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Most say labels placed on schools are inaccurate 83 Pima schools called failing as special-ed conflict goes on 42 schools fail fed assessment

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Fear must not influence desperately needed changes that lawmakers are considering to the federal No Child Left Behind education-accountability law.

A subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, on which Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., sits, has hearings scheduled for today about No Child Left Behind, which is up for renewal.

The experience of Tucson schools illustrates how urgently reform is needed in the provisions on special-education students. The changes must be practical while not watering down educational standards.

Once again, Tucson-area schools have been tagged as failing to meet federal standards because they allowed students who qualify for special-education accommodations to take the AIMS test in math, reading and writing using those accommodations.

In many cases, students were allowed to use calculators, as they are every other day of class under a different federal law that protects students with disabilities. But doing so disqualified those students under the No Child Left Behind guidelines, so while they completed the test, their scores were thrown out.

As a result, schools failed to make "Adequate Yearly Progress" because, on paper, fewer than 95 percent — the minimum required in each subgroup of students — of the special-education students took the test. In Tucson Unified School District, 19 of the 29 schools that failed the federal standard did so because they allowed students to take the AIMS test using some kind of special-education accommodation, according to a story in Wednesday's Star. The same happened in other schools.

Punishing schools for doing what is right for their special-education students makes a mockery of efforts to improve public education. It's ridiculous to pretend that rules prohibiting a student who was born without hands from using a scriber to take the test — this is a real rule — somehow improve public education.

Rules that put No Child Left Behind at loggerheads with federal disability education law must be changed. Most Tucson schools have chosen the educational welfare of their students over their public image.

The federal labeling system has pressured the Sonoran Science Academy, a charter school whose students traditionally perform well on the AIMS test, into protecting its marketing plan instead of its students with disabilities. The school allowed eligible students to use calculators, and the school was listed as not making enough progress.

So Sonoran Science Academy officials told the Star they won't allow any students to use calculators on the AIMS test next year.

Grijalva said he's heard opposition to changes in the special-education provisions from advocates for those students. Take away the hammer, they say, and schools will abandon special-education students.

It's a sadly understandable fear. Students with disabilities must be challenged educationally, and that hasn't always been the reality.

Allowing fear to keep needed changes from happening won't help students improve, but it will harm them and their schools.

Students who qualify for special-education accommodations must be given the educational tools they need to learn — and the practical tools needed to prove what they know.