She wasn’t forthcoming on the policy side, but she did say something, at least. Talking about her newest child, Trig, who has Down Syndrome, she opined:

And children with special needs inspire a special love.

To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters.

I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.

Nothing we didn’t predict but I’m curious what policies she’d advocate.

The Gadfly briefly addressed this issue a few weeks ago and the editors at Newsday have taken it up in another form on their blog, Viewsday (ha ha...). New York State has been engaged in a heated debate over special education, specifically whether more or all students should be mainstreamed. More recently, and this is what the Newsday editors were really concerned with, the discussion has turned to what to call diplomas granted under Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Should they really be called a “diploma” if they’re not worth the same as a regular high school degree? This may not be a matter of semantics.

Employers and universities should know what kind of course work stands behind that piece of paper. While NCLB has attempted to address the state-to-state and school-to-school discrepancies, we’re a long way from national standards. Labeling IEP degrees “IEP certificates” rather than “IEP diplomas” could have a few benefits; I’ll focus on two. First, many too many students wind up in special education because teachers want them out of their mainstream classrooms for reasons other than their physical or learning disability. Perhaps they’re disruptive, have social adjustment issues, or are bringing issues from home into the classroom. This is an incredibly harmful and lazy practice.

Second, this distinction may make parents more informed about what their children’s degrees mean when they are choosing main or special education classrooms. Since an IEP diploma is not accepted by the military or most colleges, parents may be unwittingly allowing their children to graduate with a largely worthless piece of paper. While national standards may be many years off, we can at least give legitimate and standardized value to high school diplomas coming from different academic tracks and parents and employers more information about what kind of education their children and employees are receiving.

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.

I’m not a special education (SPED) expert nor will I ever claim to be one. But I do know that it happens to have one of the most mobilized and vocal constituencies in education. And that’s no surprise—understandably, parents of special needs children want their kids to receive the services that they need. But this article brought up a couple issues in special education that continue to be a problem.

I’m assuming the fact we continue to see our SPED numbers grow (and their associated costs) is one of the reasons that Virginia lawmakers have proposed that parents be notified—as opposed to approve—when a district wants to terminate services. I’m guessing some parents look at these services as given. But aren’t most kids (not talking about the ones diagnosed with severe and profound disabilities) supposed to be benefiting from this assistance and eventually testing out of services? We’re told that over a third of special education students in Virginia are deemed learning disabled (LD). Now, I’m not saying that these kids are not learning disabled—just that there’s some pretty solid research that says that early identification and prevention programs (esp. in reading) are better for kids who later end up getting labeled LD than are years and years of SPED services.

One of the other proposed changes places limitations around how often schools are required to update parents on their children’s progress. It’s no secret that special education as a field is particularly rife with compliance-oriented stuff; the amount of paperwork that schools must complete (including the Individualized Education Plans) can be entirely unreasonable (it’s an area the feds have tried to remedy).  Again, folks more knowledgeable than I about this area have set out parameters for what does and doesn’t make sense in terms of compliance features.

Overall, these proposed changes seem to imply that special education is not just about parents and their very strong advocacy groups. Parents like Ms. Harrison recognized as much when she accused state lawmakers of  “taking away parental rights.” So here we go playing the “rights” card (it’s just as effective as the “equity” card, mind you). And no, I’m not against rights or equity; it’s just that it’s an amazingly effective tool in terms of framing a position. I’m just left asking whose “rights” are we advocating for here? Those of parents, teachers, or students?

Deciding such matters isn’t easy. At the end of the day, though, California’s court settlement is the right one. If high school diplomas are to have any integrity, if they are to represent that their possessors have acquired the minimum academic skills necessary for work, then all recipients must demonstrate that they can read and do math at a basic level.

It is no doubt difficult to deny diplomas to special education students who have put in gobs of time and effort to work their way through the grades. Certainly such pupils deserve something for their efforts (a certificate of completion, perhaps). But the bottom line (where one necessarily finds himself after doing the relevant syllogisms) is this: Any senior who cannot pass California’s exit exam—which can be retaken indefinitely, beyond graduation, and on which the receipt of passing scores requires only the most basic knowledge and skills—is unprepared to competently fill most work positions in a modern economy. The signaling of work-related competency is, supposedly, what high school diplomas are meant for.