We're gearing up for a meeting with Ian's school district. It's a game of chess and all the pieces need to be in place.
Every year, we attend an IEP meeting with the school district. His teacher, therapists, a case manager from the school district and I sit around a table and discuss our goals for Ian for the year. We review what is essentially a legal contract that lists the goals and the amount of therapy that he'll receive for the next year. It has details about the amount of therapy time that he'll receive every week. Ian, for example, receives three sessions of speech therapy per week; the therapy sessions include other students.
Our next IEP is a big one. Every four years, a child must be tested in a variety of ways. We met back in August to discuss which tests would need to be done on Ian. He was tested for speech, IQ, educational levels, and audio-processing. He went through his first battery of tests back when he was four, so it will interesting to see how far he's progressed.
So, why is an IEP a game of chess? Because I want Ian to receive more therapy and the school district wants him to have less. Ian's doing very well, but his language difficulties presist. Other neighboring school districts offer at least five hours of therapy after school hours. Ian isn't receiving any extra help, except what we pay for out of pocket. He's a good candidate for extra therapy, because Ian's other problems are relatively minor.
Every school district assigns a case worker to supervise your child. Their stated mission is to represent the interests of the child. However, the real mission of the case worker is to limit the amount of money that a school district spends on the child. Her role in the IEP meeting is to stop your child from getting help that they need.
When Ian was three, the school district became responsible for his education. At that time, Ian was in a very bad place. His speech was non-existent, and he was extremely frustrated. He spent a good part of the day screaming. He needed to be in a specialized school that had experienced teachers and ABA specialists. Instead, he went to a half-day program in our school with a general special ed teacher, who had no idea of how to work with him. The school district wanted to keep him there, because it was cheaper than sending him to a full day program in another district. They knew that he needed extra help. They discouraged me from going to a neurologist, who would have given us that very important diagnosis. When I was in distress about his education, they told me to stop worrying and get a manicure.
We have a superintendent who gets up in public forums and announces that we are one autistic child away from blowing the budget. Town council members have said in public sessions that we can't build any more houses in our town, because a family might move in with an autistic child and it will cost us $100,000. During our recent town budget crisis, another case manager in our town said that our expenses are so high, because we pay our therapists too much money. There is a witch-hunt atmosphere around special ed students.
The funding for special education should come from the federal government and not local government to prevent special ed students from being victimized again.
To distract the community from bigger problems in the school budget, the special ed kids have been painted as an enemy who take resources away from the regular kids. It's a zero sum game. If you help the kid with Down syndrome, you take money away from the entire second grade class.
Yet, I have friends who have been in much worse circumstances. They have had to pay $90,000 out of their own pocket for special schools and then sue the school district to recover that money. Every year they have to endure this insanity, despite the fact that the school district loses their case every time.
The IEP meeting itself is ridiculous. Why should a parent be in the position to beg and plead and find rationales for necessary services? Imagine a parent of typical child having to beg that their child have a math class or reading. The parent has to prepare themselves like a lawyer for his case and, at the same time, act as a beggar. They must throw themselves at the mercy of a heartless bureaucrat.
So, I will enter a conference room in the next few weeks with a carefully arranged speech and specific demands. If Ian needs five hours of after school therapy, I'll ask for ten. Maybe we'll get three hours, if we're lucky.
UPDATE: More discussion at Crooked Timber.
Apt. 11d 
My friend the grade-school principal says that special ed is why charter schools are bad — that no one wants to include special ed kids, and gradually the charters suck all the money away, leaving the neglected and special ed students in the public school playing with sticks.
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A friend who sits in on some of these meetings says that she’s seen a change over the course of the last 15 years are so. She works in a liberal school district, which is known as a magnet for its well respected autism program (one of those disticts that people move into to get appropriate educations for their children with special needs). She says that in the meetings 10 years ago, she felt that when there was conflict between parents and the “case manager”, in general, she thought the parents were asking for services that would not be helpful for the child. But, now, she thinks the case manager does indeed represent the district’s interest in keeping costs down (rather than in providing the appropriate education to the child at question in the IEP).
Everyone’s learned the legal language to represent these interests (which aren’t a part of FAPE) while staying on the right side of the law.
Good luck.
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Good luck on dealing with them. When the guy talks about one more special education child busting the budget, you could indicate how much that cost is in terms of a percentage of the last raise the teachers got. Or something like, “If the teachers paid 10% more of their own health insurance, they’d still pay well below the national average and we’d have enough money for xx aides.
Or that might make things worse. I have no idea as I alway lose arguments in setting where personal insults and bad puns don’t help.
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I’m sure this recent Department of Education study could be employed to demonstrate that, in fact, departmental resources could NOT be better employed elsewhere.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/department-of-education-study-finds-teaching-these,18461/?utm_source=morenews
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I remember our first IEP meeting. The physical therapist said 2-3 hours a week, and the Superintendent said, OK, two.
Your story is a vivid demonstration of the moral flaws of utilitarianism: it crushes the dignity and interests of minorities….
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I’m pleased that no one’s been chipping away at youngest’s resources in a big way. But it’s the gaps in the net that bother me. Where’s the laptop that she had provided, then we were told was not going to continue, then was restored on paper but we haven’t seen since last June? Why were so many people involved in a social skills workshop plan so that it became impossible to schedule in the time allowed?
The Ontario school system isn’t as “us vs. them” about special needs education, yet, but it’s still a huge timesink and cause for frustration. You have my sympathies with your very difficult task ahead!
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I think I’ve mentioned before that my husband participates in IEP meetings for students in the Chicago Public Schools. He’s always struck by the tension in the system: the very people tasked with delivering the services are also rewarded for keeping their budgets down.
