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While it is great seeing so many parents here fighting for access to higher mathematics, I’m here asking for Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) to bother to teach my son to add.
There are around 60 to 90 specific common core standards for each grade in elementary school which get turned into the 30 to 40 criteria reported in a standard report card.
In my son’s latest draft Individualized Education Program from the district, we don’t get a report card and the district proposed just 3 common core standards.
3 out of 60 to 90 standards.
They aren’t even trying to provide a real education.
Basically, PAUSD put my son on the “no high school diploma” track last year in the Second grade
This is the opposite of what is supposed to be happening in California with The Alternate Pathways to a High School Diploma.
Palo Alto needs to change course to meet these goals and do what is right for its students who face the most challenges.
References:
Pathways to a High School Diploma – Legislative Report – https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/ac/altpathwayslegreport.asp
Workgroups Provide Special Education Recommendations – https://www.scoe.net/news/library/2021/10/07workgroup_reports/
California Alternative Pathways to a High School Diploma Workgroup Report – https://www.scoe.net/media/2tla0rk5/ca_alternative_pathways_workgroup_report.pdf
California Statewide Individualized Education Program (IEP) Workgroup Report –
https://www.scoe.net/media/ankhexys/ca_iep_workgroup_report.pdf
Employing Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities and Developmental Disabilities in California –
https://www.sbcc.edu/extendedlearning/sb_adult_ed_consortium/files/AWD%20AEBG%20YR3%201718%20California%20Competitive%20Integrated%20Employment%20Blueprint.pdf
Ensuring All Students with Disabilities have a Pathway to a High School Diploma in California –
https://mailchi.mp/dredf/ensuring-all-students-with-disabilities-have-a-pathway-to-a-high-school-diploma-in-california?e=2962aa2122
Palo Alto Unified School District’s 504 Plan demographics are substantially different than California’s or the rest of the US states with around 7% of our students having a 504 plan (see attachments) vs. the national average of 2.7%, California at 4% and the highest state average New Hampshire at 6.2% (tab 2 of “Enrollment-Overall”)
Thank you to PAUSD Staff
First, thank you to Amanda Bark and the PAUSD staff for providing this data. I only looked at this because the 504 numbers were broken out in the recent mid-school math report and they were surprisingly high.
What is a 504 Plan?
Students with 504 plans typically do NOT have IEPs and are NOT covered under IDEA.
https://www.understood.org/en/articles/what-is-a-504-plan
504 plans are focused on education accessibility and addressing discrimination as opposed to supporting individualized learning needs.
Implications?
There have been cases that I’ve heard in other school districts pushing students to get 504 plans instead of IEPs (and PAUSD has a low number of Students with Disabilities defined by IDEA both vs. California and nationally). State IDEA metrics do not flag schools for low IDEA metrics, so I do not know if PAUSD is notably low at the state level (there is no slick dashboard for IDEA data like there is for general education)
504 plans are not monitored with any of the attention that is given to IDEA, unfortunately, so, it is much harder to “see” what is going on.
I do not know the reason for this number – it is just a notable outlier.
I believe that the district can break this down by disability category and certainly look at the trends over time. Given other disproportionality issues, it might also be worth looking into ethnic, SED, and other demographic groups to see if there are other drivers.
All my best.
Steve
- Note the “Enrollment Overall” spreadsheet was retrieved from the Office of Civil Rights reporting at the US Department of Education.
https://ocrdata.ed.gov/estimations/2017-2018
more“when students are included, they have more access to the general curriculum
and effective instruction, they achieve at higher rates of academic
performance, and they acquire better social and behavioral outcomes.”
According to the latest report under IDEA for Palo Alto, 7.75% of students spend less than 40% of
their day in general education (reports from 2021).
Compared to California, this is good as California’s average is 18.2%.
However, California is the second worst state (for segregated special education) in the US (only ahead of New York).
There are 11 states that average better than Palo Alto.
- West Virginia 7.4
- Alabama 7.2
- Iowa 7.2
- Kansas†† 7
- Connecticut†† 6.6
- North Dakota 6.4
- BIE schools 5.5
- Nebraska 5.4
- South Dakota 5.4
- Wyoming†† 5.4
- Colorado 5.3
- Vermont 4.5
“..when educated in inclusive classrooms, peers without disabilities experience
either a positive academic and social impact or at least no negative impact on
academic achievement”
If you include students at separate schools, we perform even worse. We have 3.23% of students in
separate schools, worse than California’s average of 2.3% and worse than all but 15 states.
If you combine these numbers, there is a total of 10.98% of students in highly segregated settings –
worse than 16 states.
- Puerto Rico 10.6
- Vermont 9.8
- Idaho 9.6
- Indiana 9.2
- Kentucky 9.2
- Kansas†† 8.9
- Alabama 8.5
- Iowa 8.1
- Oklahoma 7.9
- West Virginia 7.6
- Nebraska 7.2
- Colorado 7.2
- North Dakota 7
- South Dakota 6.4
- Wyoming†† 6
- BIE schools 5.6
“..in special education classes, 58 percent of the time was not devoted
to instruction, in contrast with only 35 percent of non-instructional time in
general education.”
For general education, fundraising by PIE, and most other areas, Palo Alto Unified School District
benchmarks its performance and targets being one of the best in the USA.
Why not special education?
