Jay Greene and I continue our debate about special education policy at Pajamas Media with the really good stuff happening in the comment section. He, quite generously, concedes that his study did not conclusively prove that schools are falsely diagnosing kids with learning disabilities in response to certain state funding policies. He concluded that it is not plausible that 1 in 7 kids have some form of disability. I responded that we, as political scientists, aren’t really qualified to weigh in on that matter.
After we wrapped up our discussion, others piped in. I was overjoyed to learn that the increased numbers of disabilities was really part of a government plot to revoke gun privileges from boys.
And one more thing. IF let’s say…a young child is DIAGNOSED as , ADD or
ADHD, is given a NARCOTIC for the better part of his (yes most ADHD
diagnosed children are boys) developmental years, will he be UNABLE
legally to purchase a weapon, as his newly affirmed 2nd Amendment
rights say? Or, and here’s my bet, will he (yes he) be deemed mentally
“disabled” and therefor flagged, and unable to purchase a rifle?
The answer coming up, and soon.
The plot thickens.
Apt. 11d 
With guns, it’s always a conspiracy. Anybody checked Charlton Heston’s hand lately?
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With guns, so much bad information is spread about, you get that type of view. I’m pretty sure that you need to have been adjudicated a danger to yourself or others before you get dinged by a background check (assuming you have no criminal record).
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“He concluded that it is not plausible that 1 in 7 kids have some form of disability. I responded that we, as political scientists, aren’t really qualified to weigh in on that matter.”
I don’t know, actually, if political scientists aren’t allowed to weigh in on this because the concept of disability is a social one, not a medical one. Individual differences abound. People are not all the same. They can do different things. Stanley Fish wrote about this in the NYtimes a while ago.
With the current methods of identifying differences, some of which may be amenable to being treated, it’s quite possible that everyone might have a “disability”. The political question is which of these disabilities should be protected, and given resources for treatment. Though it’s quite possible that more than half of the country has serious differences in learning or cognitive or physical function, from a medical/psychological/scientific standpoint, that doesn’t prevent us from making the political judgment about who has disabilities from a legal standpoint.
Much of the debate about disability treatment actually revolves around these kinds of questions — if extra time on the SAT helps you, can that be evidence itself that you have a disability? Or do you need to have an independent line of evidence in order to justify that resource?
(I still can’t bring myself to read PM, though, and the gun comment certainly doesn’t help).
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“He concluded that it is not plausible that 1 in 7 kids have some form of disability. I responded that we, as political scientists, aren’t really qualified to weigh in on that matter.”
I don’t know, actually, if political scientists aren’t allowed to weigh in on this because the concept of disability is a social one, not a medical one. Individual differences abound. People are not all the same. They can do different things. Stanley Fish wrote about this in the NYtimes a while ago.
With the current methods of identifying differences, some of which may be amenable to being treated, it’s quite possible that everyone might have a “disability”. The political question is which of these disabilities should be protected, and given resources for treatment. Though it’s quite possible that more than half of the country has serious differences in learning or cognitive or physical function, from a medical/psychological/scientific standpoint, that doesn’t prevent us from making the political judgment about who has disabilities from a legal standpoint.
Much of the debate about disability treatment actually revolves around these kinds of questions — if extra time on the SAT helps you, can that be evidence itself that you have a disability? Or do you need to have an independent line of evidence in order to justify that resource?
(I still can’t bring myself to read PM, though, and the gun comment certainly doesn’t help).
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A quick Googling finds an estimate of the rate of dyslexia in the US population to be 10 to 20% (Googled, reference in TIMEasia Magazine.) In discussions of RTI, researchers have stated that most LD diagnoses are reading disabilities.
These figures make it quite plausible that 1 in 7, at least, have some form of disability. The question is, do the bell curves in performance which school systems expect factor in standard rates of reading disabilities? That is, if a child is dyslexic, yet receives appropriate support, he may read “at grade level.” The larger issue becomes, then, is he LD? Was he never LD?
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I’m just guessing here, but I think that a kid is considered LD if there is a disparity between his IQ and his performance. So, if he’s got an IQ of 140, but he’s only reading at grade level, because he hasn’t received treatment, then he’s still LD.
Oh, yeah. There’s lot of political questions here that are open for debate and that even non-medical folk can and should weigh in. However, actually poking at kids and determining whether or not they have dyslexia is something that we should leave to people who know about this stuff.
I bet there’s a way of constructing a study that gets at the question of the numbers of LD kids without actually poking at them ourselves. Forster and Greene do take a good stab at it, but ultimately their study doesn’t prove anything. Perhaps a survey of neurologists and school officials with a really big N. I don’t know. I would have to think about it.
Speaking of annoying PM op-eds. They have a piece this week from a female professor ranting about the feminization of academia. You’ll love it, bj.