The heart of the matter is indeed the fact that funding comes from local sources, where it can’t adjust to absorb cost as the population shifts.
I just hate what happens to American education during a time of scarcity. To see everyone so obviously fighting for their own kids (and only their own kids) is dispiriting.
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My friend the grade-school principal says that special ed is why charter schools are bad — that no one wants to include special ed kids, and gradually the charters suck all the money away, leaving the neglected and special ed students in the public school playing with sticks.
Well, those kids are just going to hold you back when you’re trying to race to the top.
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“My friend the grade-school principal says that special ed is why charter schools are bad — that no one wants to include special ed kids, and gradually the charters suck all the money away, leaving the neglected and special ed students in the public school playing with sticks.”
I wonder. I was in DC (which is charter central–38% of DC public school students are enrolled in charter schools) last week and had a chance to talk in depth with an old parent buddy about developments at our old school. Over the past few years, DC has renovated a building next to our old non-charter public school, and created the new combined Hyde-Addison Elementary School with both non-special ed and special ed children.
http://www.hydeelementary.org/Our_School.cfm?subpage=384486
Part of the deal in DC is that they are trying to reclaim special ed students from the private schools that previously a lot of DC special ed students have been going to at city expense. Also, as I recall, the school went for the special ed partnership in order to save Hyde, which was in some jeopardy of being closed because of its small size. Hyde-Addison is still a work in progress, but if anything, it looks like competition (from charters and private schools) has helped DC improve its game, or at least get much more ambitious about what it is offering to DC families.
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I think you are right that school officials want to minimize the amount of services they provide to cut costs. However, I also think that parents often expect the world for their kids. Wouldn’t most of us like our kids to get more services? Heck, most neurotypical kids even would do better with more one-on-one attention! It’s a shame that there’s no good way to objectively determine what a particular child really NEEDS to make his/ her education on par with peers’ rather than what parents WANT for their kids. And unfortunately, public schools are not set up to give most parents what they REALLY want.
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Good therapy can make the difference between an individual functioning independently in society versus a life-time of institutionalization and further cost to society. I think most parents want that for their kids, and I wouldn’t describe that as a frill. Read what kind of services are given in the Netherlands.
The problem is that parents have gotten into the position of pleading with an individual district and marginalization from the community. There should be a certain standard of care with federal guidelines and federal funding, so I don’t have to explain to someone why my kid needs more speech therapy.
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Good therapy can make the difference between an individual functioning independently in society versus a life-time of institutionalization and further cost to society.
So can a good education for kids with more typical brains. However, many public school districts would not want judged on the degree to which they have provided the students with a foundation for a functioning independent life.
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“However, many public school districts would not want judged on the degree to which they have provided the students with a foundation for a functioning independent life.”
This is just knee-jerk anti-public school sentiment. Is there a public school whose mission statement is “We want to provide students with an inadequate foundation for a functioning independent life?”
Schoolteachers may not want to be judged by how well students actually acquired the learning required for a functioning life, but that’s certainly not the same as planning and trying to provide that education.
I reject the primarily utilitarian argument for providing an education to children with special needs. Yes, for some, an appropriate education will mean that they will be less of a burden on society (but, as we know, that’s true for children whose only special need is that they’re not learning, for whatever reason). But, the regulations for special needs children require us to provide the education independently of whether it’s going to result in less burden on society later on. Right now at least, it’s not a requirement that the educational intervention provide the child with a higher salary when they’re an adult (failing the “how good is a kindergarten class in dollars” test).
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There’s an incipient document out there that rates autism interventions, the National Atism Center’s National Standards Project. I first heard of it through a disabilities advocate, who was worried that establishing standards was going to result in reduced services.
That’s not the goal of the report, but establishing national standards for treatment would certainly result in some children getting fewer and some different services than their parents want (and think their children need).
The report supported a variety of behavioral interventions (behavior package) but rejected (for example) auditory & sensory integration therapy. Reliance on such a report could be good if it offers the appropriate service to more folks, without having to beg and plead with individual administrators.
http://www.nationalautismcenter.org/about/national.php
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“But, the regulations for special needs children require us to provide the education independently of whether it’s going to result in less burden on society later on.”
Yes, just so. Ultimately it is a matter of dignity for each and every person, not utility.
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Yes, utility is a bad argument, but it is one that we often have to fall back on, as we plead for services from our schools. Each parent is forced to become a moral philosopher, a legal scholar, and a supplicant. It’s truly insane.
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“The report supported a variety of behavioral interventions (behavior package) but rejected (for example) auditory & sensory integration therapy.”
I’m not surprised about auditory and sensory integration therapy getting rejected. There are a lot of other dubious therapies, although fortunately the scariest ones (like chelation) are not done in the school setting. In general, autism seems to be a magnet for quacks.
http://www.autism-watch.org/about/bio2.shtml
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“This is just knee-jerk anti-public school sentiment. Is there a public school whose mission statement is “We want to provide students with an inadequate foundation for a functioning independent life?”
“Schoolteachers may not want to be judged by how well students actually acquired the learning required for a functioning life, but that’s certainly not the same as planning and trying to provide that education.”
I think it is very fair to point out that public schools are not ragingly successful with average children, and that schools are happiest with the kids that don’t require a lot of teaching. To begin with, a big chunk of students drop out before high school graduation, and even for high school graduates, the value of a high school diploma has eroded to the point that a college degree has gotten to be a must-have even for low level clerical work. Furthermore, there is poor articulation between high school and community college. Joanne Jacobs writes:
“Some 60 to 80 percent of [community college] students are told to take basic-skills classes. Half of those referred to remediation never take a single college-level class.”
