Special Ed Wars Look Different From the Front Lines
We live on a cozy dead-end street in suburban New Jersey with 13 school aged kids. Of those 13 kids, six qualify for special services and have IEPs, including my son.
Why are nearly 50% of the kids on our block receiving special services from the public schools? Greg Forster and Jay Greene think they have the answer.
On June 16th, Forster and Greene asserted in a PJM article that “millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability”. They believe that these kids have been given this label because the school districts want the federal money. The kids have fallen behind in the classroom, not because of a learning disability, but because they have been harmed by bad teachers.
Clearly, it’s not beneficial to incorrectly smack the “disabled” label on kids, if they really have no cognitive, neurological, or behavioral disability. However, I am not convinced that the mislabeling of special needs kids is as widespread as Foster and Greene maintain. I also believe that any crackdown will lead to a witch hunt atmosphere that will create a hostile environment for disabled kids, the vast majority of whom really need services. One of those kids is my son. Since he was identified as having special needs when he was 2-1/2, I am no longer just an academic who studies education policy from the ivory tower, but a parent on the front lines of the special education wars.
Foster and Greene note the sharp uptick in the number of special needs kids that occurred after 1976, when federal special education laws went into place. Correlation does not prove causation. At this same time, the medical community began to more clearly identify learning disabilities. Aspergers’ Syndrome only became a distinct diagnosis in 1992. Dyslexia was only more fully understood after research that emerged in the 80s and 90s. Attention Deficit only became an official disorder in 1980.
These diagnoses cause real problems in education. Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and remember the kids who were ostracized, lonely, strange, smelly, weird, hyper, and angry. Today, those kids have a much better shot at life, and at an education because they are getting appropriate services. With help, they are more likely to finish high school and even attend college. They will be able to more fully function in society and provide for themselves, rather than spend a lifetime on welfare.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a single kid in my kid’s special needs classrooms that I thought should not be there. In fact, after having compulsively reading every article and book on neurological disabilities, I see undiagnosed kids (and adults) all the time.
The identification of and intervention for special needs children has increased also because our society expects more kids to finish high school and attend college than it did a generation ago. There are fewer manual labor jobs that provide a middle class income for people who can’t read. Success in school is more important to basic survival than ever before.
Foster and Greene maintain that schools have a financial incentive to label kids as learning disabled. In fact, schools actually have a disincentive to diagnose kids. The money that they receive from the federal government is a fraction of the money that they actually spend on special education. The federal government only pays for 17% of the expenses for special education. State and local governments must pick up the rest of the tab. In our town, nearly half of the local school budget is devoted to special education.
Local political officials speak publicly about how they don’t want to build more homes in our town, lest a kid with special needs moves in.
Moms from across the country on my special education listserv compare notes daily on their frustration as they try to get their kids the support that they need in order to get an education. Websites, like Wrightslaw, are aimed at helping parents navigate the system, which is designed to resist providing expensive services. Parents spend tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to supplement the services that they receive from the public schools and are not covered by health insurance that are crucial to helping their kids learn.
My son languished in an inadequate program for two years, until a kind administrator took pity on us and sent him to an out-of-district program that was geared to his needs. The progress that he’s made in the past year has been amazing, and he should be mainstreamed in a year. However, this highly effective program is costing the district a fortune, and they are itching to return him to the district where he can receive cheaper (and less effective) services.
Perhaps there are a handful of kids who have been misdiagnosed in the system. Perhaps there are pushy parents in wealthy districts who hope to give their kids an edge by giving them a label. Perhaps there are a few school districts that need to give the kids extra help to make up for a poor general education.
But these numbers are much smaller than Foster and Greene imagine. It would be a huge mistake to crack down on the whole system, because of a few errors. My son and his classmates legitimately need the services they are receiving to become productive members of society.
The disabilities on my block run the full spectrum of modern learning disorders — ADHD, dyslexia, Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD, hearing impairment. Nobody knows exactly why these children have those disabilities – genetics, because they were part of multiple births (which are on the increase) and because we’ve gotten better at understanding why many otherwise smart kids can’t read. Or why a child who can read and do math can’t utter a complete sentence.
In the past, maybe only my son and the deaf boy on our block would have received help. The others would have been left to struggle and drop out. And then what? Welfare? Drugs? Crime?
Foster and Greene incorrectly assume that schools have an incentive to mislabel students.
Talk to any parent who has pleaded with a school system to get speech therapy for her kid, and you’ll get another story entirely.
Laura thanks for posting this article. I can corroborate that California special needs can also face the challenges you outline. I have a nephew who is in special needs and my sister has very carefully had to shop for the best district services and move her family there to get the care she needs for her child.
