Insight
Hard times and special education
Jan 22, 2009 5:33 PM
Supporting the most vulnerable of the vulnerable
If you can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members, then one way to judge a school system is by how it treats its special education students. These are the children who are most fragile physically or emotionally, and they are the most challenging — and expensive — to educate.
Over the last five years, it’s fair to say the Department of Education comes off more like an indifferent monarchy than an enlightened democracy in the realm of special ed, leaving vulnerable students to sink or swim, depending on how loudly their parents or teachers can scream.
The department doesn’t see it that way, of course. “Through our Children First reforms, we have placed unprecedented focus on students with disabilities,” DOE writes on its special education Web site.
But judging from meetings, appeals, blogs and reports, parents and teachers have grown increasingly frustrated in the years since Children First began. They say more learning-disabled and emotionally disabled students have gone without services, and their teachers have gone without mandated resources.
“Most of my kids are supposed to be in a 15:1:1 environment (no more than 15 students, one teacher, and one paraprofessional). But by the second week of school, 12 kids turned into 17 and that second ‘:1’ was nowhere to be found,” wrote “Sue Denim,” pseudonym of a second-year special ed teacher, in a late October blog. “I need another adult in the room. If I talk to my principal, I get the budget speech — the money’s not there.”
Claims vs. results
The DOE boasts, “The number of students with disabilities in collaborative team teaching classes, an inclusive setting, has more than doubled since the mayor and the chancellor announced reforms to special education in Spring 2003, and standardized test scores for students with disabilities have improved annually.”
But teachers say CTT classrooms, especially in the middle and high schools, have become dumping grounds for students who should be in self-contained or resource room settings, making the classes harder to manage and compromising instruction.
“The CTT criteria are vague,” UFT Vice President for Special Education Carmen Alvarez said. “There are no real criteria, especially in the small schools.”
And those test scores? They have gone up but just in tandem with the scores of other students, so the gap between general ed and special ed performance remains unchanged.
More disturbing are the graduation rates. In 2007, New York City graduated just 20 percent of its students with disabilities after four years and only 24 percent after five years. Even depressed “Big 4” upstate cities do better. And statewide, 39 percent of special ed students graduate in four years and 47 percent after five years, twice the city rate.
What is the real track record?
- In April 2003, at the start of Children First, the chancellor consolidated district-based Committees on Special Education into the new administrative regions and eliminated nearly 1,000 school-based education evaluator positions. The rather thin rationale was to streamline administration and shift more teachers to classrooms. But with schools’ evaluation and case-management capacity gone, there was a 35 percent drop in referrals and a 36 percent decline in evaluations the next year, according to a report by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. Soon the newspapers were buzzing with stories of huge backlogs of students awaiting services.
- At the same time, the DOE was creating hundreds of small high schools — the centerpieces of its high school reforms — and those schools were specifically exempted from accepting special education students. A 2006 report by Parents for Inclusive Education found there was little information or help with placements of any kind for special needs high school students.
- The problems persisted. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, in a June 2008 report, found that more than half of all students receiving new placements in special ed during the 2006-07 school year waited longer than the federally mandated 60 school days. Meanwhile, the number of unfilled recommendations for “related services,” such as speech or physical therapy, more than doubled, from 28,624 in June 2003 to 64,897 in June 2007. Delays remained “at historically high levels,” the comptroller wrote.
- That same month, Public Advocate Gotbaum surveyed school psychologists, who took over the responsibilities of education evaluators. She found the vast majority (94 percent) spend more time on paperwork than on serving students and families; more than 71 percent said the individual education plans they draft for special ed students are less effective because they do not have time to consult with the children’s teachers or parents.
- Time has not improved the picture. This fall, a cost-cutting move by the DOE resulted in 200 fewer special education buses and many students missed classes or services. Last month, Chancellor Joel Klein admitted to the Panel for Education Policy that nearly one-quarter of special ed students aren’t getting their occupational therapy services, and one-sixth of those mandated for physical therapy aren’t getting that service. (The DOE was doing much better with speech therapy and counseling.)
“One more round of deregulation, especially as this budget crisis escalates, will push it over the edge,” warned Alvarez. “This is really a lost generation of kids.”
A structural fault?
What’s at the bottom of this situation? While federal law requires that special-needs children get appropriate services, the administration and oversight of special education rests with the local school system. In the case of New York City, the district management philosophy seems to be on a collision course with the needs of special education students.
The practical result of principal “empowerment” — the DOE’s management system — is that day-to-day administration and oversight of special education in the schools falls entirely to principals.
Many principals know little about special education. Yet under the new regime they are “empowered” to change student IEPs, allocate money (or not) for related services, close or create classrooms sometimes disregarding mandated service levels, and evaluate the psychologists who are saddled with all the compliance paperwork. The remote Integrated Service Centers provide little in the way of on-the-ground assistance or authority.
A system whose watchword is “accountability” now fails to provide any where special education is concerned. “There’s no sheriff in town,” as Alvarez says. Dismantling the bureaucratic apparatus of special education and replacing it with airy concepts of empowerment and responsibility has left vulnerable kids alone in the deep end.
Late last spring, the Council of the Great City Schools, in a report prepared for the DOE, found the lack of accountability particularly troubling in District 75, which serves 13 percent of the city’s most impaired special-needs students.
“[Our] team could not find anything in the accountability system pertaining to incentives or sanctions for the achievement of students with disabilities,” the Council wrote. “This omission extended to the lack of extra credit in the accountability system for the use of differentiated instruction, collaborative team teaching and other inclusive models of instruction, positive behavior interventions and supports, and response to intervention practices with research-based interventions for students falling behind their peers, progress monitoring, and data-driven decision-making.”
As we are learning, “sink or swim” is not an effective way to run an economy, or a country. It’s certainly no way to run a school system.
