districts.

The NJ State DOE has just released a report commissioned by Denver-based Augenblick Palaich and Associates (APA), which seeks to answer the question, does the School Funding Reform Act adequately fund district costs for students with disabilities?

Children with autism accounted for almost one third of a comprehensive sample of published court decisions concerning the core concepts of free appropriate public education (FAPE) and least restrictive environment (LRE) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The other major, and more significant, finding was that when comparing this litigation percentage with the autism percentage in the special education population for the period 1993 to 2006, the ratio was approximately 10 : 1. The reasons for this disproportionality, or overrepresentation of children with autism in FAPE/LRE litigation, are complex. Special education leaders need to pay particular attention to establishing effective communications and trust building with parents of students with autism and to optimize the use of various approaches of alternative dispute resolution.

Eva Moskowitz, a charter founder in New York City, says in the article that the reason the numbers of special education students are low is because her schools are able to move students out of special education because of her schools'  superior methods. But this claim demonstrates that her schools take students with the mildest disabilities, and leaves those with high needs to the public schools, a complaint often lodged against charters.

"A new report from the Office of the Independent Monitor in the Los Angeles school district looks at whether charter schools ask parents up front-before they can enroll-if their children have disabilities."