Here is an idea: Pay for you own speech therapy.
Too many parents think that it is OK for their kids to cost their neighbors 10x what they pay in taxes for the schools. We often read (including on PJM) of bleeding heart liberals who find out their kids are special needs, then, they suddenly decide to move to more rural/conservative areas because the schools are better. Well, they won’t stay better if parents with special ed kids and an entitlement mentality keep flooding them.
Many parent want their kids to be labeled because it makes them feel less guilty about being rotten parents. Instead of being the parent who didn’t read to their kid and work with them, they get to play the martyr, at least in their own mind.
Being labeled as special needs can even prevent the schools from disciplining a kid.
Many parents also want their kid labeled so that it greases the wheels of social promotion. Have a 16 year old with a second grade reading level? Well, socially promote him all the way!! How did he get that far? Well, once he started falling behind, he was put on an Individual Education Plan that required he be promoted with his peers so that he could be socialized. Never mind that he soon got completely bewildered by the classwork and fell further behind. Never mind that his teachers now had to try to teach him to balance chemical equations when he couldn’t pronounce or recognize the word “chemical” or “equation”.
Quite frankly, special ed kids need to have the old-fashioned special ed classrooms. Not to isolate them, but to allow a specialist to help them grow as much as possible. Keeping a 16 year old with other 16 years olds is stupid when his mental age is 10. All he learns is defeat, humiliation and frustration.
If you’re a teacher with a pupil you’d like to get rid of, one of the ways you can do it is try to get him transferred to Special Ed. The school psychologist will support you because detecting more and more learning disabilities helps justify her job. The principal will support you since classifying your problem pupil as learning disabled exempts him from the standardized testing by which the state evaluates his school. The parents will support you since it means the school district is about to spend twice as much on this pupil as on his classmates. Even the pupil will appreciate it since the penalties for misconduct are lighter for Special Ed students than others. Eventually he will get a diploma he can’t read but his eventual problem is not your immediate problem of getting rid of a pupil who’d much rather disrupt your class than learn anything.
smarty, I would say that’s about 30% true. If you listen to the reasonable people who disagree with you instead of setting up false dichotomies, you might be able to raise that.
In my only disagreement with the original essay, I would not that while the school district has a net financial loss when declaring a child in need of special interventions, there are people within the district who benefit from the designation. This is part of what creates the impression that schools are looking to put kids on the lists; there are individuals, and the national groups behind them, who want exactly that.
You raise some important arguments here and there’s really not enough space in a comment to do them justice. I’m asking PJM for permission to write a column in response. If we can’t do it here, I assume we’ll post it on Jay’s blog (www.jaypgreene.com). I expect we will have a full response up by the middle of next week or so.
Sounds great, Greg. Could you also provide a link to your study?
Smarty, where I live, private speech therapy is approximately $100AUD per visit for an hour session. My son is supposed to have two sessions per week. With private health cover, that still does not cover the full or even half the costs of these visits. Speech therapists are hard to come by in public and private systems. I haven’t had my child labelled with a disability, he was born that way and I will do what I can within my power to see he gets the help he deserves as most parents with a disabled child/ren would.
Smarty says -
“Quite frankly, special ed kids need to have the old-fashioned special ed classrooms. Not to isolate them, but to allow a specialist to help them grow as much as possible”
Ah, the old separate but equal line. Which of course is inherently unequal no matter how well meaning your intentions may be.
Well Smarty, let me tell you about the “old-fashioned special ed classroom” that you romanticize.
I was placed in one nearly 38 years ago. Children were placed there not because we were disruptive, they well knew how to deal with disruptive children. No, we were placed there because we were different, something about us wasn’t quite right and they were afraid that it might be catching. For the most part we were just extreme introverts, I suppose that more than a few might have been diagnosed as having a form of autism, but they didn’t do that sort of classification in those days.
During the two years I spent in that environment not a single day was spent on instruction in reading, math, science or any of the subjects that “normal” children were expected to attempt. The expectation for us was much lower, we engaged in making crafts and developing basic motor skills with the hope that someday we would be employable performing some menial task. When the weather was nice we would spend the entire day outside on the playground.
It came as some surprise to them when I was tested at the end of the second year, I would have been in the sixth grade and about 12 at that time, and I tested as able to read and comprehend on an eleventh grade level.
What they failed to understand is that I had no desire for social interaction and in their eyes that translated into being unable to function.
I lived those days that you seem fond to return to and I would not wish them on anyone’s child.
Ah, but today’s argument is the we are more enlightened, we have better tools and the errors of the past will not be repeated.
Times may change but people and institutions do not.
“I see undiagnosed kids (and adults) all the time”
If by reading books on the subject you start evaluating kids and adults as disabled, think of those whose jobs rely on doing exactly that.
