Next Media Animation looks at a narcoleptic college student who claims her British university didn’t give her enough assistance.
Kids on welfare: The disability dilemma
July 28, 2011 by
Disability checks for children have become The Other Welfare, reports the Boston Globe. Low-income parents can boost their income by getting children on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), often for learning and behavioral problems such as hyperactivity. That encourages parents to get their children on drugs such as Ritalin.
Qualifying is not always easy — many applicants believe it is essential that a child needs to be on psychotropic drugs to qualify. But once enrolled, there is little incentive to get off. And officials rarely check to see if the children are getting better.
Preschoolers with delayed speech make up the fastest growing category of new SSI claims, reports the Globe. Once on SSI, they’re unlikely to leave, even if they outgrow their speech problems. Their disability status may lower expectations for their school performance.
Teens on SSI avoid taking jobs for fear of losing the payments. (Under federal law, someone who earns above a minimum amount is considered no longer disabled — even if the worker really is disabled.)
SSI for children was designed for parents raising kids with serious physical disabilities that create extra costs. But it was expanded in the ’80s. Now the majority of children on SSI are not physically disabled, reports the Globe.
The series won the 2011 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
With two Mercury News colleagues, I won the Casey Medal back in the day for our welfare series. Our teen mother supplemented welfare with an SSI check for her older son, who’d been born very early and was expected to be disabled. When he was four, the pediatrician praised the mother for her excellent care, told her the boy was developing normally and reported his healthy status to SSI. Without the extra money, the mother decided to get a full-time job instead of trying to complete a community college degree. The economy was booming and she’d done well in a work-study job, so she probably succeeded. I hope. All her phone numbers went bad and I wasn’t able to reach her again. She was 19.
Educating all the children
January 2, 2010 by
Utah has its first high school designed for autistic students, reports the Deseret News (via Education News). Spectrum Academy is extending its K-8 program.
Such specialization runs counter to a federal and state push over the last decade to give children with learning disabilities equal access to a mainstream public education.
To comply with federal law, schools “offer special education courses but place autistic children in traditional classrooms as frequently as possible.” But some parents think mainstreaming doesn’t benefit their children.
Education News interviews Miriam Freedman, author of Fixing Special Education. Among her 12 steps for improving the system is ending the reliance on a medical model for labeling students with learning problems.
A child may be labeled with a specific learning disability (SLD) in one school district, emotionally disturbed in another, or simply as an ‘at risk’ student in the third. In the first town he gets a panoply of individualized special services, in the second, a panoply of totally different services, and in the third–none. This, in spite of the fact that we know that diagnoses are not exact, and far too often, are based on attributes unrelated to the child, such as socio-economic realities, savvy parents, or zip codes.
Freedman also talks about reducing paperwork and litigation so teachers can focus on teaching.
Disabled students post higher scores
November 17, 2009 by
Test scores improved for students with disabilities from 2005-06 to 207-08, according to a new study by the Center on Education Policy.
The study found that students with disabilities showed progress at all levels of proficiency in 4th grade, where the median percentage scoring at the basic level or above was 71 percent. Most states showed more gains than declines among students with disabilities over the three-year period.
No Child Left Behind was a “strong factor” in the gains, said Jack Jennings, CEP president.
It’s difficult to evaluate disabled students’ progress, CEP said, because of “the often-rapid changes in the number of test-takers that some states reported in that subgroup from year to year” and changes in how many students take alternate assessments rather than the regular state exam.
Despite the progress, the gap between disabled and mainstream students remains wide.
Special ed vouchers cut disability diagnoses
August 19, 2009 by
Public schools identify fewer students as disabled if disability qualifies kids for a voucher to attend another school, concludes a Jay Greene-Marcus Winters’ study released by the Manhattan Institute.
. . . the vouchers check public schools’ financial incentives to identify more students as disabled. Public schools may get additional subsidies when they shift more students into special education, but if they then make students eligible for special education vouchers, they risk having those students walk out the door with all of their funding.
“Nearly 1 in 7 students nationwide is now classified as having a disability,” Greene writes on his blog. The 63 percent increase isn’t caused by a plague of disabling illnesses. It’s about the money.
A previous study found states that pay more for each student classified as disabled showed much higher rates of growth in special education enrollment than states that changed funding formulas to end financial incentives for identifying children as disabled.
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