What am I doing on the sunny, cool morning in New Jersey? I'm researching the history and the cost of special education. I'm a fun, fun girl.
Here are some nice factoids:
- Prior to 1975, public schools were not required to educate disabled kids. As many as 2 million kids, received no education at all. The others were sent off to depressing institutions.
- Buoyed by the civil rights movement, in the early 70s, parents went to the courts to demand an education for their children citing Brown v Board of Education as precedent. The courts maintained that disabled children have the right to a free, public education in the least restrictive environment.
- In 1975, Congress passed the Education for all Children Act (later renamed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), which was intended to help cover some of the costs of educating disabled kids.
- Many believe that the feds intended to provide more support than actually happened.
- More kids than ever are getting the special education label. Between 13 and 14% of the general education population qualifies for special education.
- If you combine education and support services, the total bill for educating special ed kids is 19.1% of total education expenditures in the US.
- Costs have risen over time, mostly due to the increase of the special education population to include developmentally delayed kids.
- Localities are picking up the tab. The Feds pay for 9% of total expenditures, states pay for 45%, and localities pay for 45%. (There is, however, a huge variation among the states.)
Information gained from numerous sources, including the New America Foundation.
Apt. 11d 
“More kids than ever are getting the special education label. Between 13 and 14% of the general education population qualifies for special education.”
“If you combine education and support services, the total bill for educating special ed kids is 19.1% of total education expenditures in the US.”
If you combine those two facts, it doesn’t sound wildly out of line, unless the special education number doesn’t cover special education students’ share in total costs (building, lights, school secretary, etc).
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Yes, Amy, I was thinking the same thing.
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I guess I figured the federal share was higher for special ed. My mom was a Title something or other teacher and I thought that it was federal money.
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The numbers were interesting, but I am having problems comparable to Amy’s in determining what “counts.” Also, this may not be obvious to a casual reader, but it looks like a lot of the data you/they are citing is from the 1999-2000 school year, and some of it might be mixed together.
My best guess it that the numbers represent the “marginal cost” of education one extra kid, so her portion of the heating bill doesn’t count. The link to the SEEP report shows $12,474 for a special ed kid versus $6,556 for a “regular ed” student, for a ratio of 1.9 times more to educate a special ed kid. (Add in fixed costs to both, and you’d assumedly increase the total number, but lower the ratio.)
These are 1999-2000 numbers, though, so who knows what the numbers are now.
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Ditto to the “that doesn’t sound like a wildly disproportionate piece of the pie” sentiment.
Although I am in favor of increased federal funding, ideally paid for by taxing rich people and/or going to war less often. Dumping it all on local districts means that special needs kids from poor states and poor cities get the shaft, because a 19% slice of a crap pie is still not going to feed you lunch. (Or, I suppose, to overly extend the metaphor, we’d be talking about a 19% slice of an edible but extremely small pie, whereas in the richer districts the kids are getting their slices cut from something the size of a wagon wheel.)
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Sounds like it could be an AHR or Perspectives piece. To support your book once that comes out. 😉
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The numbers are old, but they say that the 19.1% number includes both the regular ed & SpEd costs.
“During the 1999-2000 school year, the United States spent $50 billion on special education “support” services and an additional $27.3 billion on regular education for disabled students ($77.3 billion in total).”
I can imagine that those numbers have changed, though, in 11 years, during a period when more students are being identified (and, I hope, served).
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As a fetus they were sacred, now they are just too expensive. What a country.
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“As a fetus they were sacred, now they are just too expensive. What a country.”
It’s actually the other way around vis a vis “sacredness”. 90% of US Downs babies are aborted if there’s a prenatal diagnosis. As you say, what a country.
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Yes, those numbers are old. I am just starting to wade through some very turgid and highly partisan papers. Yes, this is ripe ground for something better, though I’m not interested in writing for academic journals anymore.
Sorry, but you’ll probably get another post or two on this topic in the next week. You guys are my guinea pigs.
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You guys are my guinea pigs.
Are you hiring more rodents?