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2010/10/start-in-remedial-ed-end-in-remedial-ed/
My dad is in his second straight year of teaching remedial community college math, and it’s a really tough scene (although admittedly, a few of the worst case scenarios are homeschoolers). A lot of the students have math skills that are stalled at the early elementary level. My dad says that after teaching at this level, he knows that these students get ripped off on every loan they get. That’s a big part of providing students with an adequate foundation for a functioning independent life, and they don’t have it. They’re sheep for the salesman’s sheering, and the really sad thing is that the same is true of people much higher up the socioeconomic scale, as we have been discovering over the past three years.
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Came here via Twitter.
First of all, good luck on the IEP. I usually find myself trying to swallow my heart back down into my chest.
If you’ve not seen it before, I’ve found Dan Dage’s IEP guidelines series helpful — we featured his Writing Effective IEP Goals and Objectives: Suggestions for Teachers and Parents on The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism:
http://thinkingautismguide.blogspot.com/2010/07/writing-effective-iep-goals-and.html
LeftBrainRightBrain’s Sullivan took on misconceptions about special education budgets “encroaching” on general education budgets just yesterday:
http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2010/11/special-ed-students-could-bankrupt-districts/
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If we reject utility in gauging appropriate expense for special ed kids, what then is our yardstick? “What they do in Scandinavia”? This has proven again and again to not work in a culturally and socioeconomically diverse place like the States.
I’m not just throwing this out to make for argument; I really wonder how to determine what we need to devote to education. I even deal with this within our family’s budget. Our oldest daughter is quite obviously not being served by her current school, which has no gifted programs. We are trying to figure out if it’s worthwhile to add $800 a month to our family expenses to send her to a different school. This is not an easy conversation — retirement funds, ability to see extended family, definitely home maintenance budgets will be impacted by this decision.
The fact is these needs don’t exist in a vacuum. When it comes to budget, often it is a zero-sum conversation. Sad but true.
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“If we reject utility in gauging appropriate expense for special ed kids, what then is our yardstick?”
We have to think about utility, even just within the context of figuring out what to do for a particular child. I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to utility and efficiency in education, both with regard to time and money. The child (special ed or non-special ed) has only so many hours in school to learn how to do stuff, and may or may not be well served by spending those hours watching a video, building a castle out of sugar cubes, building a papier mache whale, doing the 20th hour of test prep, drawing pictures of biology vocabulary terms, having 90 minutes of reading practice rather than 45, etc. I’m not saying that all of those items on the list are bad (I think there’s a lot to be said for moderate use of educational videos), but I think schools need to be more mindful of the fact that time is the most limited resource, and if a child fails to learn reading or math facts at an appropriate time, her development is going to be stunted forever.
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Most schools aren’t serving regular ed kids very well. There’s no doubt about it. But that should be a separate discussion about what resources are given to spec ed kids.
The parents of spec ed kids are in a tough enough position as it is, without having to rationalize why they need services. And I’m not talking about us. I’ve been reading memoirs of people with severely affected kids and it’s whole different story. There are families who are prisoners in their own homes, are beaten up by their children, and are cleaning poop off the walls. Education or therapy or whatever you want to call it gives these kids a chance to be human. It also enables the parents to be human and not punching bags. This therapy is not cheap. The therapist are expensive and it’s very time consuming work. However, studies show that these therapies do work. A cancer victim doesn’t have to justify why he/she deserves chemo. The same should be true for these parents.
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It’s really annoying when my own blog eats my comments. Grr… Let’s try again.
Regular ed kids aren’t getting what they need from schools. There’s no doubt about it. But that discussion should be a separate discussion about the needs from spec ed kids. They really have unique needs.
I just finished reading two memoirs of parents with multiple, severely affected kids. We’re talking poop smears on the wall and violence. The parents are battered and are prisoners in their own home. Their kids need 9 – 5 services at the very least. They most likely need services in the evening and on the weekends, too. With the help, these kids still won’t go to college, but they will be more functional. The parents will have some sort of life, too. Maybe it’s a mistake to call it education. Maybe it’s really medical care. I’m not sure.
A patient with cancer doesn’t need to argue for chemo therapy. We just give it to him. Even if he smoked and drank and abused his body. We just give it to him. A parent of a spec ed shouldn’t have to make these pleas for help.
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I want to re-address my utility point. Rejecting the utilitarian argument for providing education to our child citizens doesn’t mean rejecting the idea of questioning the utility of a particular intervention or kind of education for an individual child. It means rejecting the idea that we offer education because we think the child will of some use to society later on, rather than in recognition of their membership in our common human society (independent of their utility to it).
I don’t think this will protect us from facing tough questions about the allocation of resources. One of my defenses of the Autism Standards task force was that they had supported some very expensive interventions, suggesting that they were not engaging in utilitarian bean counting because the evidence suggested they were helpful to the child. In the end, we have to address how common resources will be allocated.
An aside to Sam. This isn’t an issue I’d thought much about, until I read your article, is it almost 10 years ago? in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Your story of Aidan (who appeared to have medical conditions I was familiar with only from textbooks) was the start of my education.
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“Maybe it’s a mistake to call it education. Maybe it’s really medical care. I’m not sure.”
Yeah, I think it’s stretching it to put it under the umbrella of “education.” That’s slipping way into the custodial care column. That’s not an argument against it, it’s just not education.
About the discussion of utility vs. utilitarianism, I’ll put on my philosopher’s wife hat here and say that while utilitarianism is bad, bad, bad as a total answer to moral decision-making, discussions of utility are quite unavoidable. (In other words, while it is clearly wrong to murder a friendless stranger and then divvy up his organs between multiple more deserving individuals, it’s not wrong to buy warm socks for somebody because they need them.)
