The Gadfly briefly addressed this issue a few weeks ago and the editors at Newsday have taken it up in another form on their blog, Viewsday (ha ha...). New York State has been engaged in a heated debate over special education, specifically whether more or all students should be mainstreamed. More recently, and this is what the Newsday editors were really concerned with, the discussion has turned to what to call diplomas granted under Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Should they really be called a "diploma" if they're not worth the same as a regular high school degree? This may not be a matter of semantics.
Employers and universities should know what kind of course work stands behind that piece of paper. While NCLB has attempted to address the state-to-state and school-to-school discrepancies, we're a long way from national standards. Labeling IEP degrees "IEP certificates" rather than "IEP diplomas" could have a few benefits; I'll focus on two. First, many too many students wind up in special education because teachers want them out of their mainstream classrooms for reasons other than their physical or learning disability. Perhaps they're disruptive, have social adjustment issues, or are bringing issues from home into the classroom. This is an incredibly harmful and lazy practice.
Second, this distinction may make parents more informed about what their children's degrees mean when they are choosing main or special education classrooms. Since an IEP diploma is not accepted by the military or most colleges, parents may be unwittingly allowing their children to graduate with a largely worthless piece of paper. While national standards may be many years off, we can at least give legitimate and standardized value to high school diplomas coming from different academic tracks and parents and employers more information about what kind of education their children and employees are receiving.