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The killer footnote from the Special Education section of my district’s 2011 budget:
2. Tuition costs for students placed in outside agencies and those attending cyber/charter schools will rise by approximately 17 percent, continuing a trend from the last several years.
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Bah, your district has more money than Oprah.
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“…attending cyber/charter schools will rise by approximately 17 percent, continuing a trend from the last several years.”
Why the heck should cyber/charter schools (I’m assuming that means online charters) get 17% more expensive?
By the way, speaking of things in education that look different once you have a little more information, Joanne Jacobs has a post on the no-effect-for-gifted-education study. Come to find out, the program used an extremely low cut-off for qualifying for the program:
“Students qualified as gifted based on high grades, teacher recommendations or scoring above the 80th percentile on a standardized exam. However, students with average academic performance — as low as the 45th percentile in reading and the 55th percentile in math — could qualify if they had disabilities or limited English proficiency or if they lived in poverty. About 20 percent of students were designated as gifted, an unusually high number.”
Here’s my suggestion for an alternate headline: “Average kids do average in enrichment classes.”
So much for the idea the quality of education research is improving. (On the other hand, if the kids with average math scores had super high reading scores or vice versa, carry on.)
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Why the heck should cyber/charter schools (I’m assuming that means online charters) get 17% more expensive?
I don’t know if they are getting more expensive, but I think they are getting more kids. You can hardly go to a kiddie event around here without them having a booth and a full page ad in the program.
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Laura: hire a guinea pig to talk up your book for you, then? I’m pretty sure you have a fair number around with academic memberships still.
Plus you could roast ’em up when they’re done! I hear guinea pigs are good eatin’. Google search brings up some recipes.
(I’d make a comment about standards of education research and innumeracy, but that just seemed low hanging fruit.)
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I love being a guinea pig.
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Why the heck should cyber/charter schools (I’m assuming that means online charters) get 17% more expensive?
Because they can.
This has been another edition of simple, etc.
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The innumeracy of education research is compounded by the problem of the innumeracy of individual school districts. After digging around some more for more solid numbers, it has become clear that nobody knows how much money goes to special education overall. Also, it is also difficult to make one accurate chart showing overall, nation-wide trends, because there are huge variations among the states. (If you are a special ed kid in Mississippi, you’re basically screwed.)
From the Fordham Institute (a conservative org):
“In this new Fordham Institute paper, analysts examine public data and find that the national proportion of students with disabilities peaked in 2004-05 and has been declining since. This overall trend masks interesting variations; for example, proportions of students with specific learning disabilities, mental retardation, and emotional disturbances have declined, while the proportions of students with autism, developmental delays, and other health impairments have increased notably. Meanwhile, at the state level, Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts have the highest rates of disability identification, while Texas, Idaho, and Colorado have the lowest. The ratio of special-education teachers and paraprofessionals to special-education students also varies widely from state to state—so much so that our analysts question the accuracy of the data reported by states to the federal government.”
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I wrote a longer reply yesterday, then scrapped it. Sped spending is hard to determine, because reporting standards vary. Our local district doesn’t count the multiple psychologists on staff as a sped expense, even though 90% of their time is devoted to testing, writing IEPs, and meeting with teacher teams and parents.
How to count expenditures is a tricky question. Some districts in our state are moving to a two-teacher, no aide model for instruction, to support mainstreaming. Doubling the number of teachers per class increases costs, but I don’t think that expense will show up as a sped expense. Some districts have renovated or rebuilt schools, to add space for sped services, such as tutoring and conferences. Again, that’s a capital expense.
The Massachusetts DOE has lots of info available online, especially if you poke about in the finance and administration sections of their district reports.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, that districts vary in their willingness to identify sped kids. The affluent districts are more likely to identify kids, because the parents in their districts are able to hire lawyers to fight for services. (The parents don’t always win, and at some point, it would make more sense to pay for a private school rather than lawyers’ fees.) The wealthiest town in our state spends very little on sped services in high school. I think there are sped kids living in town, but the parents just go private.
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“Also, it is also difficult to make one accurate chart showing overall, nation-wide trends, because there are huge variations among the states.”
But you could do one of those multi-colored charts with an individual line for each state. I suppose that works better in a digital version, where you don’t have to worry about the printing budget. (I hate it when people try to do charts with multiple lines in black-and-white and do stuff with shading and marking lines with triangles and circles, etc.)
“This overall trend masks interesting variations; for example, proportions of students with specific learning disabilities, mental retardation, and emotional disturbances have declined…”
I think there’s been a big shift in the chemicals that pregnant women expose their unborn babies to (alcohol, etc.), so the environmentally caused problems may be down. The decrease in lead also gets credited with a decrease in crime and behavior problems. Then there’s the dietary side of pregnancy. I’m not up to date, but they’ve added folic acid to grain products, discouraged pregnant women from eating too much fish, etc. It’s very paternalistic, but it seems to have been working.
“The ratio of special-education teachers and paraprofessionals to special-education students also varies widely from state to state—so much so that our analysts question the accuracy of the data reported by states to the federal government.”
That’s very interesting.
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…proportions of students with specific learning disabilities, mental retardation, and emotional disturbances have declined, while the proportions of students with autism, developmental delays, and other health impairments have increased notably…
Have the children changed, or have the diagnoses changed, in response to the services available for each category?
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“Have the children changed, or have the diagnoses changed, in response to the services available for each category?”
I think in some cases, autism might be misread as just being “slow.” One of my neighbors is a physics professor, and going just on appearance and his slow and mushy speech, you’d think that he was developmentally disabled.
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Specific learning disabilities may be in decline as a diagnosis in districts that have effectively instituted Response to Intervention.
There appears to be a reciprocal relationship between mental retardation (intellectual disability) and autism: as autism rates have gone up, MR diagnoses have gone down.
I’m not sure about emotional disturbance (ED) — it tends to be a more limiting label, so perhaps it is used leass.
Amy P: “slow and mushy speech” is not part of autism diagnosis.
Another wrinkle to the cost puzzle: litigation. Some districts count litigation costs (being forced by law to follow federal law, imagine that!) as SpEd costs, some don’t. Likewise, some districts spend a lot on litigation; others don’t.
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Liz,
My neighbor’s speech, dress and body language definitely read as “slow” to the casual eye. I really don’t know how to categorize him.
“I’m not sure about emotional disturbance (ED) — it tends to be a more limiting label, so perhaps it is used leass.”
I’d think that “emotional disturbance” is a label you use when you can’t think of anything more specific. If you had a more precise diagnosis in mind, you’d drop that one.
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I agree that the data seems to be an impenetrable morass and that any numbers that get reported are reported with a political purpose in mind (usually to show how the budget is being consumed by those “other” children.).
Nevertheless, I really would like to have those numbers. In the legal sense, the numbers aren’t supposed to make our decisions for us. But, even under the law, the state is not required to provide the “best” education, merely an appropriate education. I always worry that the very unequal playing field on which these decisions are made (the parents who can front the 75K private school bill while they pay to litigate to have the state pay it v the parent who has to manage with the best worst solution right now, this very minute) makes me think that a real attention to what it costs to provide “appropriate” is a necessary decision for us to be having as a community.
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“…any numbers that get reported are reported with a political purpose in mind (usually to show how the budget is being consumed by those “other” children.).”
It might turn out that if you had all of the numbers, it would turn out that the $75k was actually a bargain, and then sending an expensive child out of district was a really good deal. But we don’t really know.
Cranberry had some interesting thoughts on the accounting side upthread. I’d add that ideally, you’d want to figure out how much of staffers’ time a child is consuming. If a single kid with behavior problems is consuming 5% of the vice principal’s time, you’d want to calculate what 5% of the vice principal’s salary is, and then do the same for the child’s classroom teacher, and figure that in to the cost of educating that child.
“…makes me think that a real attention to what it costs to provide “appropriate” is a necessary decision for us to be having as a community.”
The costs are going to vary hugely from individual child to individual child.
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Special education needs lots of attentions, there are some organizations helping special people for their education free of cost, we must help these organizations.
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