Those who think the growth in disabilities is nothing more than label-pinning should talk to long-time teachers. They will tell you that there are just more children with learning and communication problems than there ever were – the classroom with one challenging child now has five or six children with challenges.
Once that is accepted, it’s time to ask – no, demand – an answer to why there are so many more children with issues?
As far as labeling kids to get their NCLB test scores eliminated from counting against the school – the special ed subset DOES get counted, and since it is smaller than the general population, it each child gets counted for a larger percentage. The argument works in reverse – a school would rather take a 1 point hit in the general ed score than what counts as a 10 or 15 point hit in the special ed subset – which is the subset that schools labeled as “insufficient progress” get zonked on.
Education is a “pay me now or pay me later” scenario, and even more so with children with learning challenges. Want to stop paying? Ask questions.
Smarty, when someone you love – a child or grandchild – is inevitably affected by special needs, you’ll get it. And, yes, it is inevitable and you will look back be deeply ashamed. I pity your ignorance.
Its also a good thing we have wonderful pharmaceutical companies ready to help our children with their special needs. After all daddy’s on 8 different prescriptions himself. Maybe there is something in the (bottled) water these days, who knows. Everybody is a victim. Sometimes a very smart child is bored with an ineffective teacher with a watered down curriculum, don’t worry, I’m sure they have a pill for that too. Pretty soon we are going to need autism vaccinations, apparently there’s a case of that going around too. I have a lot of friends and family that were stuck in the LD ‘system’ for no reason(as it was just becoming ‘hip’ when I was in school in the ’80′s). The biggest hurdle they had was getting caught up once they broke out of it. At least they weren’t as quick to medicate back then.
Laura,
Sure thing. Here’s the HTML version of the study:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_32.htm
And here’s the PDF:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_32.pdf
I am a pediatric audiologist in independent practice, and in the course of my job I test the hearing of children who are behind in their speech and language development. I have been doing this job for 25 years. I am usually the first stop along the chain of evaluations, which are started — usually before school age — because *something is not right* about the child. I can tell you firsthand that the numbers of kids that I see who show signs of autism spectrum disorders has risen *dramatically*.
Formerly, most of the kids I saw had middle ear problems that were muffling their hearing — they were otherwise very typical. Nowadays every other child I see is inattentive to conversation, playing inapropriately with an object in the room, avoiding eye contact — basically disengaged from the world of communication. I have no incentive to “diagnose” these kids — I just test their hearing and write a report.
It used to be that the hardest part of my job was telling a parent that their child was deaf. Now *by far* the hardest part is telling these parents that their child has normal hearing. At that point they usually break down, knowing that the alternative that is left is much harder to “fix”. These are parents from all walks of life — not only well-heeled parents, but Mexican immigrants who had never heard the word “autism” before some doctor mentioned it offhandedly. Don’t tell me that the only thing that’s changed is the label.
Great article: I’m the parent of two kids with special needs, and it’s good to see some common misconceptions and half-truths corrected.
A couple of things: the psychologists don’t need to justify their jobs by identifying more kids. It’s not piecework. There are other things these people are supposed to do, such as develop behavior plans or provide counseling. I think people apply widget economic models to school districts, and they’re not really analogous.
Also, as someone else pointed out above, under NCLB children with disabilities are supposed to be tested; schools that play games by telling those kids to stay home on test day are flagged. The numbers are included with the school district’s totals, and this holds true if the children are placed out of district. There are a very few kids who are given alternative assessments. They receive IEP diplomas, and those are last resorts, b/c the military and most colleges won’t accept them. So no, Jack Olson, the principal doesn’t get to exempt those students, nor are parents necessarily delighted to have their kids classified.
And for the record, the vast majority of classified kids are in inclusion settings: getting a child classified is not going to send the child off into the Siberia of special education and out of the general education classroom, so teachers aren’t necessarily running to get students classified so they’ll be out of the teachers’ hair. As I tell other parents, “special education isn’t a place; it’s a continuum of services and accommodations.”
I’m not necessarily a fan of NCLB, but the fact is that after it was brought in, a lot of kids who were kept out of general education courses ended up taking those courses and passing the tests. It forced accountability.
Well, if I didn’t HEAR something as a child, my parents promptly made sure I was LISTENING. They weren’t trying to understand my sensibilities or make buddy-buddy with me with the myriad of little things in life children are often not interested in. They owned me and the home I lived in, and I surely was reminded regularly. Parents these days are so used to blaming every single problem they have on something other then themselves, SURELY their child must be a victim of something.
