Do High-Needs Students Affect a School's Grade?

Beth Fertig:

New York City's latest plan to reform special education services encourages public school principals to take more of the neediest students. An analysis by WNYC shows how these students are not distributed evenly across all schools. The analysis also found that high schools with the best report card grades often take smaller percentages of the special education students who are the toughest to educate.

The chart below shows that high schools that earned As and Bs on their annual progress reports tend to take a small share of special education students who require segregated classes, or what the Education Department calls "self-contained" classes. These are students who can't be included in mainstream classes most of the time because they require more intensive services. Some high-performing schools have just a sprinkling of these students, representing less than 2 percent of their overall population.

Still, it's not clear that there's a link between having a lot of these challenging students and getting a poor grade, contrary to what some critics contend.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 16, 2012 1:36 AM
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