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spending those hours watching a video, building a castle out of sugar cubes, building a papier mache whale, doing the 20th hour of test prep, drawing pictures of biology vocabulary terms, having 90 minutes of reading practice rather than 45, etc.
Amy P, you need to enroll your children in your local public school ASAP. Your list of alternatives is far too narrow. How about, watching a Disney movie, state test prep, watching the same movie for the 3rd time in Health, spending an hour under a desk for (mandatory) school lockdown drill, or attending an anti(-bullying, -drugs, -youfillintheblank) rally in the auditorium. Our public school did do other things fairly well, but huge parts of the school year were effectively taken over by the politicians. Every new school safety initiative calls for a new committee, and a new school-wide activity.
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There are alternatives to utilitarianism – resource-based distributive justice is a start, which is close to impossible to debate politically in the US, given the bat-shit craziness of the Obama-is-a-Muslim-Socialist-Hitler right wing. Such a move would not give up on efficiency altogether. But it would recognize certain differences, such as:
“…ideally, social circumstances over which people have no control should not adversely affect life prospects or earning capacities. Some resource-theorists further argue that, for the same sorts of reasons, unequal natural endowments should attract compensation. For instance, people born with handicaps, ill-health, or low levels of natural talents have not brought these circumstances upon themselves and hence, should not be disadvantaged in their life prospects.”
That is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Distributive Justice,” section 4, “Resource-Based principles”:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/#Resource
Aside to bj: it is gratifying to know that Aidan’s story touched you. That article, which I suspect was from 1999 NYT, is here:
http://uselesstree.typepad.com/useless_tree/2005/07/i_am_going_to_b.html
I tried to HTML that link earlier, but I screwed up somehow…
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To distract the community from bigger problems in the school budget, the special ed kids have been painted as an enemy who take resources away from the regular kids. It’s a zero sum game. If you help the kid with Down syndrome, you take money away from the entire second grade class.
That’s the way they budget. There’s an inclination to spend right up to the levy limit, if possible. Our town finance committee proposed an escrow account in the school budget, to accrue funds over time to deal with sudden, expensive outplacements. The school committee declined to cooperate. The school system would have to lay off a teacher to fund the account. I suppose they preferred to live in fear of new families.
In an ideal world, it shouldn’t be a zero-sum game, but in practice, it is. It isn’t a separate budget (see the resistance to escrow accounts.) An expensive placement can mean larger class sizes, as that’s about the easiest ways to balance a school budget quickly. We’re in a “good” school district. Families in this district face school supply lists which can run from $30 to $80, depending on grade (not including graphic calculators.) There are bus fees, kindergarten fees, sports fees, activity fees–and no cap on the per-family total.
Our state Department of Education used to break out the “spending per student” and “spending per special education student.” They don’t do that anymore. I’ve heard people whisper behind their hands, “You don’t want to be known as a district which is good in special ed.” I think that’s a widely-held belief, which is an incentive to subtly limit the special-ed program. Don’t want to be “too good.” (As an aside, I think they’re mistaken. Even in this downturn, our property values have held up. The least expensive homes (shacks) are over $400,000. )
It would be more efficient for special ed diagnoses and reimbursements to be set by a central authority. It would be helpful if it were decided by people who had to spend the money on special ed therapies only, rather than people who had to run a school system as well. It would be appropriate for the people assessing the children not to work directly for the people running the district budget. It would be appropriate to means-test special ed spending. It would be lovely if the federal government picked up 40% of the tab.
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Sam, here is a link for you: Harrison Bergeron
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Distributive Justice, we got it!
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“For instance, people born with handicaps, ill-health, or low levels of natural talents have not brought these circumstances upon themselves and hence, should not be disadvantaged in their life prospects.”
So uncoordinated people should get pro basketball contracts, autistic people should get jobs in sales and customer service, colorblind people should work in graphic design, people with ADHD should work in accounting, people with severe skin problems should get modeling contracts, and the lion should lie down with the lamb? I think you’re immanentizing the eschaton, right there. It never has worked before and it’s not going to work now.
What I would suggest is that we have to recognize and work around people’s natural selfishness and acquisitiveness if we want to have a happy, functional society. Unfortunately, if we expect altruism 24/7, we’re going to wind up getting less altruism than if we only demanded it part of the time. To give an example, back during Soviet days, salaries were relatively flat (although there was hazard pay, higher pay for miners, etc.). Unfortunately, without the profit motive in manufacturing and state agriculture, there were shortages of food and most other things and workers compensated by stealing everything from work that wasn’t nailed down. Soviet-style equality didn’t make them lose the sense of needing to provide for their children and social circle, but it did make it nearly impossible to do so by legal means. In my opinion, it is far preferable for people to believe that they can work more and get more stuff, rather than believing that the only way they can get ahead is to steal and cheat.
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“Amy P, you need to enroll your children in your local public school ASAP. Your list of alternatives is far too narrow. How about, watching a Disney movie, state test prep, watching the same movie for the 3rd time in Health, spending an hour under a desk for (mandatory) school l——n drill, or attending an anti(-bullying, -drugs, -youfillintheblank) rally in the auditorium. Our public school did do other things fairly well, but huge parts of the school year were effectively taken over by the politicians. Every new school safety initiative calls for a new committee, and a new school-wide activity.”
Cranberry, you beat me. By the way, I should mention that the word “l*o*c*k*d*o*w*n” in conjunction with the word “school” seems to trigger a lot of pervy Asian spam. I’m still periodically having to scrub down a short blog post I wrote years ago about a l*o*c*k*d*o*w*n at my kids’ school.
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Amy,
Why are you jumping to extremes (I’m not sure if Dave S. is as well, or if he’s just joking around….)? How do you get from “…not be disadvantaged in their life prospects…” to “uncoordinated people should get pro basketball contracts…” Your comment suggests a rather perverse prejudice.
