Amy P sent me a link to a NRO article on Sarah Palin’s speech on special education. The editors at NRO conclude that vouchers are the solution for the inadequacies in special education in public schools. While I very much appreciate the national attention to issue of special education, I strongly believe that vouchers for special education would be a very bad idea.
The main problem is politics. Special education costs a lot of money. My district has to spend a small fortune to ship my kid out-of-district to a program that is set up to deal with his very special needs. The program that he’s in has a very high teacher to student ratio. The teachers and aides receive special training. He’s very bright, but can’t focus in a large group setting. So, he and two other students are pulled to the back of the room where they go through a normal first grade curriculum. He gets special help with his speech and handwriting in a one-on-one setting. Another expert teaches him how to control his frustration and respond appropriately to daily demands. And we’ve seen real results from all this attention. When he’s able to improve his focus and reduce his frustration, he’ll be mainstreamed and will have the same shot at a fulfilling life as any other kid.
However, all that attention is very pricy. How pricy? I’m not going to tell you. If the public was aware of how expensive his program was, there is no way that they would agree to pay for it. It works in our favor that the dollar amount for his education is a closely guarded secret among administrators. The seniors in our town continually vote down every school budget. They would explode if they knew the price tag on my kid’s school. All those people who think that disabilities are the product of bad parenting would never agree to spend more on his education than any other kid.
There are other smaller problems. I don’t want my kid in a private school. Right now, his program is located in a regular public school and he interacts with regular kids during lunch, recess and library. I don’t want him hidden away in a private school somewhere, where he would be isolated and forgotten.
While I’m no fan of Palin, I am a big fan of Trig. I want that little boy to be embraced by the community in a common school and to have the fullest attention from a range of teachers. I believe that vouchers for special education would mean a cut in funding and isolation.
Apt. 11d 
You missed the biggie from that article: SP calls for “fully funding IDEA.”
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Yes, that’s a good thing, Amy. I am not sure how they plan to do it, if McCain calls for an across the board spending freeze on everything but veteran affairs. But I do appreciate that this problem got it’s two minutes of attention.
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I don’t think the problem is limited to the political issues. Most of the private schools that I am familiar with tend to steer special needs students away if it isn’t a very common or minor need. They argue (reasonably to me) that they are too small to have the specialized staff required. On the other hand, in most less populous areas, the same could be noted about the public schools.
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I’m all for funding special education to the hilt, but this isn’t the Pentagon: no black budgets allowed! You have to tell taxpayers how much this costs.
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I think Laura’s point is that af supports something that is impossible. You cannot fund special education properly if you very visibly demonstrate how much it costs; people won’t put up with it. I do think that some of the costs of special ed could be lowered by more efficient and effective provision, but not enough to make it palatable to voters.
MH’s point is important for considering comparisons between private and public schools. Public schools deal with all the most expensive-to-teach students because parents cannot (or, perhaps in a few cases can, but will not) afford the full cost of very expensive to teach children. (That is the issue: the private schools you refer to do not set tuition for those kids at the true cost because parents won’t pay it). This makes comparisons very hard to do.
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I know of one private school locally that has a child that needs a one on one aide all the time. My understanding is that Medicaid pays for this particular child’s aide. I wish I knew more about it, because most private schools do discourage anyone with special needs because they can’t deal with the logistics and cost.
But Laura, weren’t you referring to a public school solely for special ed cases- like a contained classroom vs. main stream- rather than what most of us think of as a private tuition based school?
Our school, as a charter does a great job with providing services to a point. We have a well trained sped staff who does a remarkable job and offers things similar to what Laura talks about for her son. We’ve even had one on one continuous aides. It’s not cheap though, and the right kind of special ed student (maybe that required a self contained classroom, or extensive counseling, etc.) could actually bankrupt a charter school.
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Here’s another issue: how good are the interventions? My husband and I were recently reading H.J. Polatajko and N. Cantin’s “Review of Interventions for Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder,” which is a chapter from a book called “Developmental Coordination Disorder” (2007).
