A remarkable new data engine and provocative policy paper from the Center on Reinventing Public Education should serve to refocus the attention of policymakers and ed-reformers on the many shortcomings of special education as it has evolved over the past half-century. Yes indeed, it’s been 50 years since President Ford reluctantly signed what is now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Back then, 8 percent of U.S. school kids were identified as “handicapped.” Today it’s 15 percent nationally, though the remarkable state-to-state variability is one of the many virtues of CRPE’s new data tool. By all means check it out, as it shows changes over time by disability category and by state, as well as for the country as a whole.
As the policy paper—by Ashley Jochim and Alexander Kurz—explains, the swelling of SpEd rolls can be traced to actions by Congress and the courts to widen eligibility, notably the statutory inclusion of “learning disabilities,” autism, and “other health impairments” (such as ADHD), all in “the wake of protracted advocacy campaigns about students’ unmet needs for support.”
As the authors also note, the current federal special-ed structure rests on two key elements. First is the existence of a government mandated right to “free, appropriate public education,” with “appropriate” expanded over time to mean assured access to a host of services and accommodations not ordinarily available to other students. And, second, exactly that “exclusionary foundation,” such that (for example), “Students whose reading struggles are associated with dyslexia are ‘in,’ whereas those whose struggles are rooted in poverty, language, or poor instruction are ‘out.’”
This structure has given rise to all manner of problems, including vast amounts of litigation, much bureaucracy, a focus on compliance rather than achievement or accountability, endless lobbying, and high costs, only a fraction of which is covered by federal funding, even though this is the second largest federal K–12 program.
These problems have been recognized for ages. Back in 2001, we at Fordham teamed up with the Progressive Policy Institute to issue a comprehensive repair manual, titled Rethinking Special Education for a New Century. We wrote then that:
Over the past 25 years, K–12 education in the United States has undergone a profound paradigm shift, from access-and-services to results-and-accountability. During the most recent decade, this change has been especially dramatic. Special education simply hasn’t kept up. It’s still an access-and-services program enveloped by a civil rights orientation. It still has more to do with combating discrimination than teaching children what they need to learn.
We itemized eight major “policy failures” and recommended a total overhaul resting on six principles:
1. Make the IDEA standards- and performance-based wherever possible, using Section 504 as the civil rights underpinning of special education but viewing the IDEA as a bona fide education program that is judged by its results.
2. Streamline the number of special education categories into a very few broad groupings, distinguished by whether the basic conditions they address are primarily in need of prevention or intervention, remediation or accommodation, or some combination thereof.
3. Focus on prevention and early intervention wherever possible, using research-based practices.
4. Encourage flexibility, innovation, and choices, allowing schools to work with students and parents to customize services and placements to meet varying needs, and foster the integration of special education into the school’s larger mission and program, while giving parents sound options for their children’s education.
5. Provide adequate funding to ensure the program’s success, assigning to Washington full responsibility for funding the education of the country’s growing population of severely disabled students.
6. End double standards wherever possible.
Perhaps I don’t need to note that not much of this happened. When IDEA was reauthorized in 2004—the last time Congress has touched it—some useful changes were made but nothing like a full makeover. And in the two decades since, the policy failures have mostly worsened, the costs have risen, lawyers and lobbyists have grown wealthy, the SpEd rolls have ballooned—and youngsters on those rolls are still not learning nearly as much as they’re capable of.
On the plus side, NCLB identified students with disabilities as a category whose achievement needed to be tracked at the school level and dinged schools that did poorly in this realm. In the early years, this accountability system plus disaggregated results yielded some gains for SpEd students. While it lasted, the Reading First program also produced improvements in the early reading abilities of some disabled youngsters.
The biggest reform of the past quarter century that bears directly on children with disabilities, however, is that school choice has created escape mechanisms for many families, enabling them to exit the bureaucratic/legalistic precincts of traditional public schooling into private-sector alternatives. This began in a big way with Florida’s creation of the McKay Scholarship Program—piloted in Sarasota in 1999 and now part of the Sunshine State’s overarching “Family Empowerment Scholarship Program.” Today, some 20 private-school scholarship programs scattered across 14 states are designed for students with “special needs.”
Choice continues to grow, but NCLB and Reading First are both history. Congress has avoided going back to fix IDEA and no White House has pressed them to. Much of the rest of the ed-reform movement of the past quarter century seems to have bypassed special education, and today, the federal SpEd edifice is something of a sacred cow or—viewed from the other direction—“third rail” issue that nobody in high office is brave enough to tackle.
Kudos to CRPE for plunging back in. The problem—at least for me—is that the principal reform the new policy brief proposes is to give millions more kids a federally guaranteed right to the education they need. Jochim and Kurz put it this way:
A new, needs-based entitlement is the linchpin of any effort to fix today’s system of general and special education. It would establish reliable criteria (e.g., students identified at-risk for low achievement in reading or math) for identifying educationally disadvantaged students and a legal mandate to provide those students with the additional instruction and support they need to succeed in school.
Think about it. Students would still have to be “identified.” The “criteria” for doing so could be anything and everything—and we can be certain that all imaginable interest groups would do their best to qualify, from gifted students to left-handed students to trans students to artistic students to kids with unusual athletic skills or career aspirations. Meanwhile, others would continue to be left out of this “legal mandate,” thus perpetuating the “exclusionary foundation” that the authors see as the source of today’s SpEd woes.
I do not understand how this proposed remedy solves the problem. It appears to worsen it, even as the authors launch the politically fraught idea of yet more federal “rights” atop a K–12 system that is grounded in state constitutions, mandates and budgets. Is it really a good idea at this moment in time to create a “needs-based entitlement” and to spur vastly more litigation by “providing parents, the courts, and state policymakers a legal basis for adjudicating claims of inadequacy”?
Somehow, I don’t think so.
