January 4, 2024
The Honorable Bernard Sanders, Chair
United States Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
332 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-4504
The Honorable Bill Cassidy, Ranking Member
United States Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
455 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-1806
The Honorable Virginia Foxx, Chair
United States House of Representatives
Committee on Education and the Workforce
2462 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-3305
The Honorable Bobby Scott, Ranking Member
United States House of Representatives
Committee on Education and the Workforce
2328 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-4603
RE: Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act (S. 2945/H.R. 5748)
Dear Chair Sanders, Chair Foxx, Ranking Member Cassidy, and Ranking Member Scott:
The National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of Blind Americans, strongly opposes the recently introduced Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act, S. 2945/H.R. 5748. We are concerned about the negative impacts this edition of the legislation will have on blind and low-vision students by its attempts to amend the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
For more than a decade, the Alice Cogswell and Anne Sullivan Macy Act (Cogswell-Macy Act) has been promoted as a tool to improve education for students with low incidence sensory disabilities: blind and low vision, deaf and hard of hearing, and deafblind. Unfortunately, the proposed Cogswell-Macy Act has failed to live up to these promises for blind and low-vision students.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides for individualized education for eligible students with disabilities. In addition to setting forth requirements for the educational needs of these students through Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), the IDEA lays out legal requirements for determining student eligibility, defines student and parental rights, and governs both schools and states in their provision of “special education”. Furthermore, the IDEA requires the provision of disability-related instruction and materials in the least restrictive educational environment that provides each student with a disability with free appropriate public education and access to the general education curriculum. In addition, the IDEA requires that IEPs adequately prepare disabled students for post-secondary education, post-secondary employment, and independent living.
We have five major concerns with the provisions proposed in the Cogswell-Macy Act (S. 2945/H.R. 5748):
First, some of the Cogswell-Macy Act’s proposed changes will require the use of assessments on blind or low-vision students that do not meet minimum IDEA assessment standards. This will result in blind and low-vision students having fewer IDEA rights than any other disabled students or students merely suspected of having a disability other than blindness or low vision.
Second, the Cogswell-Macy Act proposes to fundamentally change a decades-long protection for blind and low-vision students: the right to literacy through Braille and/or print. The current version of the Cogswell-Macy Act not only requires a Braille assessment that is biased towards print. It allows listening to substitute for reading at any age, and before any literacy instruction begins. This would result in blind and low-vision students being the only students in the nation for whom reading and writing instruction could be completely abandoned in favor of simply listening to the text.
Third, while the Cogswell-Macy Act would require assessment of blind and low-vision needs in additional areas, its language serves to dilute the Braille literacy section of current law. Moreover, the proposed language does not contain provisions to provide this instruction to blind or low-vision students outside of regular school hours, so these additional instructional areas may result in large-scale and long-term removal of blind and low-vision students from the general classroom environment – and thus deny these students their right to the least restrictive educational environment.
Fourth, the current version of the Cogswell-Macy Act fails to address two decades of changes in education and updated federal guidance in terms of the needs of blind and low-vision students. Our students deserve a comprehensive, cohesive codification of their educational and access rights to support all administrators, educators, parents, and students in the development of IEPs that meet the needs of blind and low-vision students.
Fifth, the current version of the Cogswell-Macy Act further fails blind and low-vision students by maintaining the outdated term “visual impairment” to describe blind and low-vision students, but it replaces the term “hearing impairment” with “deaf/hard of hearing.” This serves as further evidence that the Cogswell-Macy Act does not serve the needs of blind and low-vision students – even the need for equitable terminology.
Sadly, the Cogswell-Macy Act fails blind and low-vision students at all levels. In addition to diluting the rights of blind and low-vision students, some provisions of the proposed Cogswell-Macy Act actually strip these students of legal protections afforded to every other disabled student (and to students just suspected of having a disability). Tragically, the Cogswell-Macy Act clearly empowers schools to replace reading and writing (literacy) with listening – but only for blind and low-vision students. This unprecedented assault on blind and low-vision students must be stopped.
As a blind father of two blind children, I urge you to not consider the Cogswell-Macy Act (S. 2945/H.R. 5748) in your respective committees until these five offensive provisions are removed. As always, the National Federation of the Blind remains open to working with you, and the bill sponsors, to ensure that rights of all blind students are protected.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind
CC: The Honorable Ed Markey
The Honorable Shelley Capito
The Honorable Matt Cartwright
The Honorable John Rutherford