Among other things, Polatajko and Cantin discuss their review of the literature on Sensory Integration, a therapy method that might typically involve “swings, scooter boards, or balance activities” in the belief that “providing specific sensory stimulation can elicit adaptive motor responses that lead to improved sensory integration, which, in turn, leads to improved higher cortical function such as academic learning.” Unfortunately, Polatajko and Cantin go on to say that “The cumulative findings from the seven studies indicated that SI was never more effective than placebo in improving academic performanc, the major targeted outcome for SI. With regards to motor performance, cumulative results showed that SI intervention, at best, was as effective as other interventions and in many cases as effective as no treatment.” Yowzers.
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I still haven’t figured out what I think about vouchers in general. My usual heuristic is to learn what the teacher’s union thinks and take the opposite position. But, with vouchers I can’t shake the feeling that somehow this will do more to screw-up Catholic schools than it will to improve education in bad districts.
Education is on my mind lately as we are looking at a pre-school that is attached to a K-8 school. So, we’re getting hit with information and questions about things that won’t apply for several years.
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I think the argument you make for vouchers for special education: “I believe that vouchers for special education would mean a cut in funding and isolation” apply just as well to vouchers for regular education. For regular ed, it would mean isolation of those who aren’t wealthy enough to supplement the voucher to attend a private school (or a religious school).
I also don’t think that hiding the costs of education (special or otherwise) is a long term sustainable solution to people’s unwillingness to support it.
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At one of the school committee meetings I went to, they requested a new 1st grade teacher. They already had budgeted for the positions in terms of having a full-time nurse-aide for a severely handicapped student. But that student’s mother decided to send her to a private school, and now that money was free so they could hire another teacher.
So, in other words, that kid’s education cost at least as much as one full-time teacher’s salary.
For the record, no one at the school meeting blinked when that info was shared, fwiw.
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“with vouchers I can’t shake the feeling that somehow this will do more to screw-up Catholic schools” That’s why, until very recently, the Catholic interest groups have been opposed to school vouchers.
Maybe the cost of spec. ed. could be reduced through greater efficiency. Special ed. could be a county-wide effort rather than a district effort. Less redundancy and more large scale programs. Maybe. I don’t think that there’s any real way to make the costs equivalent to regular education.
The only way to shield spec ed kids from the wraith of penny-pinching voters is to have more money come from the federal level. It’s less personal that way.
And, of course, I don’t feel great about covering up costs. Openness is always the best way to proceed in a democracy. It’s just as a parent, I know what the consequences would be.
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I am as anti-Palin as they come and I actually caught the part of the speech last week where she called for full funding of IDEA. Good for her. Here’s the problem, however: do you trust Republicans to follow through on what needs to be done for Special Ed.? I don’t. As Laura suggests, a McCain admin. would be looking for all sorts of “social services” to cut in order to maintain huge defense spending to underwrite his more aggressive foreign policy. That’s what he really cares about – finally “winning” the Vietnam war. It’s easy to see how a VP promise falls out of the picture there (especially with the growing rift between McC and P). But that is academic. McCain will lose. So, if Palin really means it, she can go back and make Alaska into a model of SPED innovation and effectiveness, while leading a national movement for full funding of IDEA. We’ll see.
But that’s not all. The key problem with Special Ed. is a structural budgetary problem. Special Ed. funds are drawn from the same pot of money, at the local level, that funds “regular ed.” Invariably, this sets up bad fights between parents of Special Ed. students and others. To my mind what needs to happen is the articulation of “disability policy” as distinct from “education policy,” with funding sources that do not impinge upon “regular education.” Special ed. should be implemented in public schools but should not drain resources away from public schools. That would imply something vastly more radical, in terms of federal government responsibility, than IDEA. But until we do that we will continue to live with the worst of outcomes: real Special education needs not being sufficiently addressed while “regular education” budgets are depleted.