California Special Education Reports by LEA – https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/ds/leadatarpts.asp
Palo Alto Unified Report Volumbe in California IDEA Report for 2021 –
https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/ds/documents/indrptlea2021pr.docx (page 43)
43rd Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act, 2021 – https://sites.ed.gov/idea/files/43rd-arc-for-idea.pdf – see pages 150-151.
The Segregation of Students with Disability – 7 February 2018 – National Council on Disability –
https://ncd.gov/sites/default/files/NCD_Segregation-SWD_508.pdf
Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) Special Education / Students With Disabilities Demographics (2019,2022)
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Student Population | Students With Disabilities Population | Percentage Students with Disabilities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2021 | 10754 | 1087 | 10.1% |
| PAUSD | 2019 | 11992 | 1144 | 9.5% |
| California | 2019 | 6,186,278 | 725,412 | 11.7% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 10509 | 1069 | 10.2% |
| California | 2022 | 5,892,240 | 745,513 | 12.7% |
Question – is PAUSD under-identifying SWD
Issue – data is not available on students who only have 504 plans
PAUSD Chronically Absent
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Students | Total Absentee Percentage | Total Absentee | Students With Disabilities | Absentee Percentage SWD | Absentee SWD | SWD Absentee Percent of Total Absentee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 7996 | 5.9% | 471 | 867 | 9.5% | 78 | 16.5% |
| California | 2019 | 4,279,575 | 10.1% | 429207 | 559,824 | 16.3% | 91251 | 21.3% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 6785 | 10.1% | 685 | 766 | 18.8% | 144 | 21% |
| California | 2022 | 4,009,260 | 30% | 1202778 | 560,749 | 39.6% | 222056 | 18.46% |
This is depressing across the board. There is a substantial excess number of SWD absentee students.
PAUSD Suspension Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Students | Total Suspension Percentage | Total Suspensions | Students With Disabilities | Suspension Percentage SWD | Suspensions SWD | SWD Suspension Percent of Total Suspensions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 12347 | 0.9% | 111 | 1313 | 3.1% | 41 | 36.7% |
| California | 2019 | 6,362,507 | 3.4% | 216325 | 823,805 | 6.2% | 51075 | 23.6% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 10933 | 0.7% | 77 | 1216 | 3% | 36 | 46.75% |
| California | 2022 | 6,066,021 | 3.1% | 188047 | 847,770 | 5.4% | 45780 | 24.3% |
This number usually surprises people by how high it is. The proportion of SWD suspensions vs. total suspensions is appalling and should be addressed. You’ll note the lack of an “issue” in the California data as they don’t capture disproportionality problems.
PAUSD English Language Arts Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Performance Relative to State Standard | SWD Performance Relative to State Standard | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | +78.8 | -17.9 | 96.7 |
| California | 2019 | -2.5 | -88.1 | 85.6 |
| PAUSD | 2022 | +76.6 | -43.4 | 120 |
| California | 2022 | -12.2 | -97.3 | 85.1 |
Compared to the state, Palo Alto SWD are doing well.
However, their performance gap grew from 2019 to 2022.
Unfortunately, the state performance is DISMAL.
The Gap analysis shows (or attempts to show) how PAUSD is serving its SWD relative to its general education peers.
PAUSD Mathematics Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Performance Relative to State Standard | SWD Performance Relative to State Standard | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | +83.2 | -25.7 | 108.9 |
| California | 2019 | -33.5 | -119.4 | 85.9 |
| PAUSD | 2022 | +68.3 | -57.7 | 126 |
| California | 2022 | -51.7 | -130.8 | 79.1 |
Same assessment as for ELA. California overall is DISMAL (when are people going to be ashamed of this?).
The gap between the performance of SWD in Palo Alto is also notably larger than for the state as a whole.
It has also gotten worse in 2022 from 2019.
PAUSD College/Career Readiness
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Readiness Percentage | SWD Readiness Percentage | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 74.2% | 24.7% | 49.5% |
| California | 2019 | 44.1% | 10.8% | 33.3% |
This metric is kind of cryptic. It does serve as an interesting alternative to graduation data. Some other states are actually tracking students after graduation which is an excellent idea (notably, Arizona).
Again, the big issue is the gap between general education and SWD.
(Sigh… California as usual. No data on this in 2022).
NOTE: I haven’t gone through and de-duplicated SWD in the overall population which will increase all of these gaps in performance.
PAUSD Graduation Rate
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Graduation Rate | SWD Graduation Rate | Graduation Rate Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 95.4% | 81.8% | 13.6% |
| California | 2019 | 85.8% | 64% | 21.8% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 96.3% | 83.9% | 12.4% |
| California | 2022 | 87.4% | 75.2% | 12.2% |
There was a huge improvement in state graduation rates for SWD. They also improved slightly for PAUSD.
Yay!… though with California, one wants to ask more questions.
Final Comments
- This shouldn’t have to be so hard. We should be able to pull out data on students with disabilities and parse them both between each school and the state as well as with other schools.
- The data is not cleanly separated between “students with disabilities” and their general education peers. This winds up under-counting the gap between the two student populations (I can go back and do this by hand.. but not today)
- The other largest population across California, and in PAUSD, that has a massive performance gap are English Learners (who are still learning English). We do not currently have any way to include the overlap between these students and students with disabilities (though the school district could do this analysis).
Other California Special Education Resources
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