Nov 3, 2005 11:03 AM
For years, Carmen Alvarez felt she was the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness.
Although the old Board of Education had long fumbled special education, the UFT vice president for special education knew that the harm being done to children had worsened exponentially since the Bloomberg-Klein reorganization. But except for parents of special education students, a few elected officials and other advocates for the handicapped, the audience of those in the know was small.
That’s changing, now that Alvarez can cite backing from a welcome if unlikely source: the city’s own special education report.
While written in leaden bureaucratese, the report’s narrative is as hair-raising as an Anne Rice novel. Its conclusions, Alvarez says, are a mandate for change in how the city’s 154,000 special education children get served.
Alvarez says the union will continue to push to get those changes made. But, she says, that can’t happen until the department opens its decision-making process to parents, teachers and other concerned citizens. The DOE must also make all the relevant data available to these stakeholders so they can participate with full knowledge of what’s been tried, what’s worked and what’s failed. And she called on the DOE to start the process immediately.
That hefty, 116-page report, the “Comprehensive Management Review and Evaluation of Special Education,” is based on an in-house investigation commissioned by the Department of Education itself. Released publicly on Sept. 23, and named the Hehir report after its panel chair, Dr. Thomas Hehir of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the study asks whether the DOE actually has a management structure in place — one capable of implementing the requirements of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Its conclusion: it doesn’t.
The report said the reorganization resulted only in a new bureaucracy “with confusing roles and responsibilities and limited support for principals.” It described “a bottleneck of resources at the regional level” and no movement to “implement change at the school level.”
A compelling Oct. 19 New York Times article said the report painted how “a dysfunctional bureaucracy and unreliable data impact children.” Of 14 findings, nine are negative. The five positive findings include saluting the commitment of teachers and specialists to their work and their students.
Alvarez called the report “devastating, required reading, a scathing indictment of the department’s botched implementation of the so-called ‘reforms’ initiated following reorganization two-and-one-half years ago,” and critical material for parents and the UFT in building a “real agenda” for special education reform.
Of the four areas the Bloomberg-Klein reforms sought to impact — improving instruction for special needs children; holding schools and principals accountable for improvements in special education; providing services and incentives for better school performance; and streamlining the special education evaluation process — the report validates the same criticisms the union has reached and conveyed to the DOE.
“If the measure of success is the number of students who remain in school and graduate with ‘real’ diplomas, not the incremental gains in elementary-level assessments, then the city failed again,” Alvarez told an Oct. 7 City Council hearing.
The Hehir report cites 45 percent of students with disabilities dropping out of school; of those who remain, just 28 percent receive a Regents or local diploma. This means that only 15 percent of city students with disabilities remain in school and graduate with a workforce-appropriate credential.
Alvarez likens it to New Orleans-Katrina victims: the politically and economically disadvantaged, and minority families left to fend for themselves.
“Just as FEMA had no vision and no program for saving the poor, it is clear that the DOE has no vision and no program for how to close the learning gap and increase the graduation rate for these young people,” Alvarez said.
“The department has provided little to no support for our members in this critical area. Instead, the department’s response has been to ‘dump’ students with disabilities in general education classes with limited special education support or in collaborative team-teaching classes with teachers who have no preparation or experience with this model.”
There is more. The Hehir Report faults Chancellor Joel Klein for not following through on his own commitments. While instructional support specialists were hired, the study found few actually going into the classroom to model effective instruction or to assist teachers in accommodating a broader range of learning needs. Instead, they are “putting out fires,” addressing compliance issues or burdened with caseloads as large as 14 schools each.
Many schools don’t offer the programs and services that would address the needs of students with learning and emotional disabilities, and it treats placement as the availability of seats rather than appropriate services and environments.
“The elimination of special education supervisors and educational evaluators, lack of a standard operating procedures manual, failure to effectively prepare and support school principals in assuming responsibility for special education resulted in the 2003-04 school year being a ‘lost year’ for students with disabilities and principals taking less owner ship of the education of students with disabilities, particularly at the high school level,” she told the Council.
She called the present structure “chaotic.”
Another ball indecorously dropped was the failure to make delivery of services transparent.
While the city said it initiated benchmarks, improvement plans, and technical assistance for schools, Alvarez said none of these could be independently verified. “The only information that the department will share is the resolution of complaints brought to its attention by my office. With few limited exceptions, the department refuses to acknowledge, no less address, systemic issues, nor will it share data or the results of school performance evaluations.”
As to the chancellor’s goal of “streamlining the evaluation process,” Alvarez said she’s still waiting for the slimming. What the DOE did do — in eliminating district-level reviews, conducting and finalizing all evaluations at the school level, axing the education evaluator position and consolidating 37 district-level committees on special education into 10 regional CSEs with more limited responsibilities — only resulted in expanding the school psychologist’s job. Besides conducting psychological assessments, Alvarez contends that the psychologist now must conduct academic assessments and case management.
That’s another blunder, said Alvarez, where instead of what IDEA envisioned, “a multi-disciplinary process in which children are assessed in all areas of suspected disability, the assessment process under the chancellor became a one-man show. His were efficiency moves, pure and simple. They were not designed to improve the assessment process, the quality of student IEPs, nor do they provide much benefit to parents.”
For Alvarez, the bottom line of the Hehir report is that the so-called “reforms” failed. She wants a “real agenda” for special education reform, including:
With the Hehir report as exhibit A, Alvarez thinks that agenda is doable.
In response to the Hehir report, city officials pledged to the City Council they would adjust the regional bureaucracy, spend $30 million on a new special ed computer system and $8 million to train teachers, hire more lawyers to eliminate a back-up in parental challenges and fine-tune the computer system to better track cases, The New York Times reported.
“Eight million dollars sounds like a lot of money for professional development,” Alvarez said, “but it is a drop in the bucket when measured against the needs identified in the report. And the $30 million for computer system improvements is more money for bean counting with few tangible benefits for members or kids.”
Concluded Alvarez: “If the chancellor was really interested in doing the right thing for kids, he would have properly implemented collaborative team teaching. The fact that the department continues to ignore IEP mandates, an arbitrator’s award and a court order suggests that it will be more smoke and mirrors and deceptive sound bites for the press until we join with parents and advocates to hold him accountable for the failure of his special education ‘reforms.’”
“If the measure of success is the number of students who remain in school and graduate with ‘real’ diplomas, not the incremental gains in elementary-level assessments, then the city failed again.”
— Carmen Alvarez,
UFT vice president for special education