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“Special Ed. funds are drawn from the same pot of money, at the local level, that funds “regular ed.” Invariably, this sets up bad fights between parents of Special Ed. students and others. ”
I think this “fight” that develops between regular ed parents and special ed parents can’t be simply resolved by separating pots of money. Widening the pool that shares the costs of education beyond local environments where there can be a great deal of variability in revenues + needs is a good thing (you’re talking federal, but state can help, too, and it’s what we have in Washington).
But, I think a fundamental flaw in “separating” the resources is that it presumes that there are “special ed kids” and “regular kids.” There are kids, each very individual, some of whose needs for education can be more easily served in a standard setting than others. Modifications, though can help more than just the extremes of that distribution.
Here’s a link someone sent me to that says something like that, written by the author of the “The last normal child.” The phenomenon that strikes me is that we’re expecting perfection from our children these days.
http://www.docdiller.com/article.php?sid=140
(Mind you, I am not making this argument to suggest that all kid’s needs are equivalent, or that there is no need for special resources — I’m not one of the seniors who think all kid’s needs are a result of their parent’s bad parenting. I’m just arguing that like most things, there’s a distribution)
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I think you’ve hit on one of the overall challenges with the concept of “privatizing” education (whether that is with vouchers, school choice, charters, whatever.) Education is expensive, and the farther away from “average” the child is, the more expensive it gets. Whether it is special ed, or kids who don’t speak english, or 3rd graders who are doing algebra – it costs a lot of money.
I agree that there should be a separate pot of money for some of these things…but where will it come from if it doesn’t come from the government/taxes? I am beginning to think some things just can’t be privatized.
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I’m fairly certain that any moderately successful education reform would kill privatization as a going policy proposal. I’m less certain that any moderately successful education reform will happen. Most of what I read focuses on the need for more money or higher student to teacher ratios. From what I’ve seen in Pittsburgh, neither of those are sufficient. From what I’ve seen of Catholic schools, neither of them are necessary given sufficiently involved parents.
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My child needs expensive dental work. I could (barely) afford to pay the fees, but I want to keep my own money for other things, and have you all pay for it. Since it’s unlikely you’ll agree to that, I’m going to try to sneak the cost into the sanitation budget for your town. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, right? My family and I will benefit, and my kids are the most important thing. I would say thanks, but it would be a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?
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Most people would flip out if they knew how much another guys’s cancer treatment cost, especially if they are entirely healthy. They wouldn’t want to pay for it. They wouldn’t want their health insurance money going for treatment that they aren’t receiving. Even if there is a chance that they might need the same treatment in the future. Still, we have to pay for the sick guy’s chemo. Does the health insurance company make it obvious to its policy owners how much of their money goes to other people? No.
Most people with kids with special needs don’t have the money to cover those expenses on their own. And they shouldn’t have to. If regular kids get public schools, then special needs get them, too. Yes, it is more expensive, but that’s not the fault of the special needs kids or their parents.
The only reason to keep the cost hidden is that human nature is flawed. We’re selfish. We think we aren’t going to get cancer or have a family member who needs extra help in school. (Which is also incredibly stupid.) We want every dollar of our tax money to go to benefits that only we receive. Forget those old people. Forget the poor. Forget the special needs kids. Sometimes we get around this selfishness by appealing to sympathy. Sometimes we get around this selfishness by not making some facts completely obvious.
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There’s not a lot more boring and pitiful than the guy who reports his bons mots from twenty years ago in current conversation… here’s one of mine. Back then, I worked for Superfund. Love Canal was fresh in the news, and Congress couldn’t get enough honor for funding vastly expensive clean up, and I was at a party where someone asked me if we had enough money. So I said, ‘Well, it depends on how nice you want us to make it. As nice as when the Pilgrims got here?’
