Grey Foster and Jay Greene have written a post at Pajamas Media that is distracting me from my very important academic paper. Grrrr. I’m writing a response right now. They write that "millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability."
Apt. 11d 
I’m looking forward to your reaction. I didn’t disagree with the post.
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I thought the article was deeply flawed, but am not surprised when it appears to have been written by people who would probably think that school vouchers are a solution to AIDS prevention, too (I tried to make that sound bizarre, but realize that if I actually posted it over there at PM, I might find people making arguments for why school vouchers would prevent AIDS). This kind of article is why I’ve never found any reason to read pajama media.
Is there a real analysis somewhere to support Forster’s contention that “Two-thirds of the growth in special education is directly attributable to funding incentives?” An awfully quantitative statement to make that would require a lot more than the seriously fuzzy math presented in the report. For example, there’s certainly no physiological reason why “mental retardation” would necessarily be correlated with other disabilities (cited to argue that the lack of increase in MR -> there can’t be a real increase in SLDS (specific learning disabilities). That argument is based on a deeply flawed premise. Better medical care, for example, could actually result in moving people from having been MR because of a premature birth to only having an SLD, just like emphysema treatment may move someone from being bed-ridden to being a wheelchair bound adult who rides around with an oxygen tank. combine that w/ more premature births, and there are plausible reasons why a SLD might actually be more common. And better identification of SLDS could result in the identification of previously unidentified people — there’s no reason to presume that the identification rates before the laws started were the baseline against which we should measure.
In addition, I find the financial incentive argument rather weak, given that identification of a disability then means the school has to produce and follow an individual education plan (which costs money). And where exactly is the *data* that “proves” that parents aren’t a driving force behind increased id of SLDS? The links I tried to follow were like falling down a rabbit hole, where the blogger reasserted the “fact” and sent me elsewhere? Did someone find an actual link that lets me look at the analysis.
The post is written as though there were a real substantive analysis, which I look forward to being pointed towards, if it exists.
I do think there’s a problem with our special education systems, but found the PM particular discussion to be totally useless.
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My child (born in 1988) is one of the kids to whom Greene & Forster refer:
The growth has taken place almost entirely in the category of “specific learning disabilities,” popularly known simply as “learning disabilities” or “LD.” Other categories of disability have variously gone up and down, cancelling each other out almost perfectly. But learning disabilities have exploded.
Does my daughter have a disability? Yes, under IDEA. Her original diagnosis (or label) was Specific Learning Disability — Reading. More informally — dyslexia. Now, back in 1997, when we first entered the world of special education, the school district couldn’t offer much in the way of remediation. Fortunately, we had the resources to provide the remediation — first, Slingerland, then Lindamood-Bell. While she did achieve age-appropriate reading levels, her reading rate remains significantly slowed. So we kept the SLD-R designation, so that (again following law) she would have appropriate accomodations in the classroom and in standardized tests.
I am happy to report that she finished her first year in college (at a selective college) with a solid GPA. She’s a good student–and still has the disability label, because it gets her two accommodations that level the playing field, just as providing a myopic student with corrective lenses levels the playing field. (The accommodations: taking all tests on a computer, untimed. This gets around the difficulties with her handwriting and spelling, and makes allowances for slow reading rate).
I don’t know anything about Jay Greene or Greg Forster. I’d invite them to talk to students like my daughter, or parents like me, for insight as to why students–who to a naive eye seem perfectly able– might seek a “disability status”.
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Response to Intervention has been talked about as a panacea or a disaster in the making. Summary of recent posts here
Again, it all depends upon implementation.
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Liz: perhaps you’re the right person to ask this question of, since you’ve successfully launched your bird!
Should computer/time accommodation be provided to everyone who wants it? How does a diagnosis of SLD-reading, differ from reading slowly for some other reason? I periodically toy with the idea that an accommodation should be offered to anyone who requests it. Take, for example, wheelchair ramps — there’s no reason why anyone who wants to can’t use them, and, in fact, one of the reasons they’ve infiltrated so successfully is that others do use them. Of course, some accommodations (handicapped parking) can’t be offered to everyone who requests them, because they are scarce, so we have to decide who needs them.
But, that doesn’t apply for more time/computer use. It’s not a scarce resource, and could be used by everyone. Frankly, this wouldn’t need to be an “accommodation” in many college classes, because it would be permitted already.
bj
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bj,
The computer accomodation seems harmless (indeed, graduate students everywhere would rejoice if comps would stop being handwritten), but I’ve been bothered by the more-time accomodation as well. Surely graduate programs and employers have a legitimate interest in transcripts that reflect that students had the same time opportunities during testing? If Suzie needs one hour to get an A, and Maureen needs two hours to get an A, giving Maureen two hours is not an “equal playing field.”
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Surely graduate programs and employers have a legitimate interest in transcripts that reflect that students had the same time opportunities during testing?
I can somewhat understand the rationale for these sort of accommodations for undergrads. What’s even more frustrating is these accommodations being given in graduate school. At one point, a third of my grad school cohort was “learning disabled”, which meant they got double-time on all exams, including qualifiers. For our 8-hour qualifer (9am-5pm), giving them double-time-in-name resulted in giving them quadruple time because they had the evening in between. If it takes you that long to do a simple data analysis problem, it is a disgrace to give you a PhD in machine learning.
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I agree with bj — there are loads of problems with special ed, and I’m completely open to the possibility that there is overdiagnosis (alongside, in some populations of course, underdiagnosis), but didn’t see how they made the case either for that or for vouchers as a solution. There are lots of different things going on, but at least one factor in the rise in diagnosis is a rise in understanding — to go to liz ditz’s example, dyslexia was far better understood both in terms of what it is and in terms of what could be done about it in the 90’s than in the 70’s or even the early 80’s. (An anecdote point — I remember a very progressive education official dismissing dyslexia as not being real at all in the early 80’s, who, by the early 90’s completely understood that it was a learning-related disability, and had made it a priority in his district precisely because it was a disability which, he thought, could be overcome, given the understanding his teams had).
Annoying piece — looking forward to your response, laura!
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Yeah, I made that point in my piece about the better diagnoses and understanding of learning disabilities occurring in the 80s and 90s. I make some other points, too. I shot the piece over to PJM last night. I’m not sure when they’ll run it.
I didn’t touch the voucher issue in my piece, because that’s a whole other kettle of fish. I could see that vouchers would be useful for kids with the most severe problems who have no hope of mainstreaming. A friend in NYC has an autistic child and he has to go through the most annoying song and dance every year with the school district to get funding for his kid’s private school. Public schools cannot deal with the most severe cases. However, most kids don’t fall into that category. I want my kid in a mainstream school environment where he is mainstreamed for certain classes and kept in a small class setting for others. He needs that back and forth. It would not be beneficial for him to be in a school with only special needs kids. He’s also in a regional program which pools kids who are similar to Ian together. He also wouldn’t benefit from being in a district program where he would grouped with kids with cognitive deficits or emotional problems.
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bj asks two questions:
Should computer/time accommodation be provided to everyone who wants it? How does a diagnosis of SLD-reading, differ from reading slowly for some other reason?
The first question: in a way, that is what Universal Design for Learning and differentiating instruction is all about. But to get from theory into the classroom….
The second question is really thorny. The very short answer is a child with SLD-reading may have difficulties also with active working memory and/or processing speed.
I suspect that in the coming decade, we’ll have a much more finely-grained understanding of what goes into reading, and through that, and understanding of the causes of reading breakdown. There is some really fascinating work going on at the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (IMBES) . Another fascinating area of growth is the role of executive function in education (here’s an introductory article).
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