It is commonly asserted that special education puts a financial strain on schools. Yet during the last four decades per pupil spending has increased from $2,360 to $7,086 in inflation-adjusted dollars, while student outcomes have been flat. "Whatever the causes for this productivity crisis in education (spending more without improving outcomes)," the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene notes, "it is not reasonable to blame special education for consuming extra dollars or burdening schools with more difficult to educate students." Even as they shift more and more students into special education, schools have more money for general education than ever before. "Schools are classifying more normal but low-achieving students as learning-disabled using vague criteria," Greene writes. "Schools get more money for these special-education kids but don't spend much to 'treat' them."
This trend is especially troubling when one considers a child's dismal chances of learning to read through special education. The longer students remain in special education, the lower their reading ability when compared to that of other poor readers. As Louise Spear-Swerling and Robert J. Sternberg explain in their 1998 book Off Track: When Poor Readers Become "Learning Disabled," "Poor readers in special education may be particularly likely to suffer decreases in practice, to benefit less from instructional interaction with a teacher, to engage in unmotivating instructional activities, and to draw maladaptive conclusions about what reading is." Similarly, a 1989 study by education researchers Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen found that poor readers in special education programs received less instructional time in reading than did regular classroom students or Title I students. A 2000 survey of 500 special education teachers by the Council for Exceptional Children found that most reported devoting less than one hour a week to one-on-one time with students.
Unlike special education, early intervention with intensive instruction appears to reduce the number of children who have reading difficulties later in life. The research suggests that when children like my nephew Clayton are taught the basic phonological skills necessary for reading, they can avoid a disability label altogether. The experience with early intervention programs that emphasize phonemes (basic units of speech) indicates that the rate of truly intractable reading problems is close to the rate of other serious disabilities. In five recent studies, when kids with poor phonological skills were given intensive instruction in phonemes and phonics, the expected incidence of learning disabilities, originally 12 percent to 18 percent, was reduced to around 1.5 percent.
"The emphasis on prevention begs the question of what constitutes a disability," write reading expert Reid Lyon and his colleagues in the Rethinking Special Education report. "If the role of inadequate instruction is taken seriously, and more aggressive attempts are made to teach all children to read, the meaning of disability could change in the future. In this scenario, the actual diagnosis of LD could be reserved for children whose reading or other academic problems are severe and intractable."
Full Funding of a Bad IDEA
Lyon argues that complex assessments and disability determinations should be replaced by a system offering intensive instruction to all children who score below the 25th percentile in reading achievement. Whatever the eligibility criteria, it's vital that funding be tied to performance. In this respect, policy makers can learn something from child welfare reform.
Foster care funding is usually based on how many days children remain in the system; the longer they stay, the more revenue they generate. The unintended consequence is that kids languish in foster care, neither reunited with their natural parents nor adopted by new parents. Some innovative states, such as Kansas and Michigan, have tied foster care payments to the speed with which agencies find permanent placements for children. Agencies that move children into permanent family arrangements more quickly receive more money. Similarly, a better approach to special education would reward states that lower their disability rates through intensive early intervention.
Special education voucher programs would also help correct the perverse incentives created by IDEA. First, vouchers would allow parents to find the school environment that best fits their children's circumstances. Second, vouchers would discourage schools from overidentifying learning disabilities: Better to teach students to read in the first place than lose their per pupil revenue altogether.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Congress will rethink special education. It appears that "full funding" of IDEA--defined as covering 40 percent of the extra cost to educate disabled children--is a done deal. The Senate IDEA reauthorization plan calls for a $2.5 billion annual increase in appropriations, resulting in full funding in six years. The House Republican plan calls for full funding of IDEA in 10 years, including annual increases of just over $1 billion through fiscal year 2007. Large, predictable funding increases can be expected to encourage further expansion of special education as schools strive to maximize their budgets.
My nephew Clayton already brings his school Title I money, based on my sister's income and his eligibility for the free lunch program. The good news is that my sister has prevented Clayton's school from turning him into a "twofer" and assigning him to special education. Linda took responsibility for teaching Clayton the relationship between letters and sounds, and by the end of the school year he had jumped from a 1 to a 3 (on a scale of 1 to 4) in his kindergarten reading classification. It's the sort of success that could be far more common if schools focused on teaching kids to read rather than diagnosing their disabilities.
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