The End of Special Education Part V
This is really Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), aka Pay for Success, part 2.
It seems that NJ Senator Teresa Ruiz, Chair of the NJ Senate Education Committee, thinks that SIBs may be a way to pay for the Committee's vision of Pre-K in New Jersey. Tuesday morning I heard a clip of Senator Ruiz on WBGO's news report. My jaw dropped.
Senator Teresa Ruiz says one recommendation is establishing a five-year pilot program allowing the private sector to pay for expanding early childhood education and then receive a portion of the state savings from that investment.
“It allows for programs to really develop more quickly because the funding is there, and certainly, later on, what we can look for is we will save money because we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on.”
Just. No.
I wrote about SIB's here, but let me recap. Goldman Sachs funded a SIBs program in Utah. They claim a 99% "success" rate. In other words, 99% of the 3- and 4-year-olds who went through their funded program did NOT require remedial help or special education classification. Goldman Sachs received $260,000 in payment for those 109 out of 110 students. And will continue to receive payment for every year those students are NOT classified for special education.
You know there are going to be questions, really basic ones, when you see "results" like that. Presumably, Senator Ruiz heard about those results and did not look further into the inevitable questions about the validity of those claims.
What was the starting criteria for those students? What tests did they use? Medical history? Demographics? How many students would have likely had to have special education if they didn't have the "high quality" Pre-K experience? How many would they expect to classify even with the experience? What is "high quality" Pre-K? What does "high quality" Pre-K cost? How much does Utah spend on Pre-K? What is the threshold that has to be met for Goldman Education Lessons From A Sparkly District: The End of Special Education Part V: