Special education confidential: how schools use the "learning disability" label to cover up their failures - Industry Overview

Reason, Dec, 2002 by Lisa Snell

THE HANDMADE FLASHCARDS were not helping my nephew Clayton. My sister Linda confided: "He's not reading. We practice, but he can't remember the words the next time. He gets frustrated."

Although it seemed overwhelming, Clayton's problem was fairly simple. "If Clayton is reading the word cat," Linda explained, "he just says the letters c, a, t. He doesn't recognize the word." Clayton wasn't connecting the letters to the sounds they represent. Children often are taught the names of letters first, which can make it hard to learn how they're pronounced. For these kids, the letter c has no relationship to the sound k in cat.

Compounding the problem, Clayton's kindergarten teacher was giving him word lists to memorize, failing to recognize that he didn't know the basic letter sounds. She kept sending home new lists even though he hadn't learned the words on the previous ones. It's not surprising that Linda and Clayton were frustrated.

I was worried for Clayton because I know what happens to kids when they don't learn to read. Comprehensive research by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development shows that children who cannot identify word sounds in kindergarten often cannot read by third grade. If Clayton failed to learn the relationship between letters and sounds in kindergarten, chances are he would be assigned to special education by fourth grade, which would spell his doom in the public school system. He probably would never become a proficient reader. Despite attending a solidly middle-class school, rated 7 out of 10 by the state of California, Clayton could easily end up as yet another child labeled "learning disabled" because his school failed to teach him how to read.

This winter Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA),which dispenses $6o billion a year to school districts around the country. While there's no question that IDEA has provided legal protections and services for students with handicaps, it has also created perverse incentives that encourage schools to call kids disabled as a way of attracting more funding and masking instructional failures. Instead of restructuring the program to mitigate these unintended consequences, Congress is set to simply throw more money at the problem.

Disability As an Excuse

Nearly 12 percent of American students in kindergarten through 12th grade are assigned to the special education system. Children with severe disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism, blindness, and deafness, account for only a tenth of these students. The remaining 90 percent are described as suffering from conditions that are less obvious and harder to verify objectively, such as specific learning disability (SLD), speech and language delays, mild mental retardation, and emotional disorders. SLD is the most common label, accounting for more than half of all students covered by IDEA. SLD diagnoses, which have risen by 34 percent since 1991, are the main factor contributing to the dramatic increase in special education enrollments since 1976.

In a recent Education Week commentary, Manhattan Institute education analyst Jay Greene observes that the SLD category "has more than tripled from 1.8% of the student population in 1976--7 to 6.0% in 1998--9. All other categories of special education combined...have actually declined from 6.5% to 5.8% of the student population during the same period." Greene sees these trends as cause for skepticism about the validity of SLD designations. "If a general increase were truly underway in the proportion of students with learning problems," he writes, "then it should be evident in more than just one category of special education."

Federal law defines SLD as "a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest itself in imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations." To prevent overuse of the label, federal regulations stipulate that it be limited to students who show a "severe discrepancy" between their achievement in one or more subject areas and their intelligence, usually as measured by an IQ test. For example, a child who scores lower on a standardized reading test than on an IQ test might be classified as having a reading disability.

Even with these criteria, an SLD diagnosis remains subjective. In addition to the federal standard, there are 50 different state definitions of learning disability, and the methods used to determine intelligence vary widely. University of Minnesota education researchers James Ysseldyke and Bob Algozzine estimate that more than So percent of all schoolchildren in the United States could qualify as learning disabled under one definition or another. In a 1986 study, UCLA education psychologist Esther Sinclair and her colleagues applied five different formulas to a sample of 137 children. Those classified as learning disabled ranged from 4 percent to 28 percent.