Smarty: “Many parent want their kids to be labeled because it makes them feel less guilty about being rotten parents. Instead of being the parent who didn’t read to their kid and work with them, they get to play the martyr, at least in their own mind.”
James: “Parents these days are so used to blaming every single problem they have on something other then themselves, SURELY their child must be a victim of something.”
So, I quit my part-time job, even though we needed the money, to spend a year working intensively with my oldest Asperger’s kid on his tantrums, only to have all my work erased when we moved. I breastfed my other Aspie despite the fact that he would not nurse unless he was able to pinch me till he left bruises all over my chest and arms. I had to tandem-nurse him and his younger brother, who was allergic to milk and soy so had no source of milk other than mine. When he started having a severe biting problem I read everything I could about biting, and we tried everything including bitter apple spray.
I did this all by myself without blaming anyone else or anything else but myself, to the point where I was getting horribly depressed because I could not stop the problems. When your child is far out of the norm difficult, you start to realize that only someone as grandiose as Smarty or James would think they have the power to make it all perfect.
I read to my kids. I run a science club for them and all their friends so that they can have a hands-on learning experience and get some social interaction. I quit my job again so that I could potty train my younger Aspie, a task that takes much longer and more intense effort than potty training a normal child. I teach my children the self-calming strategies that most kids their ages have already mastered. I work extra hard to earn a little money so that we can afford to pay for all the food that one son’s morning breakfast ritual wastes, the extra clothes to replace those lost to chewing, an entire new set of silverware because one of the family Aspies can’t handle having two different designs in the drawer. I wake at 5 or 6 in the morning and often don’t get to bed until after midnight, and my house is still a crap heap and the sink is still full of dishes and the laundry is in heaps.
But by all means, tell me I’m a lazy, rotten parent who doesn’t want to take responsibility for her own actions.
If you start off with a pretty good school district in a nice area, and you start trying to improve the services that you provided to Special Ed students, you will be rewarded by having your liberality posted on the internet. Soon, your school district will be absolutely swamped with Special Ed students.
School districts often refuse to pay to send children to superior privately run programs even if running their own program costs them more and delivers a lot less. They don’t want to create a precedent of entitlement to private programs because they don’t want to become a “magnet district” for families of low-performing, high-cost children. If you want to keep property values high, the trick is to attract families with high-performing children.
Thank goodness a great retort was posted to that ridiculous article using outdated studies (pre NCLB) which asserts that school districts benefit from having more kids.
The source of the true problem is how education is funded, or not, and what our national priorities have been, especially in the last 8 years. Certainly in the part of the US where I live, the school districts across our state are constantly scrambling to function with their limited budgets. IDEA mandates that all children will get their FAPE, but then the Federal budget routinely underfunds IDEA. SPED funding is constantly pitted against general education funding, which is not only not in the spirit of the law, but creates no incentive for districts to have even more kids protected by IDEA (and thus SPED kids).
It’s criminal that our wealthy country spends it’s bounty on funding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when our domestic needs are woefully underfunded. Imagine the opposite: $4000.00 per second spent on our children! There would be enough for every child with every ability to get what he or she needs.
My concern is with “mainstreaming”. It seems as if the harm to the abled children’s education from the more frequent disruptions, extra attention required by the disabled students, etc. is never considered.
How ironic this topic is for me.
I attended a well-respected High School in a toney Suburb of Massachusetts in the early/mid 70s. I was “diagnosed” (I use the term advisedly) as in the category under discussion.
My “Crime?” While others would take six weeks to read a book, I would knock the damned thing off in a day or so. As this left me with weeks in which with nothing to do (and the “expert” teachers not able to grasp this simple fact), this somehow made me “dysfunctional.” I distinctly remember my Dad confronting the Housemaster and engaging in a major knock-down drag-out fight over the Housemaster’s lackadaisic attitude and fallacious academic engineering concepts. “You will NOT play your little weepy social engineering games on my Son,” he raged, or something to that effect.
Ultimately, my experience there was over, and I went on to serve 6 years in the Army, followed by a very successful extended career in Electronics, Science, and then Administration.
Yet I was not “normal.”
There is a very real tendency for teachers and their superiors to label students as they see fit; economics be damned. That they have no expertise with which to do so is irrelevant to them. On they plunge, making superficial determinations about our children that have sweeping consequences for their futures. They don’t care; they are “experts” at education, after all.
Parents beware.
So how about the children who are different because they are far advanced intellectually? They get disproportionately less spending. Studies have shown that “mainstreaming” the really bright kids causes them to learn way below their potential, and often they develop behavioral problems out of boredom.
Another question… could it be that modern pedagogical techniques, and the modern home environment (with television, video games, computers, etc) leads to more ADD-like behavior and other “abnormalities?” Perhaps the schools need to adapt to the now very different brains that their students have, compared to the past.
For that matter, why do we build schools with no windows? Kids at home have all sorts of stimulation, and then they go to a prison-like classroom and are expected to focus. No wonder they have behavioral issues – they are being tortured.
As for Aspergers, those of us in the engineering profession don’t consider that a disability, but an asset (unless it is too severe)!
An interesting summary – the real question becomes how much more money does a community pay to educate these kids? Do we treat them equal – i.e. that same funding per kid? Do they get 2x everybody else, 4x? If so how is that ‘fair’ to everybody else.
I was struck by one line in the article: “In our town, nearly half of the local school budget is devoted to special education.”
There are quite a few ways to take this. If the author’s cul-de-sac is representative, with 6 out of 13 kids having IEP’s, wouldn’t this just be saying that spending is alloted proportionately? In the same paragraph as the “nearly half” figure, the author notes that 17% of the “special ed” costs are picked up by the Feds. Wouldn’t this end up as a subsidy for classifying kids?
And wouldn’t this amount to an indictment of the “conventional” school program, in that it couldn’t work appropriately with nearly 50% of its students?
I suspect that there’s not enough of the picture being presented in the article to gain a full appreciation of the situation. And, what’s more, I’d suspect that this is true for every piece of writing regarding this subject — people tend to come at it with their own agendas.
So, because most people detect that presentations may be slanted or facts are being omitted before they can detect what the actual point to the presentations or relevent facts are, the public is unlikely to broadly push for reform in this area. The arguments are too complicated, the information too closely held, the equity of the matter too well obscured. One of the benefits of the testing regime from NCLB is that there is a single set of well-defined numbers that can be argued about.
I would only hope that this transparency could spread further through our murky public education system.
I’m a homeschooling veteran–having homeschooled three children from birth, with one child graduated from homeschool, with some college, and a career in law enforcement. We still have a child homeschooling high school, and our youngest is homeschooling with visual, health, speech, and other challenges. All three of my kid’s are wonderful, and fun, with their own unique strengths and challenges. Sure, it hasn’t always been easy, but I don’t think I’ve had it any harder than a lot of parents who tell me they have to fight “the system” tooth and nail to get what their child needs. In addition to my blog, which offers information for homeschooling with little or no resources, I also co-authored two books: “Homeschooling on a Shoestring,” and “Educational Travel on a Shoestring.” Both can be obtained through your local library or bookstore. If you’d like to explore the homeschooling option for special needs, also visit http://www.nathhan.com for more help. Just wanted you guys to know that there are other options for other struggling families. I’ve got to run; as most of you know, a mom’s work is never done!
Thank you for this response article.
As a parent of not one, but two Autistic children I regularly have to fight with our school district to get our children the assistance they need to succeed.
What I think alot of the commenters here don’t realize is just HOW MUCH MORE help a child with even mild to moderate autism spectrum disorder needs JUST to be EVEN with the “normal” children. We are talking Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy, Behavioral Therapy, Psychological Therapy and in-class assistance.
It is a HUGE HUGE HUGE expenditure to support JUST ONE Autistic child, much less a whole district of them. The Federal Government supplies a tiny fraction of the money required, the rest must come from State and Local resources, or the Parent’s own pockets.
And don’t forget how devastating it is for a parent to find out that their child has Autism. It is a massive strain on a family, with negative effects on the marriage relationship. 80% of marriages that produce Autistic children end in divorce within 10 years of an Autism diagnosis.
Parents of Autistic children also find themselves discriminated against in the workplace. Why? Because their kids take so much more time than regular kids. My own wife has already been discriminated against for taking vacation time “too often”, even though she is owed it by her employer. (The local Library, a govt. run institution no less.) Parents of Autistic kids get passed up for promotions because they don’t stay late like other people.
Autistic kids have poor sleeping habits, and often wake up at all hours of the night, waking up everyone else in the house along with them. Parents of autistic kids are almost always constantly exhausted, and this effects their work performance.
In some cases there is direct discrimination from Antique bosses that think if these employee’s kids have autism there must be something wrong with the parents. Thus, parents of Autistic children are often less successful and less able to afford needed services that the govt. does not provide.
Autism isn’t something that you “occasionally” have to deal with when you are the parent of an Autistic child. It is constant, unrelenting, unending. You don’t EVER get a break. All your vacation time is spent taking care of the kids when they aren’t in a school program, you spend ALL your disposable income (Yeah, forget retirement, the kids need Speech Therapy). You spend ALL your free time taking care of them.
And then on top of all that, we have to FIGHT with the local school admins JUST to get our child the services they need. So please, don’t tell me about waste when you are talking about Autistic kids. It’s presumptuous, rude, and completely ignorant.
