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.