What “…not be disadvantaged in their life prospects…” could reasonably mean is that disabled people would not face life prospects significantly worse than readily available economic and technological resources might allow. You know, like lousy housing in isolated and run-down group homes. Or inadequate health care. The invocation of a dystopia of extreme leveling, with a reference to the Soviet Union thrown in for good measure, demonstrates a clear ignorance of resource-based distributive justice. Please learn before you criticize.
In my own case, insurance companies attempted to deny my son, who could not feed himself or be fed by mouth, the special, and expensive, feeding formula he needed. They claimed it was “medically unnecessary.” This is not about “Soviet-style” equality, but a fairly basic human dignity and decency.
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I am sorry to have used that word in connection with school, Laura. Amy P, I had no idea. I wish the state didn’t require the drills.
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Ack. More spam. That’s all I need.
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Sam,
To be disabled is to be disadvantaged. That’s basically a tautology, which is probably why dave s. and I were puzzled.
When I bring up the Soviet Union, it’s not as a bogeyman or anything remotely dystopian. By the 1960s or so, it was more or less an OK place to live (as long as you weren’t a poet with no visible means of support, or a Jew, or what have you). I put in a decade or so of my life studying all things Russian and lived and worked in post-Soviet Russia for a bit in the Yeltsin era, so my mind turns very readily to Russia. The US is very similar to Russia, both being large (both in population and physical size), ethnically diverse, rich in natural resources, and being closely tied to but not part of traditional Europe, so I think it makes a lot of sense to treat the two countries as being members of the same class, quite a bit more so in fact than comparing the US to some tidy little Scandinavian country and wondering why we can’t do things the same way.
I’m sure you’ve been through a lot. I certainly agree that the concept of a health insurance company (as currently executed) is a very strange one. You and your employer pay into it, and then at some later date, they pay for your medical care (or don’t). That’s not a good model. On the other hand, neither is creating one big insurance company (i.e. the feds) and having them take in money and pay it out (or not). That just replicates and exacerbates the flaws in the previous system.
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Yes, to be disabled is to be disadvantaged. But it is not a tautology when that disadvantage is compounded over time when it does not have to be. That Aidan required special and very expensive food was an expression of his disability. That the insurance company attempted to deny him the funds for that food was a compounded, and unnecessary, and, to my mind, immoral disadvantage. His disability brought added disadvantage, one that I myself have never faced. Since I am not an expensive insurance case, no such attempts have been made to deny me coverage. That is the problem we are talking about here: how initial inequalities are made worse by unjust restrictions of resources. Aidan was additionally disadvantaged because he was disabled.
This is why your other response rankled so much: no one is expecting perfectly equal outcomes. That is absurd. We simply ask for adequate access to resources so that the initial disadvantages of disability are not made worse than they have to be (given therapeutic and technological and medical possibilities) and that ultimate inequalities are not unduly pronounced.
And while I respect your expertise on Russia, I would have to argue that, given the history of the twentieth century, it is not politically in the same class as the US. Its invocation in this context is bogeyman-ish…
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They knew that he needed extra help. They discouraged me from going to a neurologist, who would have given us that very important diagnosis. When I was in distress about his education, they told me to stop worrying and get a manicure.
I’ve seen this happen to friends. It’s dangerous to bond with the Sped administrators. The teachers are subject to other pressures. The parents eventually figured out that their children needed more therapy, but there was a delay, sometimes for years. It’s hard, because these are the same people responsible for your child’s welfare every day. Trust, but verify, perhaps?
I wouldn’t dismiss auditory & sensory integration therapies out of hand. A friend swears by them for her two children. If autism is really “the autisms,” i.e. a collection of genetic and environmentally-influenced disorders with many shared behavioral systems, there may well be some children “on the spectrum” who are helped by any particular therapy. I don’t know how we could construct a study of the efficacy of certain therapies, when we don’t yet know which children share the same autistic characteristics. If it’s a collection of disorders, each of which characterize 3% of the pool, how do you identify successful therapies? After all, insulin is a life-saving treatment for diabetes, but doesn’t do anything for lupus.
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“I would have to argue that, given the history of the twentieth century, it is not politically in the same class as the US.”
We could say very similar things about Germany, and yet people don’t hesitate to admire lots of stuff about Germany (educational system, health care, manufacturing, industrial policy, transportation, environmental policy, etc.) and want to transplant them to the US.
We have wandered pretty far from special education, though.
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Sam, have you written anything about the problems getting food from the insurance company for Aidan or resources from the school? Also, looking for political or moral justifications for why society should pay these services? Need citations, please.
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“If it’s a collection of disorders, each of which characterize 3% of the pool, how do you identify successful therapies? After all, insulin is a life-saving treatment for diabetes, but doesn’t do anything for lupus.”
Well, in medical literature, you have to have an independent method of identifying those 3% who will benefit from the therapy. That’ concept, of individual differences, is discussed in the NAC NSP report. It’s not a useful concept until we have a way of identifying those who might be helped. Why? Because identifying those people the way you have anecdotally (a parent swears that sensory integration therapy, or oculomotor exercises, or brain boost, or whatever helped *their*child) can’t work statistically. If you identify the group based on the perceived (or even real) success of the therapy, and it only helps 3% of the population, well that’s within the standard for most statistical tests. If you try a 100 therapies, 3% of the kids will be “helped” by one of the therapies, through pure randomness.
That’s why insulin for diabetes works — because we can identify diabetics with a blood test, and then administer the treatment. When we can identify the type of autism that might benefit from a type of therapy by a particular set of symptoms, or a genetic test, or a blood test, or an MRI, or an fMRI, then we can justify a therapy that only helps 3% of the people.
