I’ve been a Speech Pathologist working in the public schools for the last twenty-five years. I’ve worked in two states, three different school districts and eight different schools. I’ve been in the classrooms of more than a hundred teachers at this point in my career. I’ve participated in thousands of multidisciplinary evaluations. I’ve never met or interacted with anyone who gave a rip about the financial ‘incentive’ to diagnose or qualify kids. By and large teachers either want to help a child, or they want help with a child. Statistics tell a piece of a story, but it is certainly not the whole story. Just because there appears to be a causal relationship between events doesn’t make it so. Any student of statistics knows that they can be manipulated to show whatever you want. I will concede that “personal” experience by anyone–parent or special educator–gives limited information from which to extrapolate a conclusion. However, I’d be more convinced by your article if you had some actual first hand evidence of a special education team making a decision motivated by a financial benefit for their school.
And by the way, knocking McKenna for using emotion and non-empirical evidence in her article while saying things like, I paraphrase; misidentification of LD students is causing substantial resentment from parents who think their child is being cheated out of resources which will ultimately result in a backlash against funding and services to all special education students, is rather hypocritical.
