Who Should Be Eligible for Alternate Assessments?
IDEA ’97 requires that states develop alternate assessments for those students who cannot participate in large-scale general assessments, even with accommodations. How should those students be defined? Is this strictly a decision to be made by the student’s IEP team? Clearly, IDEA ’97 places the ultimate authority for the decision of how a student will participate in state or district assessments with the student’s IEP team. Yet, what eligibility criteria should IEP teams use to ensure consistent application? Should this decision be based solely on diagnostic labels (i.e., those diagnostic categories representing students with the most significant cognitive disabilities)? Yet, as has been noted elsewhere, a criterion for participation in the alternate assessment based solely on diagnostic labels would violate fundamental principles of due process and individualization because individual student decisions can never be based solely on such categorical labels (Kleinert, Haigh, Kearns, & K