(and, I should be clear — the NSP classed sensory & auditory therapies as ones where there were no identifiable studies that showed significant improvements, within the group of studies they found adequate to address the question. They did not class it with therapies that caused active harm.)
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It cannot be overestimated how much these questions affect the schools. Special education and supplementary services are literally a larger portion of the budgets of many district than all general education classes.
There are two conclusions you have to draw:
a) The US has made a sustained commitment to special education that is in many ways commendable. My nephew with Asperger’s would have gotten better treatment in the States than he did in the Netherlands.
b) This commitment draws resources and attention away from educating most children. My niece (the nephew’s sister) got a better education in the Netherlands than she would have at any public school in the US I’ve encountered.
The passion of the constituencies behind special education makes any attempt to rationalize (yes, ‘ration’ is in that word) the services offered highly unlikely. But the fact is that the public is wildly misinformed about where the money goes in schools.
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Actually our school budget is completely transparent, and while it is true that every dollar spent educating a child with special needs is a dollar not spent on a typically-developing child, so too are the dollars spent on high-school football and the math team and dozens of other line items in the budget.
I believe it is morally reprehensible for parents of children with special needs to be told that their child bears the burden for the school’s financial challenges. It is morally reprehensible for school administrators to deny children the therapies they need to achieve their potential, in a context where they are (as Sam points out) already disadvantaged by their disabilities.
And as a side note, our kids go weeks at a time without watching a single video, attending a single assembly, or being subjected to a single non-academic piece of curricular instruction. And yet the district still faces a broad-based racial achievement gap that disgraces all of us in this community.
Stereotypes and broad generalizations make for pithy comments but offer a poor picture of what life is like in the tens of thousands of different school districts around this country.
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“b) This commitment draws resources and attention away from educating most children. My niece (the nephew’s sister) got a better education in the Netherlands than she would have at any public school in the US I’ve encountered.”
This presupposes that US schools know what they’re doing, they just need more money to do it. I think that’s highly debatable. Although a lot of people are going to chime in right now and tell you how much they LOVE their US schools, I think the basic problem is that a lot of US schools don’t know what they need to be teaching children or how to teach it (math instruction being the clearest example of this phenomenon). Parents who can make up for the deficiencies, and that’s where the class and racial issues that Jody mentions show up–if you don’t have a parent who is available and capable of figuring out what is lacking in the school curriculum and doing something about it, you’ll fall farther and farther behind. So the school, rather than being an engine of equality, drives inequality.
(Here’s where I confess that despite being happy with the Singapore Math that my 3rd grader does at school, we do have a pretty strong home math program going at home, both informally over dinner (my husband) and formally with Kumon workbooks (me). However, we’re not doing the same stuff my 3rd grader is doing at school. She can do her math homework all by herself, with no questions in my direction, which is not generally true.)
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“Special education and supplementary services are literally a larger portion of the budgets of many district than all general education classes. ”
Cites please? I believe this is clearly and demonstrably not true in our own district. Which district do the special education (and I don’t know what you’re counting under supplementary services) cost more than the general education?
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I just looked at our town’s school budget and though I did a quick scan and quick math, not an exact accounting, all expenses labeled Sped came out to about $3m out of an $18m budget. That included faculty, staff, Sped admin, out-of-district placements and transportation.
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Nationawide, the ratio spent on special education services seems to be 12%. The nationwide proportion of the school population served under IDEA is about 14% and that subgroup of students account for about 20% of the budget.
http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/individuals-disabilities-education-act-cost-impact-local-school-districts.
These numbers simply don’t reflect a “crisis” of any kind in SpEd funding generally.
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In Pittsburgh, $62 million goes to special ed, out of an instructional budget of $277 million (so 22%).
But it’s muddied by the fact that Pittsburgh (and maybe most districts?) define special education as “students with physical, cognitive, social or emotional disabilities as well as students
with speech, hearing, and vision disabilities, or gifted students served by the District.”
In Fox Chapel schools (inner suburbs of Pittsburgh), it’s $10 mil out of a $41 mil instructional budget (24%).
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These numbers simply don’t reflect a “crisis” of any kind in SpEd funding generally.
As I read the report, it’s 20% of the overall budget (“total spending on elementary and secondary education”), but as I read Jacob’s post, he was talking about percentage of instructional costs (“general education classes”).
If on average 20% of the total budget is going to special ed, it wouldn’t suprise me that in more than a few districts it’s close to 50% or more of instructional budget (for example, in PPS only 44% percent of the budget goes to instruction — over 10% goes to debt service alone!).
None of this is normative — I don’t have any strong opinions on what the right number is. I just realized that Jacob was right, and I wasn’t really sure how the money was split in the districts of interest to me.
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“it’s close to 50% or more of instructional budget (for example, in PPS only 44% percent of the budget goes to instruction — over 10% goes to debt service alone!).”
But, we’ve yet to hear of any districts where we get to greater than 50% even normalizing to the smaller “instructional budget” number. Your Pittsburgh numbers don’t meet that number.
I’ve never been comfortable with those calculations, anyway, which try to assign different jobs that serve for the function of the school to different budgets. Our local budget does separate a capital budget from an operational budget, but I’ve never found the numbers that try to separate “overhead” from “instruction” to be meaningful, just data massage.
I’m still waiting for a report of a district where the SpEd budget consumes more than 50% of any budget.
Not that I would necessarily think it would justify less spending if there was one — but I do think that this particular factoid needs to be supported without something other than raw assertion.
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Oh, and the 20% number is including the “general ed” dollars spent on the “special ed” students, of course. So 20% of the budget is spent on 14% of a particular group of the students (in the national numbers).
