[Vision2020] A Bad IDEA Is Disabling Public Schools

[Dale Courtney]

>From Education Week
(http://www.edweek.org/ew/newstory.cfm?slug=01bolick.h21)
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A Bad IDEA Is Disabling Public Schools

A powerful toxin infects our nation's education system, imperiling the
ability of every public school to fulfill its mission. It is not school
vouchers or inadequate funding, but the federal Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. 

Tracing back to the 1975 legislation enacted to ensure equal educational
opportunities for children with disabilities, the IDEA now covers 6.1
million schoolchildren at a cost of $41.5 billion annually, accounting for
40 percent of all new education funding over the past 30 years. Because only
12.5 percent of the money is provided by the federal government, the idea
constitutes the largest unfunded federal mandate in American education. Far
worse, it creates perverse incentives that have deepened stratification
within public education to the detriment of minorities and the poor. 
For 26 years, the IDEA has been politically sacrosanct. To criticize it was
to be condemned as hostile to disabled children, whose needs the legislation
commendably serves. But two new path breaking studies, spanning the
ideological divide, provide strong support for systemic reform. A report
earlier this year by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project found that
African-American children were far more likely than white children to be
relegated to special education, but less likely to receive the help they
need. This summer, a joint study by the moderately conservative Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation and the "new Democrat" Progressive Policy Institute
delivered a far more sweeping condemnation.

Passed with the most benign of intentions, the IDEA mandates that states and
local education agencies provide a "free appropriate public education,"
based upon an "individualized education program" (known as an IEP) geared to
each student's needs, to all public school children with disabilities.
Accompanying the federal rules were funds that eventually were to equal 40
percent of the program's cost. 

But the program has evolved in ways that are dizzying yet all-too
predictable when education policy is dictated from Washington. Participation
in the program was capped at 12 percent of American students. Demand has
increased to meet supply: While 8.3 percent of students were classified with
special needs in 1976, today that figure is-guess what?-about 12 percent.
The overall number of special-needs students has increased by 65 percent in
25 years, attributable to an expansion of the concept of "learning
disabilities" that has transformed the IDEA, in the words of G. Reid Lyon of
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, into a
"sociological sponge to wipe up the ills of general education."

My interest in the IDEA emanates from personal experience. Seven years ago,
my younger son was classified as learning-disabled. When I questioned the
battery of experts constituting his IEP team at his Fairfax County, Va.,
public school about the nature of his disability, I was told that he had a
"deficit" in his writing abilities relative to his intellectual capacity.
"This is a symptom, not a disability," I replied. For an hour we went round
and round, until finally I realized my son had no disability at all. But the
only way the school could get him the extra help he needed in writing was to
assign the "learning disability" label-a fact the IEP team reluctantly
acknowledged.

In addition to the physical and psychological disabilities that IDEA
specifically lists, the law encompasses "specific learning disabilities,"
which are not physical disabilities but rather "processing disorders that
interfere with one's ability to perform a number of learning tasks"-a
category so murky that James E. Ysseldyke at the University of Minnesota
says 80 percent of all children could qualify. The category has exploded
from 796,000 children in 1976 to 2.7 million in 1997-a 233 percent
increase-so that today more than half of the children covered by the IDEA
have no physical disability, but amorphous learning "deficits." In private
schools, these kids would simply receive tutoring or extra help; under the
IDEA, they are branded with a label. Meanwhile, slow learners who do not
have "deficits" in particular areas, or who can't get into the program
because of capacity or administrative backlogs, often receive no extra help
at all. The program creates two segregating impulses: to warehouse certain
children, typically minorities and children from impoverished families; and
to "cream" others, particularly children whose parents are sophisticated
enough to recognize special advantages that the IDEA can confer upon their
children. 

The program works least well for children who most need educational
opportunities. The Harvard Civil Rights Project study found pervasive,
statistically significant overrepresentation of African-American children in
special-needs programs in 45 states. Overrepresentation is most acute in the
category of mental retardation. But socioeconomic factors do not seem
causative: The likelihood of labeling African-American children as mentally
retarded actually decreases as the incidence of poverty rises. Meanwhile,
African-American special-needs children are far less likely to receive
speech, occupational, and physical therapy than their white counterparts.

Two incentives exist to over identify children from poor families. First is
federal funding. Many poor children qualify for federal Title I compensatory
education funding; IDEA funding makes them a "two-fer," in the words of Wade
F. Horn and Douglas Tynan in the Fordham Foundation/PPI study. Also, school
officials can often exclude special-needs students from high-stakes testing,
thereby inflating their standing under state accountability standards.
Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina recently reported large gains in
reading scores- along with large increases in the percentage of
special-needs students excused from standardized tests.