You have to have some way to compare your expenditures. For special ed, there is the Helen Keller model – which needs an Annie Sullivan for every kid. My somewhat-special needs (ADHD, and not very severe) kid went into a pullout classroom for some classes, got some nudging, produced at a higher level than he had in the regular classroom, now seems to be doing better and is back in the regular class. His life would be somewhat better if he had his very own Annie Sullivan through the rest of school (and – Hell, why not? college, too!), but that would be about $30000 out of our town’s budget – you could buy a couple of traffic lights for that. Or you could pay for treatment for that guy with cancer you are talking about. Or you could buy the right wing for a drone for Afghanistan… Or maybe you could pay for a month’s treatment for the cancer guy with a palliative / life-extending non-cure which gives him an extra month. Or you can put some Jersey barriers by a road in a place where you think there’s a one in twenty chance they will avert a fatal crash. Or you can throw some money into making the road to Ted Stevens’ friend’s restaurant, which was nowhere on the top zillion list of projects from Alaska’s transportation department but mysteriously got built…
My assertion here is, you really do have to compare your public expenditures to each other and only do the urgent. And you need to remember that you are sending men with guns to extract taxes from people who have earned their money by working, so you need to show some restraint in spending that money on ‘nice-to-do’ enterprises. And when you hide expenditures, they are more likely to go to Uncle Ted’s buddy’s restaurant (or special nice pension packages for your governor’s girlfriend’s union members!) than your kid’s aide.
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Couple of quick points:
1. My kid is not a superfund site.
2. The special ed budget isn’t a secret. It’s nearly half the school budget, btw. Just the amount that goes to each kid isn’t widely discussed.
3. The problem is that we’ve got in our heads that education is a local function with local taxes that somehow deserves more scrutiny than other areas. If I saw an itemized budget of the military budget, I would go ape shit. If the military was forced to buy a tank with a voucher, then the public would never, ever agree to it. No tanks.
4. The school district is working very, very hard to cut services for my kid. They did a little jig last year when his OT services were cut from 3 to 1 per week. They can’t wait for him to return back to the school district. They would have pushed him back sooner, but no teacher would agree to have him in their classroom. He can’t focus in large groups, so he’ll either put his head on the desk or tear around the room disturbing all the other kids. Even though the public is unaware of how much money my kid gets, they do know how much the overall special ed budget is. Pressure there. And there is finite pool of money for the SD to play with. With more money going to SE, there’s less money to do things for a larger group of kids with voting parents. Pressure there.
5. So, believe me, my kid is getting the minimum. There is still lots of pressure to reduce his services. If you put an actual price tag placed on his head, I would fear being fun out of town by my neighbors.
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“And you need to remember that you are sending men with guns to extract taxes from people who have earned their money by working, so you need to show some restraint in spending that money on ‘nice-to-do’ enterprises.”
dave s.,
Are you suggesting that universal preschool may have to give way to special ed funding?
“If I saw an itemized budget of the military budget, I would go ape shit. If the military was forced to buy a tank with a voucher, then the public would never, ever agree to it.”
Laura,
And yet we had pretty big scandals earlier in the Bush presidency over lack of body armor and armor for vehicles.
I think taxpayers probably process local property taxes vs. federal taxes differently, and feel more willing to spend federal rather than local dollars, perhaps because so few of them actually pay a meaningful amount of federal taxes. And that explains a lot about the federal deficit…
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Our diaper pail is going to be a superfund site. Pretty much fruit, candy, tomato soup and raisin bran is all that’s gone in for the past couple of days.
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Education for all isn’t a “nice-to-do”, it’s necessary. We are all better off when we have an educated citizenry. Either we pay to educate people as children or we all will pay the consequences for not educating them when they become adults.
It’s not only to the children’s benefit, it’s to all of our. And it’s their right.
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In Australia, we don’t have vouchers for education (yet), but we have a couple of vouchers-in-all-but-name programmes: the first home buyers grant (a one-off payment to people who can prove the house they’re buying is their first) and Child Care benefit (an ongoing top-up for parents who pay the exorbitant fees for child care in this country.
