Everyone’s special, round 2
My recent post on special education (SPED) had one education scholar emailing me to point out that a perverse financial incentive exists to place students in special education. I agree with that, though it doesn’t discredit the influence that special education advocacy and parental groups have exerted on the issue (which others like Wade Horn and Douglas Tynan have also acknowledged).
But I’m also intrigued by some other factors that may be influencing the rise in SPED costs. I’m referring to research in Massachusetts a few years ago which found that cost increases in that state were less a factor of district policy or practice (e.g., inaccurate over identification of SPED students) and more a case of increasing numbers of students with significant special needs requiring more costly service. Specifically, researchers found several major underlying causes of rising SPED costs. One was changes in medical practice that now enable increasing survival rates for premature babies (many, unfortunately, with lifelong developmental and neurological problems); deinstitutionalization (more SPED children once served by state facilities are now served by school systems); and social/economic factors (more children exposed to child abuse, neglect, drug use, and dysfunctional family environments). So it’s not just perverse financial incentives or influential SPED advocacy groups that are contributing to rising costs. Given these findings, it may be both our good intentions and our bad ones.
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June 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Thanks for the link to my post and continuing the discussion.
I would like to add that I previously debunked the claims that surviving premies or environmental factors are causing a significant increase in special education in the Education Gadfly in May of 2002 (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/index.cfm?issue=58#a845 ).
Enrollment in severe disability categories, such as mental retardation have actually been declining over the last few decades. So, while medical advances are saving premies who end up seriously disabled, other advances are preventing disabilities. Fewer babies are born oxygen deprived because we monitor them much more closely and perform many more c-sections. And public health measures, like reduced lead paint, child car seats, bicycle helmets, etc... are further reducing severe disabilities.
The growth in special ed is really in the relatively low cost SLD category. It’s true that there has been an increase in autism, but the numbers remain small compared to SLD and most of that increase seems to be shifting students from emotional disturbance or mental retardation categories. The true distribution of disabilities in the world has not changed very much while the identification of SLD has grown a large amount.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I am a conservative-minded public school teacher. I’d like to point out a couple things wrong with the bounty theory:
1) The percentage of students identified has leveled off in the 2000s.
2) I have a better theory. The increase in the 1980s and 90s came mostly in the category of learning disabled. These learning disabilities were “diagnosed” based on test scores. A low score on a reading test meant there was a “reading disability.”
There was never any proof that these “disabilities” were organically based. I submit that they were the result of early grade teachers doing a poor job of teaching reading. The increase that Forster and Greene describe lagged just behind the whole-language fad that swept across the country. As phonics have regained favor, the number of learning disabled students has stabilized. The special education industry, however, is not likely to dismantle the empire it has built any time soon.