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My state’s system amounts to a penalty for every special needs child identified. There are reimbursements, but only for very large amounts, and with a time delay. Thus, the school system gets a percentage, I think it’s 2/3, of the sums spent on outplacements to expensive specialty schools.
My children are older than yours, Laura, and as their cohorts move through the system, I see many children who haven’t been officially identified, and _should have been_. One kid is a textbook case of ADHD. According to his mother, he has never had an IEP, and the school continually put her off. Now, I believe that other parents assumed he was on an IEP, because his symptoms were that flagrant. He is only one kid among many. Had the school identified him early in his school career, much could have been done.
So, I’d love to know what your opponents are choosing as an example of a state with the “correct” percentage of identified LD kids. States without a financial bounty for special needs kids could very well be operating in such a way that there’s a penalty for every kid identified. That’s not a tenable baseline for comparison.
Another question is the assumption that services provided to special needs kids are services the schools would provide anyways. “At least some of what people identify as the “costs” of special education, especially for students with milder learning disabilities, are expenditures that schools were going to make anyway to help those students catch up.” Er, maybe in some other universe, where schools actually make an effort to help students catch up, rather than the existing universe, in which schools blame a lack of educational progress on students’ lack of effort. Once a child’s been tagged with the Special Needs label, for many in administration in particular, the floor for acceptable performance is set very low indeed, and the ceiling’s not much higher.
In our school, a Special Ed tag will get your kid accommodations, many of which won’t help. It may get him a aide, or placement in a class with an aide. Of course, our school pays aides $20,000 a year, which doesn’t lead to sterling hires. They’re generally nice, motherly types who can remove an obstreperous kid from a classroom. Highly educated, cutting edge educational therapists they’re not. Two half hour sessions a week reading with auntie isn’t going to get these kids where we all need them to be.
I wish schools were free to tell parents, “your child needs XYZ services. We can’t afford to provide them, but the ABC school down the street could. Or you can supplement our efforts with Dr. X, the $100 an hour speech pathologist who’s booked up until next year.” I believe those parents who can afford it would rather pay for early, effective educational supplementation, than wait until the kids hit middle school to pull the kids out for specialized private schools. At present, though, the schools don’t dare say this, because they’re in an adversarial position with respect to every parent of a LD child.
For the record, I don’t have any LD children. I am not speaking from sour grapes, or a hatred of our local school. I do find the current system counterproductive.
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Ho boy. I couldn’t read the comments.
LDs in general are such a complex, multi-faceted thing. The more we learn about (for example) the neurological foundations of reading, the more we realize that there are many, many ways for the process to go awry. It may be more correct to speak of “the dyslexias” than to refer to the problem in a unitary way.
For my money, I don’t think “specific learning disability–reading” casts much more light.
Stranger wrote, That is, if a child is dyslexic, yet receives appropriate support, he may read “at grade level.” The larger issue becomes, then, is he LD? Was he never LD?
Stranger, most dyslexic students, with intensive and correct intervention, can learn to read “at grade level”. For many, however, there are residual issues, depending on the underlying neurological issues. For example, a child whose dyslexia includes difficulty with rapid automatic naming (RAN) or processing speed may read ‘at grade level” after remediation, but remain a slow reader compared to non-affected peers. This can in turn affect comprehension levels.
For a more nuanced understanding of what reading is, neurologically speaking, I recommend Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, ISBN-13: 978-0060186395. Do read some of the reviews at Amazon as they are informative.
Or you may consult the long review at California Literature Review.
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“States without a financial bounty for special needs kids could very well be operating in such a way that there’s a penalty for every kid identified. That’s not a tenable baseline for comparison.” yeah, I pointed that out and Greene agreed.
I’m actually not bitter either at this point. My kid is getting a lot better services than “Auntie in the classroom.” But I did have make a stink before he got better treatment. He’s going to be mainstreamed for second grade (one more year) and I am very worried about him getting stuck with old Auntie.
The truth is that effective treatment is REALLY expensive. As expensive as special ed is now, if every kid was really getting the good stuff, the price tag would be much, much higher.
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I agree with Greene that 1 in 7 is an implausible figure. I’d have expected it to be much larger, given my experience of adults, various assumptions about human diversity, and some observations about the social environment. (Ask Greene, for example, to do a quick survey of the 40 people he is closest to, asking how many have taken anti-depressants in the past 4 years. If it’s less than 1 in 7..well, he’s not as close to them as he thought).
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Among academics, I would say the numbers were closer to 1 in 3. In the engineering schools, it’s closer to 1 in 2.
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harry b,
I think you’re right about the one in seven, although the larger we make that number, the more sense it makes to talk about “human diversity” rather than “learning disabilities.”
I bet use of antidepressants varies radically according to geography and demographics, though.
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There is a practical issue in all of this. Depression is now treated in 1 out of 7 because treatment is a pill. Back when treatment was more labor intensive, treatment for depression was for the wealthy and those who were actively suicidal. Everyone else was just sad.
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