Revamping special education

Public Interest, Summer, 2001 by Wade F. Horn, Douglas Tynan

It is questionable whether students who persist in defying rules despite such efforts should be included within the framework of special education at all. It is a fine line to distinguish between a psychiatric disorder that can be treated and criminal behavior that should be adjudicated, a distinction made even more difficult in the high school years.

Funding reforms

Currently, schools draw down special-education funds based on the number of students identified as having a qualifying disability under IDEA. As noted earlier, this creates an incentive to identify low-achieving students as disabled. If the current system resulted in substantial improvements in educational outcomes for these students, there would be less need for reform. But evidence is mixed at best as to whether student performance is enhanced by placement in special education.

One reform advocated by some is to move to census-based funding for special education. Under such a scheme, funding for special education would be based not on the number of children identified as in need of special education but on total student enrollment. Census-based funding has the advantage of providing schools with the flexibility to set up school-wide programs to enhance learning and good behavior. (Although the 1997 amendments to the IDEA allowed some movement in this direction, identification and classification remain the focus of the system.) Critics, however, worry that census-based funding provides schools with little incentive to provide the more expensive accommodations and services needed by the severely disabled, and does not necessarily lead to better results for students with disabilities.

Moreover, census-based funding does not take into account differences that may exist across school districts in the percentage of students with severe disabilities requiring intensive special-education services. An imbalance can occur, for example, when parents of severely disabled children move their children into a school district near a specialized medical facility. Even a quirk of fate can cause an overrepresentation of students with severe disabilities in some school districts. For example, a Pennsylvania school district of only 400 K-12 students includes a pair of severely autistic twins and a child with a severe head injury. Under census-based funding, such districts would be unfairly penalized financially. One remedy would be for schools to identify that relatively small group of children who have severe special needs and have state government help fund local programs for this population.

To increase accountability for improving educational outcomes for disabled students, funding could be based on the number of students who achieve the goals set forth in their Individual Education Plans, rather than simply the number of students identified as in need of special education. This, however, may result in the lowering of IEP goals. An alternative would be to use the current state-wide assessment tests and differentiate the scores of students in regular education from the scores of students in special education. Under the assumption that the purpose of special education is to improve the academic performance of these students, schools would be held accountable for measurable gains over time in the special-education population relative to those in regular education.