God Bless Wacky Hermit for sticking it out with her Aspie kids. I know what you are going through sister. You have been given a special charge by God, Keep the faith.
Oh, and guys like Smarty and Steve D? If you EVER say something like your comments here to MY face, don’t expect to be conscious for long, eating solid foods for the next 6 months, or walking or using your arms and hands any time soon afterward. Jerks.
James wrote: Its also a good thing we have wonderful pharmaceutical companies ready to help our children with their special needs.
Nice strawman, James. The most common disability is reading failure (not surprising, as Maryanne Wolf writes).
There is no drug treatment for dyslexia (or reading disability,or specific learning disability-reading — whatever you call it).
Several studies have shown that effective remediation changes the brain.
The hitch? Effective remediation usually involves one-on-one teaching, intensively. It is expensive. And it tends not to happen, leaving the child further and further behind. As a commenter on my blog wrote:
I am an instructional support teacher at two elementary schools. We use response to intervention as a tool for remediation as well as possible spec. education placement. I struggle with what interventions to use with each individual student. I know that to make a real difference, the student needs lots of one on one time, however; my schedule does not permit more than 30- 45 minutes per student. I am supposed to only spend about 20 minutes per student which is just ridiculous.
For more information on reading and reading failure, do visit the Florida Center on Reading Research. I particularly recommend #8, the introduction to dyslexia.
James:
“Well, if I didn’t HEAR something as a child, my parents promptly made sure I was LISTENING”
Yes, because we all know that you can “beat” the autism out of a child. Just like it’s posssible to beat the epilepsy, MS, or Downs out of a child.
You know James, you should just STFU. Your ignorance is astounding.
I have tought. I had to teach chemical equations to a room full of 16-17 year olds, when one of them had a 1.8 reading grade level. It frustrated him, and prevented me from helping the others be all they can be.
Mainstreaming is a socialist idea, and it fails everyone. I knew GREAT special ed teachers who were severely limited by what they could do with the kids because of the mainstreaming requirement. Special ed kids need special ed teachers. Otherwise, you force every teacher to be a special ed teacher, and you have enough teachers who barely know their own subject.
Parents of Autistic children also find themselves discriminated against in the workplace. Why? Because their kids take so much more time than regular kids. My own wife has already been discriminated against for taking vacation time “too often”, even though she is owed it by her employer. (The local Library, a govt. run institution no less.) Parents of Autistic kids get passed up for promotions because they don’t stay late like other people.
It’s discrimination to not promote employees who expect to work fewer hours than other employees?
Steve:
It is when it’s a matter of “requiring” overtime work for advancement. I’m not talking working LESS than the allotted time, I’m talking being unable to put in much or any overtime due to needing to get home to your kids.
This is something that even parents of regular kids have to deal with occasionally. Parents of Autistic children deal with it MUCH more frequently.
Of course, there’s also the fact that many parents of Autism spectrum children have to give up promotions voluntarily because the promotion would entail a move to a community with little or no Special Education programs available. Once you give up a promotion like that, you can often find yourself stigmatized in a company, even if you have perfectly valid reasons for doing it.
I’m not saying we need more nanny-state laws, I’m just saying people need to be more aware, and more sensitive to how difficult it is to parent an Autistic spectrum child. Realize that it is WRONG to “punish” someone by passing them up for promotion or raises just because they are responsible parents.
Ultimately, I think many of the issues surrounding Special Education could be solved with a school voucher program. Obviously, Children diagnosed by Medical professionals as Special Needs would have to get additional money, but as long as it could only be used to pay for school tuition there wouldn’t be a problem.
This would allow enterprising private individuals to set up schools for special needs children where they can get the focused attention and therapy they need. Since it would be based around market principles via a voucher system, there isn’t any worry of a “separate but unequal” type situation.
Of course, I doubt that will happen any time soon in my state (NY), but if it does become available in a state known for good SE programs, I might consider a move.
Great article, Laura.
Smarty, I’m glad my kids weren’t “tought” by the likes of you.
I do not believe it helps any child to be labeled special needs and continue with that label from age 3 until he graduates from high school and in some cases college.
It is true that some children are labeled as special needs when they don’t perform academically in school, or are disruptive in class or are a handful at 3 years old.
My son has a learning disability but his grades are high enough that he does not qualify as special needs.
So only children who get bad grades and have a disability are special needs except in cases of hearing, speech or physical impairment.
The end result whether you like it or not is the child eventually has a specially trained minder who reads every test, writes what the child says down on the test and even “helps” the child get the question when it appears to be too hard. I know this is true because my district has training sessions for volunteers test scibes and readers before every standard testing round for all grade levels including high school.
