Why Does Special Education Have to be Special?
Guest post by Dr. Douglas Green
Thanks to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act passed in 1975, students who have some kind of identifiable disability that gets in the way of keeping up with their able peers, get service from special education teachers in schools throughout the United States.
While practices vary from state to state, there is some similarity as to how these services are provided. The law is well intentioned, and there is no doubt that much of what special education teachers do is helpful. However, we spend too much money and time on bureaucratic procedures that wastes funds that could be used to pay more teachers to give more help. The process that a child has to go through to become classified and therefore eligible for service creates a barrier that favors students with strong parent advocates, at the same time it leaves some poor kids who aren't quite disabled enough out of luck.
Unlike Finland where services are provided to about half of the students at some point before they fall too far behind, we limit these kind of services to roughly 12% of the student population, and often wait until students are far behind their peers before we provide it. As an elementary school principal where 90% of the students were poor, 25% were refugees, and 20% qualified for special education services, I've seen this process close up. I have great respect for the teachers involved, but found that we spent way too much time in meetings trying to determine if a given student was classifiable rather than just helping kids who seemed to need help.
Tag 'em and Bag 'em
In order to qualify for special education services, a student needs to go through the dreaded classification process. Students who seem to need help are first dealt with by a committee of teachers who try to figure out how to help the student to avoid a special ed classification. If this doesn't work, the student gets individual testing from a special education teacher and a school psychologist. When the testing is finished, the committee on special education meet to review the results and decide if a special ed classification is in order.
These meetings include the child's regular classroom teacher, a special education teacher, the school psychologist, the child's parent (if they show up), a parent of a student already in the special ed system, and a committee chair provided by the district. As principal, I usually attended and parents where allowed to bring in advocates and lawyers if the wished.
After about half an hour of sorting through data that almost no parent and many regular ed teachers don't understand, it's up to the school psychologist to see if the child is eligible for one of the allowed classifications. About half of the students who make it are considered learning Why Does Special Education Have to be Special? - Work in Progress - Education Week Teacher:
