According to the new standards, the Department of Education puts the states into four categories. Credit: U.S. Department of Education

Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman is supporting a national effort to take a closer look at the education of students with disabilities.

In the past, states have just had to show that children are receiving an education.  But now, they are being asked for test scores to prove the quality of that education.

Speaking on a conference call with U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan, Huffman acknowledged that Tennessee has not been providing an accurate picture of how special needs students perform.

“For us, when we look at students with disabilities, we see that the majority of those students are students who are perfectly capable of learning and doing better than they have been doing.”

Huffman points out that, like most states, Tennessee needs to improve.  The U.S. Department of Education says that states that fail to meet new, more measurable benchmarks for three or more years could lose of some of their federal funding for special education.