In too many school districts parents are told erroneously that no one knows what type of instruction works best to teach reading or math or that there are no textbooks that provide the necessary examples and explanations. Such statements contradict the Department of Ed’s own documents. Beyond a certain point inadequate instruction can produce learning disabilities in some kids. Taxpayers paid well in many cases for what turned out to be a bad deal for everyone.

To go back to the analogy above, some of these fallen sparrows were pushed. Very few learning disabilities are so severe that they must be dealt with in a residential program. For everyone’s sake though it needs to be an option in extreme situations. The mere threat of the crushing expense in an individual case may be the incentive some districts need to everything they can to remediate for most all students.

Margo, I know the law surrounding the IDEA. Note that I didn’t say anything about the law mandating inclusion — inclusion-at-all-costs is a trend, nonetheless. Some of the trend derives from parents wanting their kids in the typical classroom, and some probably derives from districts trying to cut costs and “resource rooms.” Yes, lots and lots of weaknesses in the current system — I agree and deal with them in my classroom — I’ve been through several service delivery models. Before I took over the AP program, I typically had 1/3 to 1/2 of my students covered under an IEP or 504 (I still have quite a few in my reg classes, but very few in AP, so sheer numbers have dropped.) I haven’t seen an IEP for ADHD since they dropped the funky OHI approach.

The idea behind an IEP is to address the individual needs of each individual; unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to do that well, by definition, in a large beaurocracy with lots of competeting interests.

The ruling affects only a narrow slice of students with disabilities, certainly not “every child with ADHD or every teenaged drug user.” The conditions under which a student with a disability may receive public funding for private education have been clear for some time–essentially based on the inability of the public district to meet their need. Previous court decisions have established that the law did not imply that in every case the student had to fail to be adequately served within the public system first, that other criteria than wallowing through inadequate services could apply. In other words, the school system doesn’t get to try to teach a blind kid to read text before determining that they should be taught braille, and sent to an appropriately equipped entity to do so, if the school has none.

What this case established was that in a narrowly defined set of circumstances–that is, where the district had refused to provide services at all–parents could be reimbursed for the cost of private education, after establishing through the courts that their student had need and that the district had failed to meet that need. I would love to believe that this ruling has wide-ranging impact, because I believe that schools have an obligation to teach every child, and to do so with quality. But, I see the reality of too many kids written off too easily. I am glad for the precedent that was set here–but the reality is that it isn’t likely to affect most of us. Only those families in a very limited set of circumstances, who also have the resources to front the money and go through a risky due process for reimbursement.

Our district is already cutting the budget for regular education, to support special ed costs. Our district practices inclusion to an unusual degree, so greater inclusion will not salvage the public education system. This spring, the school board decided to cut teachers, and AP sections, rather than try to convince the voters to agree to a property tax increase.

Private schools will benefit from this ruling, not only the schools which enroll students with learning disabilities. All private schools will benefit as the public schools cut services, as it will drive students out of the system.

But, in my experience, there’s a lot of mythology and uninformed opinion floating around the average school with regard to IDEA. At points I have been told that my son could not participate in things such as “interventions,” legally mandated for students who either did not pass, or were at risk of not passing state assessments because of his identification. This was considered to be “double dipping.” Neither that wording, nor that concept, derives from the law–but belief in it was widespread and remained so until the first year that the district was held accountable for AYP for kids with disabilities.

I believe that there are still teachers and principals in my district who believe that regular education teachers cannot be compelled to teach students with disabilities. While that may be true as a practical matter (as in, you can put the kid in the class, but you cannot make the teacher teach them), it is not a legally, or contractually protected right, as many seem to believe.

An additional myth is the belief that IDEA requires “inclusion at all costs.” The word inclusion is not contained in the law. What the law does specify is a right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment(LRE). Both FAPE and LRE are open to interpretion, in each individual case, and districts demonstrate wide latitude in interpretation. My district still resists inclusion as a concept. The moved years ago to rename the “special ed” rooms “resource rooms,” which would imply that they are somethign of an adjunct (resource) to the regular classroom. They are not. At high school level there are special education teachers purporting now to teach subjects like “biology” and “algebra” to students with special needs. Many have been teaching low level science and practical math for years. Because the LRE is supposed to be determined by the “services” that a student needs and where they can best be delivered, the district blankets in “smaller classroom size” as a needed service. The kids who are “included” are pretty much “disabled” in name only–that is, they receive no, or very little in the way of services in the regular classroom.

My suspicion is that in this particular case, the student’s needs could have been addressed far better and at lower cost had the district been willing to provide services much earlier. There are some cases in which it is more effective and efficient for the district to purchase services in the form of a private education. I think that this is frequently true with extreme autism, where the districts have just lacked the resources to develop adequate programs for a fairly small segment of the population. I would also say that most districts would be happy, in a heartbeat, to contract out the eduction of many emotionally disabled students, just to get them away.

I want to see the people who complain about the cost chime in on this one. Do you think $5,000/month for one child is a reasonable cost for you to bear as a taxpayer?

Probably not for every child. For one-and-only-one child it just doesn’t matter. Kinda like spending $1M on medical care for one person doesn’t matter, but we can’t do this for everyone.

California has about 4.8 million K-12 students. Currently, California spends about $10K/year per student (probably dropping a bit due to the current budget crunch). This works out to a bit under $50B/year for the state, and this consumes about 40% of the state budget.

Going to $5K/month for a 10 month school year gets us to $50K/year for that student. So this one student is consuming the education budget of 5 average students.

If the state spends this amount on all the students, we wind up with a state education budget of about $250B/year, which is approximately 2 times the current state *total* budget. Current California voting on tax increases suggests that the California taxpayers are very much opposed to any non-trivial increase in state taxes, so doubling the state peak income tax to ~20% and pushing the average state sales tax to ~16% (which would, maybe, allow us to double the state tax collection) is pretty much out of the question.

I think the big question is: How common is this sort of thing? And how common will it be in the future?

The trick here is that the $50K/year for this kid doesn’t come out of thin air. The money gets diverted from some other use, in this case probably the education budget for the district. Two kids like this in one district means that the district loses one teacher (more or less). Four kids mean that the district loses two teachers. Etc. At some point, educating these kids negatively impacts the education of the remaining kids in the district (because the resource loss starts to matter).

So, how many of these kids do we have? A few hundred in a large state probably don’t matter. Tens of thousands will.

-Mark Roulo

FWIW, I do wonder about the whole story. ADHD doesn’t usually trigger an IEP.

FWIW, I do wonder about the whole story. ADHD doesn’t usually trigger an IEP.

I think it’s not paying for the disability, it’s paying for an education.
What is weird is that schools are obliged to provide an actual education to disabled children, but not to children without disabilities.

Bill–better to have the streets filled with “fallen sparrows,” right? Better to be tripping over unemployed illiterates than enable them to work, right?

I have at times had the opportunity to interview and hire people for positions. It is impressive the number of “fallen sparrows,” that are now considered to be recoverable, who before were left to be “a burden” on either their family or society. I recall particularly a former truck driver who was severly disabled in an accident. She had been retrained to provide clerical (data input) support using voice-activated software.

Last night I was watching the review of Michael Jackson’s life. The comment by one of the brothers in an interview at a young age concerned whether Michael had always been the star. The response was that, of course, he was their “front,” their lead singer. They put him out front because he had so much energy. I had to think–if he had spent most of his days in regular school instead of performing, he might have been diagnosed as ADHD–just another fallen sparrow.