Special Education for Everybody?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 4, 2001 | by John Berlau

Sen. Jim Jeffords held hostage the president's tax cut to add $181.1 billion to the budget over 10 years for so-called `special education' of the disabled in a massive boondoggle.

With an evenly divided Senate that Republicans control nominally through Vice President Dick Cheney's tiebreaking vote, Jim Jeffords is an important player. A liberal Republican, the senator from Vermont has sought out opportunities to butt heads with President George W. Bush. He refused to go along with Bush's $1.6 trillion 10-year tax cut, calling it too large. Bush eventually found some Democrats willing to go for tax cuts totaling $1.35 trillion and the measure passed.

The latest dispute with the stubborn Vermonter involves federal funding for special education. This is an array of federally subsidized programs for students whom local school authorities diagnose as having handicaps of any kind that might affect school attendance or learning. One of Jeffords' biggest causes since coming to Congress in the mid-1970s has been to increase the share the federal government pays for special-education costs, much of which has been required by federal-court decisions. Since he became chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in 1996, federal funding for special education has been increased 174 percent and now is about $6 billion a year. Bush proposed a $1 billion increase for next year.

With every GOP vote needed, Jeffords saw his chance to demand a great deal more: An increase during six years of nearly 300 percent. Jeffords' "extortion amendment," as it has been called, passed the Senate without objection by voice vote on May 3. It will increase the federal government's share of special-ed funding by $2.5 billion each year to more than $21 billion in 2007. The cost over 10 years: At least $181.1 billion.

After that, it could balloon even more because the amendment makes special education an entitlement under the same mandatory-spending regime as Medicare and Social Security. Rather than deciding on an appropriate amount, Congress would be required to fund the program based on the number of students local school districts classify as physically, mentally or emotionally disabled.

Democrats and activists have charged that Bush doesn't care about this issue, saying he puts tax cuts ahead of disabled children. But before it commits to making special education a massive new entitlement, the Bush administration has insisted that it be studied for reform. The Jeffords amendment "would undermine fiscal discipline by removing the program from the appropriations process ... with no attention to improving educational results for these children," the White House says in a statement prepared for Insight.

Education experts close to Bush tell this magazine that too many children already are referred to special-ed programs after being labeled "learning disabled" because they haven't been taught properly, and that the referral does not assure they will catch up. The Bush people say the lure of more federal funds without reforms may tempt schools to put even more kids in special-ed programs without authentic focus on individual needs.

"You want kids who genuinely have special needs to receive the funding" a White House aide tells Insight. But "if a child is labeled `IDA'[Individuals with Disabilities] or `special ed' because they weren't given the right reading instruction, that's a travesty. We don't want that to occur."

Chester Finn Jr., an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration who advised Bush during his presidential campaign, says special education should have a "pretty fundamental rethinking" before it gets locked in with a massive increase in funding. "The existing program is flawed in enough ways that to pump it fuller with money is not going to do kids much of a service," Finn tells Insight.

Finn now is president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which teamed up in May with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a center-left think tank affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, to produce a compendium of scholarly studies and commentaries that contains a devastating critique of special education and a call for its reform. "America's program for youngsters with disabilities has developed infirmities, handicaps and special needs of its own," Fordham and PPI concluded. "Merely adding dollars to the current program will not reform it."

Jeffords says he is open to reform, but only after huge spending boosts. His spokesman, Erik Smulson, tells Insight: "For Jeffords, it's purely a funding issue. He does believe there need to be reforms; however that is a very complicated and time-consuming process." Jeffords insists on more federal funding to "relieve property taxes [and] give local control of education funds to the states and local education authorities.... It was a promise the federal government made 26 years ago."

The alleged "promise" was the "Education for All Handicapped Children Act," later renamed the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" passed by the radical post-Watergate Congress in 1975. It authorized Congress eventually to pay school districts up to 40 percent of costs for educating disabled children. Noting that the 15 percent the federal government now pays, the highest ever, still is far below the 40 percent the law authorized for the bye-and-bye, Jeffords calls it a "promise" and demands "full funding" at that level.