I wonder how that calculation would look if it included other groups — for example, if we looked at the proportion of the budget spent on students who take AP Chemistry, or some other category.
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If one is interested in the figures, the Massachusetts Department of Education posts figures on their website. This page allows one to download “Direct Special Education Expenditures as a Percentage of School Budgets, FY98 to FY08.” (http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/schfin/sped/sped_exp_budget.aspx?ID=0 ) They’re Excel Spreadsheets.
On another page on the website, under district profiles, one can check an individual district’s per pupil expenditures, divided by category. If you compare “Direct special education expenditures” (teaching, other instructional, outplacements) from the link above to the online listings for “teaching” and “other instructional” headings in certain districts, yes, in some districts the expenditures for special education (including outplacements) approaches 50% of the overall budget for in-district instruction (excluding outplacements, which are listed under their own tag on the district’s page.) If you include expenditures on support services, Jacob H is correct, in some districts the sums spent on sped +support are more than 50% as large as the sums spent on in-district instruction.
You’re more likely to find such figures in the towns which spend over 25% of their overall budget on special education. The districts on the first link above which spend very little, and have small budgets, are often vocational high schools, which have selective admissions.
It’s fascinating that a few of the wealthiest towns in the states seem to spend little on sped. I don’t think that means the towns don’t have special ed services, just that if they can afford it, the parents pay for private schools. Weston, for example, spends only 12.9% of the system’s budget on Sped costs. Dover-Sherborn spends some 7% of its budget on sped, but the k-8 districts, Dover and Sherborn, each spend about 30% on special ed. I don’t think the sped kids don’t get services in the high school. Rather, I think the parents pay for them to attend specialty high schools.
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Nice data set.
“If you include expenditures on support services, Jacob H is correct, in some districts the sums spent on sped +support are more than 50% as large as the sums spent on in-district instruction.”
But I’m not seeing this. Is there some other place where the support services data is detailed? In the spread sheet you linked to, the total SpEd expenditures (A+B+C+D) seem to average to 20% of the operational budget. Is there some other number to add that I’m not seeing?
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If you experiment with documents on spending from this link: http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/schfin/statistics/function09_detail.aspx, you can download spreadsheets and summaries of district spending, or the state as a whole. You can also look at a district’s spending as compared to the state average, as a 3-year trend, and compared to a group of similar districts.
If you download the state as a whole, the report breaks down the categories of expenditures in greater detail. Thus, “Guidance, Counseling and Testing” contains “1) Guidance and Adjustment Counselors, 2) Testing and Assessment, and 3) Psychological Services.”
Likewise, “Pupil Services” includes, among others, “Medical/Health Services,” and “In-district Transportation.” It’s hard to compare apples to apples without knowing a district. Two districts may have school nurses and bus service. One town may have a few sped students who require intensive nursing services, and who are entitled to special transportation services.
For example, look at Watertown. Its sped expenditures in 2008 amounted to 27.8% of the entire budget, $10,113,122. That figure includes in-district instruction (“teaching” and “other instructional”) and the public and private school outplacements for SpEd. If you look at Watertown’s district profile, under the finances tag on the website, you’ll see that for “teaching” and “other instructional,” Watertown spent $16,923,434. Looking at the percentages on the website, 27.8% of the entire budget is devoted to SpEd expenditures. Only 40% of the entire budget is devoted to “classroom and specialist teachers” and “other instructional.”
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We’ve actually had a remarkably good time with the IEP process – our district uses them to think carefully what our ADHD kid needs, they’ve had him with teachers who have generally been pretty smart about it.
The district has lots of money, wants to be well thought of, our guy is not all that expensive and he’s kind of charming, his teachers like him generally. So that all encourages a good outcome. But we are pretty happy campers.
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So here’s the (preK-12) district I used to teach in, for 2008-2009:
Regular Instruction (Including Materials), 19894621
Special Education Instruction, 4932983
Basic Skills/Remedial, 1186144
Bilingual Education, 636395
Speech, OT, PT, Related Extraordinary Services, 1788518
Guidance, 1534080
Child Study Teams (Handles IEPs), 1987272
Health Services 823,420
Tuition (to Private Schools), 3168819
Improvement of Instructional Services, 1730242
School Administration, 2513675
General Administration, 694850
Technology Services, 1426540
Operation and Maintenance, 6902083
Student Transportation, 2726750
Total 51946392
That’s 38% for regular instructional personnel, and 49% for all instructional personnel, roughly.
a. There are lots of conclusions you can draw, but one I do not believe is justified by this one small slice of data is, “the reason schools cost so much is because teachers make too much damned money,” which seems to be a common point of contention among the glitterati these days. It is more accurate to say that schools are set up in a way that requires a huge number of personnel, many of whom are not directly involved in instruction.
b. It should also be kept in mind that it is not as though funds for regular instruction are not benefiting students with IEPs as well. At least 30% of my students had IEPs, and I certainly was doing my darned best for them as well as for the other 70% of my students.
c. Given these numbers, it is ludicrous that districts (at least in my state) are almost all cutting out all funds for school-financed field trips, or consumable science supplies, or fixing up decaying classrooms, or lots of other stuff that makes learning more pleasant and possible. We have set up our schools in such a way that an excessive amount of investment goes into supplementary personnel whose job it is to shuffle papers and not enough investment goes into making schools exciting, dramatic, engaging places to be, or to giving kids a chance to see what lies outside of the classroom.
