And it doesn't even work - Special Ed
While I was running an educational consulting business for the New Yok State School Boards Association (NYSSBA), my partner, Charles Winters, PhD., and I carefully reviewed the academic performance data for New York State’s 700-plus school districts. My goal was to find out what worked to improve test scores and save school district money.
What I found out was what Mr. Winters had already discovered: “I can’t tell you what did work, but I can tell you what didn’t work,” he said.
When all was said and done, Mr. Winters concluded that 85 percent of schools who spent more on special education did worse academically than similar schools. The other 15 percent showed no improvement.
As the Business Official for the Newburgh Enlarged City School District and consultant for the New York State Association of Small City School Districts, Mr. Winters compiled extensive data sets on student outcomes, demographics, local costs and state support. He developed a system of measurement based on three criteria: school lunch eligibility, U.S. Census data on poverty and income data based on state income tax filings.
He found the combination of all three that identified the best predictor of student performance on state tests and used the “scatterplot” graph, an effective visual for displaying multivariable data, to illustrate his findings.
Mr. Winters’ school district comparison data became a key element in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and a companion lawsuit filed by several small cities in New York State that ended with a plan to redistribute $5.5 billion in new aid to school districts in the state with the primary focus on those serving the largest poverty populations. Like many states, New York State underfunded poverty students’ education, and this disparity exacerbated the difficulties children from poverty have in producing acceptable results on standardized tests. (The plan won court approval but was never carried out.)
Using the system of measurement based on three criteria: school lunch eligibility, U.S. Census data on poverty and income data based on state income tax filings, Mr. Winters found that fourth grade reading scores were lower in schools that spent more on special education.
When all was said and done, Mr. Winters concluded that 85 percent of schools who spent more on special education did worse academically than similar schools. The other 15 percent showed no improvement.
No one expects students to go without necessary services, but the public education system is buckling under the weight of a law without limits. Granting every special education student’s parental requests means shortchanging other students who need the dollars or the specific personnel to meet competing goals.
There are ways to make Special Education services more affordable.
Take transportation, for example. Consider consolidating Special Education bus services, sharing aides, meeting with the special education teacher a half hour per day instead of one hour per day and scheduling occupational therapy and physical therapy once a week instead of twice a week.
The total extra cost to the school district beyond that of a regular education student would drop to less than $55,000 per year instead of the 2015 estimate of $127,000.
And the student’s educational achievement would not be impacted by these changes. The student would still be receiving an education in a regular education classroom with their peers. And that’s what we want, and the law requires – the least restrictive environment.
Many people including taxpayers, parents, teachers and even administrators misunderstand the funding arrangements for special education and assume that special state aid, federal aid and school transportation aid channeled through the states and their education departments pay for special education students’ extra costs. In the cited example, extra services cost $127,000 per year and the extra state and federal aid that comes to the school district to support the extra services in New York State in 2015 would be about $30,000-$45,000 maximum from all categories. The rest of the extra costs are paid by local taxpayers.
Adding insult to injury: school districts receiving federal money (that means virtually every public school district in the country) must precisely follow elaborate rules regarding the education services provided to its disabled students.
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Each state also has its own complicated rules to carry out the IDEA with their state education department regulations and a cadre of “special education” bureaucrats who oversee school district implementation of these rules. Typically, these bureaucrats respond to parental and teacher complaints with audits of school districts’ special education procedures and provide legal pronouncements from lawyers that work exclusively at taxpayer expense to interpret and implement these rules. More legal fees.
A cottage industry
The rules and costs associated with special education have prompted it to become an industry unto itself. Shortly after the initiation of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), as principals and teachers struggled to deal with severely disabled children, they found like-minded colleagues in other school districts and rented space together to serve the same type of special education students. These special schools also created a system of support services, such as occupational therapy, physical therapy, and social worker or school psychologist counseling for disabled students.
Some of these special schools were operated privately and others were operated by consortiums of public schools. Before long, speech therapy providers (usually working with preschool children who are slow to develop oral speaking skills) were contacting parents of potential clients, evaluating preschool children and selling their services directly to parents who then requested payment for the evaluations and services from the local county or school district. And most of us who have had children of our own at home or worked with them in schools know many children have minor speech problems from ages three to eight and they gradually disappear without a speech therapist’s intervention.
But again…once the ball is rolling.
Committees on Special Education rely on evaluations by professional speech pathologists to approve or deny services, and the providers who do the evaluations see potential clients.
Again, the special education committee can’t say “no” to parent requests, especially when a licensed provider says services are needed, and requesting new expensive evaluations by an independent professional is never popular with parents.
My superintendent’s directive to me, when I was a principal, was to give parents whatever they wanted to limit friction and avoid the possibility of expensive legal battles and bad public relations for the district with local press and with the state’s education department.[i] Once one child has his own one-on-one aide, every parent of a special education student expects their child will have a one-on-one aide.
In short order the special education budget has grown to the point it is squeezing out the resources needed by the students who need extra challenges and by the students who need extra help but lack the special education label.[ii]
(Excerpt from The Politics of Education K-12 called "Institutionalizing low expectations" will be published on 10/29/24.)
[i] Allan G. Osborne Jr., Ed. D., Charles J. Russo, J.D., Ed. D., “Attorney Fees, School Boards, and Special Education,” School Business Affairs, June 2010, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ904679.pdf
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[ii] Gordon Donaldson, “Maine Schools in Focus: The Big Squeeze — Paying for Special Education Services,” UMaine News, February 18, 2016, https://umaine.edu/edhd/2016/02/18/maine-schools-in-focus-the-big-squeeze-paying-for-special-education-services/
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