This service is available until the child graduates from high school. Then what? If the child cannot read, write, think or behave in an acceptable manner — Where will they work? Are we moving towards an army of minders to go to work with these kids to help them read, write and think at work? This is already true for mentally disabled people. They are called job coaches.
This entitlement bus has to have goals.
If a child is identified in elementary school or before, there should be a point of no more extra help by sixth or seventh grade or at some point before high school. Even a hearing impaired child needs to get along in the world.
Otherwise the child learns helplessness, the parent learns entitlement and no one learns to read, write, think and independence.
To Another View: your post makes me cringe. I have a high schooler who receives special education services. She is also a member of Honor Society and finished middle school with a 3.9 GPA, and an A in Algebra I Honors, a high school course. She is expected to master the same work and do the same tests as everyone else. She sometimes needs things rephrased before she “gets it,” but once she gets it, it’s in there forever, and she’s at the top of her class. Hopefully some employer will appreciate that her learning curve may be a bit longer, but once she learns something, she’s not only an expert at it, but has a gift of being able to teach it to others.
As far as Job Coaches, a good job coach is not “thinking” for a disabled person, but is determining what a disabled person is able to do well, so that he can be an asset in the workforce. Employing the disabled is not a handout – it’s finding a good match for a job.
To the socialist who went on a rant about the war:
If spending money solved problems, then the Washington DC schools would be the best in the nation, AIDS would be cured, there would be no more poverty, and crooked politicians would be satisfied with their bank accounts and retired.
But it isn’t the cure.
And wearyman, when people object to going to work every day to provide 10x for each of your kids what their one kid need, you think threats of violence are OK? You obviously have a chip on your shoulder, and the socialists perception of who is entitled to what.
It seems to me that some of the commenters have a somewhat outdated perspective on special services, in terms of both classification and education. Before we learned that our son had special needs, I might have held the same views.
BACKGROUND
When our son was in (private) preschool a heads-up teacher thought she saw something and suggested that we have him tested. Eventually, the docs determined that he had ADD and some processing and motor issues. It still wasn’t easy to get him classified, because our district is small and they give priority to kids who are severely disabled or (ironically) who have behavior problems. However, our district did find him a spot and he was getting help by the middle of his Kindergarten year. For first and second grades he was pulled out for resource room instruction (1-on-1), OT and speech. He also has (private) after-school tutoring twice a week. Next year he will be in a regular third grade class, with special ed teachers coming into the classroom for enrichment.
COMMENTS
1. I always cringed at the notion of “accommodation” – lowering the bar so the kid “won’t feel like a failure.” However, I don’t think it’s used that much anymore. The school psych mentioned it and both his teachers and we were vehemently opposed (our son’s neurologist thinks it’s BS, too). Teachers seem to have a good handle on how to manage emotions in the classroom, and I don’t think lowering the bar is that common, at least in elementary school.
2. Our son works hard. To succeed academically he will have to work harder than anyone else. We know it, he knows it, his teachers know it. Two tutoring sessions plus at least an hour of homework a day – even over the summer. If anyone thinks this is gaming the system I’d like to know what I’m missing.
3. Teachers like to have the kids in the regular classroom as much as possible, largely for social reasons. Resource room kids need to gain experience working in groups not because they are so accustomed to working one on one. They aren’t mainstreaming the kids to socially promote them.
4. Both my son and his twin sister were in second grade classes of about 20 kids. About 4-5 in each class have some special needs, and maybe 1-2 are pulled out. More experienced teachers tend to get the kids who need extra attention. 50% sounds high.
I have friends that are constantly battling their district; we have been very fortunate in our district’s dealings with us and providing help for our son. Our situation may or may not be typical, but I can say that if the special ed cliche of “separate ‘em, promote ‘em and push ‘em out the door” was ever true, it is not true in our district and I doubt it is common anywhere else.
Ronbo:
“Accommodations” do not lower the bar – accommodations level the playing field. An accommodation would be a note-taker for a child with cerebral palsy, extra time on a test for a child who processes slowly, visual aids for a visual learner, etc.
“Modifications” are changes in the curriculum. You might consider that “lowering the bar,” but in reality it has opened opportunity. In the past, a child who could not master the curriculum would be denied the curriculum – maybe put into a “life skills” class instead. Now they are allowed to be exposed to the general ed curriculum with modifications for their individual abilities.
For example, take the parts and functions of the cell. An accommodation would be to use manipulatives to build a cell, instead of just a picture. A modification would be learning what a cell does without being able to identify which part does what – so the child who cannot master which part of the cell does what still has the opportunity to learn what cells does, or if the child’s ability is more basic, perhaps that all living things are made up of cells.