d) There is a range of special needs. There are students who need unique services. There are students who have a significantly distinct brain chemistry in a way that requires dramatic accommodations if they are be successful in school. As I said earlier, there are definite positives to our commitment to educating students with special needs. But there are also many students who are not successful in our schools, because their classes are boring, because they have trouble staying organized, because their teachers have trouble coordinating with their parents, because they hate sitting and writing stuff down hour after hour after hour, because of any number of reasons that doesn’t require any neurochemical abnormality. Some of those students end up with IEPs, some of them do not. More importantly, if you happen to be the kind of person for whom sitting in a desk hour after hour after hour, when you are five years old or when you are thirteen, is just not a perfect fit, it doesn’t mean you are abnormal. Given the conditions under which humans evolved, you probably are closer to the norm than the kid who just loves sitting and answering questions year after year. But we’ve set up our society such that it’s really hard to be economically independent without an extraordinarily high tolerance for school, and that’s a shame. We should be looking at the very large number of kids for whom our schools don’t work, and think about whether this model (sitting, taking notes, answering questions, taking tests, repeat for the next fifteen years) is really the only possible one we can think of.
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Good special education is expensive. There’s no doubt about it. 99% special ed kids aren’t the future mechanics of the world. Most of them are kids with cognitive or neurological differences. They need more assistance. They need aides in the classrooms. They need speech therapy and physical therapy. All that is expensive, but good therapy makes a HUGE difference. In our own case, I’ve seen dramatic changes when a smart teacher replaced a dumb teacher.
For most special ed kids, they don’t get those types of services. They give the slow kids an IEP and put them in a “special skills” learning class, where the teacher treats them like morons and doesn’t challenge them. They get less homework than the other kids. They get further and further behind the other kids, until they finally drop out of high school.
I really hate “the special ed kids drain money away from the regular kids” debate. It’s a false trade off. It’s often made by administrators who have untidiness that they want to hide. Like all those laptops that they provided to our high school students in our town? Yeah, test scores went down after they distributed these free laptops. No study has ever shown a correlation between laptops for each student in a classroom and academic success. None. Or how about the fact that administrators are paid too much and do too little? I can keep going.
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And the other thing to keep in mind is that in our district, at least, there have been federal funds available ONLY for special education. (Oh, one more thing: that usually includes GIFTED education.) So yes, the special-ed budget can start to look a little larger by comparison, but that’s often because the administrators have found a way to fold instruction for LOTS of kids into “special ed” categories (graduated instruction in the classroom for example) in order to get federal and independent-grant dollars that wouldn’t be in the budget at all, otherwise.
I’m with Laura, I find this whole “special ed takes from basic instruction” debate based on a false trade-off. Never mind special education: we spend much more money instructing kids who come into school not knowing their alphabet than on the kids who do. (Every school in our district has literacy specialists, and they spend their time with the kids who need their services, not the kids who don’t.) Who would argue that that’s what the schools are supposed to do?
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I meant to write, who would argue that that’s NOT what the schools are supposed to do?
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“Like all those laptops that they provided to our high school students in our town? Yeah, test scores went down after they distributed these free laptops.”
Not surprising, but wow! 1000 students (for instance) X $500 per laptop = $500,000 to have scores go down. Bill Gates, call your office!
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“No study has ever shown a correlation between laptops for each student in a classroom and academic success.”
No study has ever shown a correlation between ballpoint pens in the classroom and academic success, either. Or xerox machines and academic success. Really, if we’re talking about the so-called “golden age” of education, shouldn’t we be going back to ditto machines?
Laptops are a technology, not a teaching method. We update technology because that’s what an advanced society does. Laptops aren’t “magic bullets”; they are simply the way we compose, research and communicate in the 21st century.
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I loved those ditto machines. Remember the smell of the ink? Instant high.
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Visiting day and boarding schools for our children, it’s striking that the most demanding schools, as a whole, have *less* visible technology than our local public schools. What they do have, though, they use much, much more effectively. That thoughtfulness may be determined by the different funding mechanisms. The private schools have the freedom to decide what they absolutely need, and can’t do without. If they invest in more technology, they often have to raise the money from donors, or cut something else. In the public schools, they can point to state guidelines about #s of computers per child as a measure of quality. (Never mind what the children might do with the computers.)
In our state, gifted programs do not count as special needs. If you look at the statewide trends document I linked to above, overall, spending on education has been increasing.
In our district, some spending which supports the special needs program has been officially deemed part of the general education program. It can be hard to track these figures. As a taxpayer, I would now favor more outplacements than “doing it in-house.” In the short run, it may seem that the district’s “saving money,” because they aren’t paying high specialty school tuition. However, when the outplaced kids hit a certain age, that tuition obligation stops–unlike the personnel the district might hire to “do it in-house.” The high private school tuition includes the cost of pension, insurance, and training. In addition, there can be a vast difference in quality of personnel between a school dedicated to treating one type of special needs diagnosis well, and a public school program which lumps many different kinds of diagnoses together in the same classroom. There’s a world of difference between a special-ed aide who took a weekend class in working with a certain diagnosis, and an educator who spent years working on a degree in working with the children, and who then works with dozens of them, over years.
I’ll just add that, in my personal circle of friends, I have the strong impression that at some point, our school systems shift from trying to remediate gaps or delays in children’s school skills, to hiding growing gaps and trying to buttress the students’ self-esteem. For example, if a reading skills specialist is working with your child who does not have an IEP, you should have that child privately evaluated at a reputable clinic. It may be that he only needs a little tutoring to grasp a skill or concept, but it could also be that the powers that be want to keep his performance just above the level at which you would ask questions.
Listen carefully to what teachers try to tell you. There may be pressure on them to not volunteer certain things, but a direct question may elicit an interesting response.
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At my private school, the principal considered photocopies to be a luxury. It was 1988 or so before teachers were allowed to photocopy a test or something. Otherwise, it was the ditto machine. I think toner was extra expensive in the early days.
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