At the other end of the spectrum, sophisticated parents clamor to have their
children labeled learning-disabled in order to glean special accommodations,
such as reduced homework assignments, extra or unlimited time on tests,
laptop computers, personal tutors and note-takers, and so on. In affluent
Greenwich, Conn., nearly one in three students has the learning-disabled, or
LD, label and the accompanying benefits. Such accommodations can continue
through the SATs, the LSATs, and even the bar exam, yielding enormous
advantages. The scam is widespread: Although kids from families with incomes
over $100,000 make up only 13 percent of those taking the SAT, for example,
they account for 27 percent of those receiving special accommodations.

Yet for all the accommodations, a study by the economist Eric Hanushek and
others found virtually no academic gains for children with specific learning
disabilities. That is unsurprising, given the IDEA's monomaniacal focus on
process-abetted by a battery of lawyers who tie school districts in
knots-rather than academic progress. 

The program is rule-laden and expensive. In Michigan alone, some 6,000 rules
govern special education. Special-needs children cost 2.3 times as much as
mainstream children to educate-an average of $13,000 per student vs. an
average of $6,200 for all others. In the District of Columbia, one-third of
the education budget is expended on 10 percent of the students.

But while other education spending is discretionary, for IDEA beneficiaries
it is mandatory and open-ended. In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
the Cedar Rapids Community School District in Iowa was required to pay for a
full-time nurse for a paralyzed teenager. Previously, the court had ruled
that when public schools default in providing an "appropriate" education,
they must foot the full freight of private schools-creating, in essence, the
nation's largest voucher system, providing private schooling for 100,000
youngsters at a cost of $2 billion annually.

Meanwhile, the IDEA creates a double standard for school discipline,
requiring educators to determine the extent to which discipline problems are
caused by disabilities-a mandate that typically leads to diminished
behavioral standards for children labeled disabled.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act unquestionably has helped
millions of severely disabled kids achieve to their abilities. But the
program is systemically dysfunctional and damaging to public schooling as a
whole. The law exacerbates educational stratification, warehousing the
have-nots while further enriching those who can successfully navigate the
system. Worst off are slow learners from poor families who may receive no
help at all. The IDEA skews education funding toward a small segment of
children while leaving others with no alternatives.

My son has benefited from compensatory efforts designed to improve his
written-communication skills. But every year I have to fend off
accommodations that would send false signals about his academic skills.
Early on, when I insisted that reduced homework assignments be reflected in
his grades, the IEP team looked at me as if I were from another planet.
"Don't you want your son to get good grades?" one team member asked. Last
year, an IEP team member reassured me about my son's lack of progress in
spelling by telling me, "It doesn't matter. We don't do spelling anymore."
It struck me that I was witnessing the demise of public schooling. And if
it's this perverse for me, I wonder how the system works for parents who,
unlike me, do not sue bureaucrats for a living. 

An opening for reform exists in the 2002 IDEA reauthorization. Sen. James M.
Jeffords of Vermont and others want the federal government to substantially
ratchet up its share of IDEA costs. But it should do so only in exchange for
three systemic reforms.

First, the focus of the IDEA should shift from process to performance.
Federal laws already prohibit discrimination against disabled youngsters in
public schooling. The IDEA, by contrast, is supposed to be about
opportunity. Evidence suggests that the IDEA does not produce academic
gains. Funding incentives should be geared toward individual student
progress. 

Second, the "specific learning disabilities" category should be excised from
the law. Because states provide the lion's share of IDEA funding, this would
leave the states with responsibility, flexibility, and funding to take care
of nondisabled kids with special needs. It might also reduce the
accommodations that create a separate and unequal system while doing nothing
to improve learning. The result would be an IDEA focused exclusively on
students with physical or psychological disabilities, who now number fewer
than half the program's beneficiaries.

Finally, the system should provide parental choice. In Milwaukee and
Cleveland, low-income parents have the option of sending their children to
private schools, which often can provide a more appropriate learning
environment for children with mild disabilities. In Florida, children with
disabilities can receive "McKay scholarships" equal to the amount the state
would have spent on their education to use in private schools of their
parents' choice. Choice options bolster the program's accountability while
helping ensure the program meets the children's individualized needs.

At last it may be possible to talk about such reforms. But talk needs to
translate into action fast, lest our public schools descend further into a
costly, bureaucratic morass that misses entirely the point of the
enterprise: to provide equal and high-quality educational opportunities to
all American schoolchildren.