Accomodations take time, money and energy from other students. It can mean having tests in different formats, like verbal, which could be seen as unfair to other kids. It CAN mean being tested on less content than their peers. Usually, changes in content are modifications, and that is certainly lowering the bar. You can only go so far with modifications.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on life skills. A retarded person needs to know about clock reading, responsibility, how to add and subtract, and how to read a bus schedule more than he needs the sesame street version of mitosis.
You can play liberal word games all day long, but special ed in America means putting kids into classes that they cannot handle, throwing aids at them, extra teacher time that detracts from the rest, and often separate lesson plans. Frustrate them with material over their heads, and end up having their peers resent them, or just get tired of them.
And yes, social promotion is used constantly with kids, regardless of special ed status, although that helps push it. Get someone to put into their IEP that it would be helpful for the child to stay with their peer group, and presto, instant social promotion, regardless of teacher input.
We live in a very small, high performance district in terms of state wide testing.
My wife teaches kids in a neighboring low income, low performing district. She teaches kids that are identified as being well under grade level in reading and writing. They are not identified as special needs per se. They spend most the day in their regular classroom. These are kids the district is trying to get up to grade level and depend on grants for paying people like my wife (non union, 1/5 of the all-in cost of tenured teachers.) No grant, no program. If there were magic funding for just designating kids ADD or something, the schools would be milking it. It isn’t happening and the author’s explanation makes some sense.
My wife has taught kids with much more severe, categorized disabilities in more affluent districts. She quit doing this due to the constant conflict between parents pushing for “mainstreaming” in impossible situations that left entire classrooms of kids falling behind or being disrupted. The majority of funding for formally categorized disabilities was provided by the district so the financial pressure was to mainstream if possible.
I think some of the confusion about “incentives” for designation of some sort comes from anecdotal evidence many people come across or hear from their kids and other parents. In our district, the number of kids that are allowed to have minders and special testing accommodation has exploded in the past several years. If there is evidence of true need, no case has been presented and instead there is an assumption that there is a good deal of abuse originating with parents pushing for unwarranted help for their children. Unless a district addresses situations like this with facts and more open discussion, the suspicions grow and rumors spread.
Smarty, you’re confusing accommodations and modifications – but whatever… so it costs more to educate a child with special needs – using that argument, should the family with six kids in public school pay more? Taxes are not paid to get back exactly what you put in – they’re for the common good. It’s beneficial to society for everyone to be educated to the best of their abilities, so they can be tax-paying citizens rather than a tax drain. Money spent on special education is one of the best investments we can make, not only from a moral point of view but from a financial point of view.
There’s nothing wrong with life-skills curriculum when it’s appropriate, but not because we can’t bother to fully educate everyone.
As far as the “everyone else” you talk about – 1/6 of our children are in special education – that would be a huge portion to leave behind.
If 1/6 of US kids are truely “special needs”, then we may as well sterilize ourselves and let our society end. But we aren’t 1/6 special needs. We have excuse making, we have pop psychology, we have some folks chasing money.
In some districts, they call juvinile delinquency special needs.
The not-special are getting tired of paying the price for the “special” in all aspects of life. From special ed to affirmative action to minority criminality to illegal aliens. When the heck are we paying enough of a penalty for being normal?
Gee – I feel that way about the so-called “normal” folks. My daughter’s civics special ed teacher spent half her time in the hall with the so-called “normal” kids who couldn’t be bothered to do their homework.
If 1/6 special ed alarms you, it should – and eventually it will affect you. Sterilization won’t help – but a smarter medical community might. Since we’ve “improved” medication so much with a vaccine for everything, our children have become autistic, diabetic and asthmatic. Our children have more chronic disorders than any other generation.
If you don’t want your government to pay for all this, demand they get some answers.
James:
Well, if I didn’t HEAR something as a child, my parents promptly made sure I was LISTENING. They weren’t trying to understand my sensibilities or make buddy-buddy with me with the myriad of little things in life children are often not interested in. They owned me and the home I lived in, and I surely was reminded regularly. Parents these days are so used to blaming every single problem they have on something other then themselves, SURELY their child must be a victim of something.
Jeez! Aren’t you angry, James! Here, have a hug. Have a Bex and a good lie down. Nothing wrong with you, eh?
Did that little outburst make you feel better?!
Jay Greene and I, the authors of the original article, have offered our response here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/yes-virginia-there-is-a-special-ed-bounty/
Many thanks to PJM for giving us the opportunity to post a full-length response, since the issues here deserve a serious discussion.
I have heard the argument that schools label children to receive federal funds and it’s not a good argument. The funds the schools receive does not usually cover special education costs. Every district I’ve seen has been trying to lower the percentage of special education children.