What happened was, because everyone is desperate to get into childcare / the housing market (and parents with special needs kids are equally under pressure to get early intervention), the sellers and the child care providers put their prices up by the same amount. So everyone was kind of back where they started.
Vouchers are not the way to fund childrens’ services, or any education service.
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In Australia, we don’t have vouchers for education (yet), but we have a couple of vouchers-in-all-but-name programmes: the first home buyers grant (a one-off payment to people who can prove the house they’re buying is their first) and Child Care benefit (an ongoing top-up for parents who pay the exorbitant fees for child care in this country.
What happened was, because everyone is desperate to get into childcare / the housing market (and parents with special needs kids are equally under pressure to get early intervention), the sellers and the child care providers put their prices up by the same amount. So everyone was kind of back where they started.
Vouchers are not the way to fund childrens’ services, or any education service.
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I’m not as negative about specialized schools as many posters here. Let me explain. I have the impression that my children are slightly older than the average poster on this site. My children’s school practices inclusion to a radical extent. Inclusion in this case is defined as children on IEPs outside the general classroom less than 21%. Last time I checked, our district was over 80%.
I’ve seen some children make amazing progress, but it’s not a fairy tale. The kids who do best are those who, in my opinion, “grow out” of their conditions. Children who are very shy, or have impulse control issues, or need to have social behavioral rules spelled out in detail, seem to do better than the average. Laura, you may find your youngest is one of those children. As the kids get older, the classroom gets quieter, and it’s easier for kids to concentrate.
As a parent in the district, though, I see a peculiar pattern emerging. The district generally doesn’t out place. Parents do the job for them, often after years of fighting with the district. They choose to move to a neighboring town, which does outplace, or they choose to send their children to private schools, sometimes schools which specialize in certain conditions. The most successful schools of this model of which the public is aware are schools which specialize in language based learning disorders.
My point is, while the school district will point to the 8th graders’ performance on state tests as proof of their approach, I’ve come to believe that that’s somewhat illusory. THEY AREN’T THE SAME KIDS. Too many of the kids who aren’t being educated leave the system. The school loses kids with dyslexia, kids whose parents are fed up with the school’s handling of behavioral issues (both disruptive kids and kids who are being distracted or bullied by others), and the school loses the really bright kids whose parents can afford to send them to private school.
Special Ed is pushing town budgets to the breaking point. The only way I can see to have a hope of preserving public education, is for the state to create magnet schools which specialize in certain disorders. The leading candidates would be dyslexia, ADHD and autism. It’s not that these students should be removed from the public schools, so much that these conditions need teachers and administrators who really understand how to educate these kids. Such teachers are thin on the ground. Taking an extra few courses for an ed degree isn’t sufficient.
By paying private schools to take the most difficult kids, or the kids whose parents have the means and ability to persevere to the end, the state already has a small number of specialty schools. Since they’re private, though, the state has no control over their capacity, nor their tuition.
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The other option I can see growing around here is each school system developing their own program. Our district has spoken of creating a program for dealing with autistic students. I understand the pressure that the fear of outplacements puts on administrators. How can you budget for the chance that an autistic child might be born in, or move into, your district? I also know that commuting long distances to specialty programs is exhausting, for students and families. However, if I had a child on the spectrum of autism, who was well served at another school, I’d be very wary of a home-brewed solution. An existing specialized school will have a staff and administration who understand the issues involved. It will have a curriculum in place, and it will not have a learning curve for the adults involved. As a matter of scale, it will not be wiped out by a teacher’s pregnancy.
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Consider this. A child with an IEP who is very bright, and liable to ace the state tests, is worth a great deal to a school system. If he’s placed in another system, presumably that district counts his scores in their total. It can make a huge difference, especially if the district has the necessary number of SPED kids to be required to track their results under NCLB.
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