From US Department of Education

1. Are NCLB and IDEA in conflict with each other?
No. Both laws have the same goal of improving academic achievement through high expectations and high-quality education programs. NCLB works to achieve that goal by focusing on school accountability, teacher quality, parental involvement through access to information and choices about their children’s education, and the use of evidence-based instruction. IDEA complements those efforts by focusing specifically on how best to help students with disabilities meet academic goals.

From Address to the 2003 National Association of School Pyschologists (NASP) Convention in Toronto
by Peg Dawson, NCSP

I've been given one short hour to bring over 25 years of clinical experience working with children with learning problems to bear on the question of whether there is a role for IQ testing in today's school psychology practice. Given time constraints, I will not go into a lengthy history of intelligence testing, nor will I spend a lot of time expounding on the theories that underlie modern concepts of intelligence. I may touch on history and theory along the way as they relate to the way school psychologists employ IQ tests in their daily practice. But my primary intention is to come at the question from a practical-and a practitioner's-perspective.

Here is the entire text of the NCLB statute as passed in Jan 2002.

From www.schwablearning.org
by Candace Cortiella

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB), all students must participate in annual state assessments, including students with learning disabilities (LD). Parents need to understand the requirements of NCLB and the important decisions they will need to make as part of their child’s educational program.

NCLB is intended to improve the academic achievement of all students and to close the achievement gap between various subgroups of students, including those with disabilities, by imposing new requirements for standards, assessments, accountability, and parental involvement.

In this article, parent advocate and special education expert Candace Cortiella addresses questions regarding the participation of students with LD in the assessments required under NCLB.

The Nation's Reportcard is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics, group appointed by, but independent of, the Federal DOE to track how well we are educating our kids. To understand where improvements are needed, the data is collected by subgroups and recombined in various ways. You can see data is broken out by state, by gender, by race, by economic class, by special ed status, etc. Having the data to understand how a particular subgorup is doing is absolutely critical for understanding if the education process is working for that subgroup. Let's zoom in the Special Ed kids in Delaware to see how things are going. However, before we begin, let's remember that this discussion is possible is only because children with disabilities participated in the NEAP assessments that fed into the report. Without test results from all the sub groups, analysis would be impossible.

Oct 2003 press release from American Psychological Association

Making IQ Tests Harder Due To Flynn Effect Has Educational, Financial, Legal and Military Recruiting Implications

WASHINGTON — The steady rising of IQ scores over the last century – known as the Flynn effect – causes IQ tests norms to become obsolete over time. To counter this effect, IQ tests are “renormed” (made harder) every 15-20 years by resetting the mean score to 100 to account for the previous gains in IQ scores. But according to new research, such renorming may have unintended consequences, particularly in the area of special education placements for children with borderline or mild mental retardation. The findings are reported on in the October issue of American Psychologist, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA).

This topic could be a website unto itself but for now, we've try to collect a few docs related to theses two subjects and how they tie together. One good place to start is IDEA and NCLB: The Intersection of Access and Outcomes. Another excellent background doc is A New Era: The President's Commission on Revitalizing Special Education