Feb 14, 2008 11:15 AM
When you’re obsessed with test scores because you’ve backed yourself into a corner and set up that quite imperfect measure as the only way to judge your competence in running the school system, it is understandable that you might wish that students with learning disabilities would just, well, disappear. After all, they tend to lower those super-important test scores, they require special attention and services that have nothing to do with test scores and, in general, they create complications for you when all you want to do is mechanize and routinize this unruly business of running a school system.
So it is probably not with any particular malice that the Department of Education continues to leave special needs kids behind these days, making them invisible. It’s the natural and foreseeable consequence of a system that is singularly focused on standardized test scores.
We have documented in the past how students with learning disabilities are consistently being shortchanged when schools do not provide the services to which they are entitled — and which are mandated by their IEPs. We have documented how students with learning disabilities are disproportionately in large overcrowded high schools and not in the new wave of small schools. And now we find that in its newest adventure, giving letter grades to schools, the DOE consistently shows a bias against schools with the most fragile students.
It turns out that the schools the DOE decided to give As to had an average special ed enrollment of 8 percent while schools deemed to be Ds or Fs had almost double the percentage of special ed students, 15.5 percent.
Worse, when you analyze the special ed figures to break out the students in the most restrictive environments — that is, the students with the most severe learning disabilities — it turns out that high schools receiving Fs had nearly four-and-a-half times the number of these students than high schools receiving As, and high schools receiving Ds had more than three-and-a-half times as many of these students as the high schools receiving As.
These figures, by the way, are from the DOE’s own statistics. You can see a school-by-school breakdown and a discussion of the problem by UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Leo Casey on the UFT blog Edwize (www.edwize.org).
While this was going on, teachers at the new Arab-themed Kalil Gabril International Academy charged that special ed students there had not received any of their mandated services, according to a report in the New York Post. The school has 10 special ed students but not a single special ed teacher six months into the school year. DOE officials were reported as saying they are working hard to find a special ed teacher.
Meanwhile, the Citywide Council on High Schools, which has filed a discrimination complaint against the DOE with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, sent a follow-up letter on Jan. 30 citing more problems. The group has charged that the DOE has a policy of illegal discrimination toward disabled students and those with limited proficiency in English in admitting them to small high schools. Citing a special issue of the journal City Limits, CCHS says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and his director for small schools, Garth Harries, make no apologies for their policy. The letter quotes Klein as saying, “A school with five teachers … can be destabilized if you require special education. You have to build capacity first, build a strong environment and culture, then send in the challenged kids.”
Perhaps one could give them the benefit of the doubt, except the Department of Education refuses to give the schools, and the special needs students they serve, that same benefit. Running a school system must be more than having a checklist to justify “reforms.” The DOE must be more concerned about serving the most fragile children of the city instead of finding convoluted ways to justify irrational policies.