Special ed is failing: Can we do better?

Fifteen percent of public school students have a disability that entitles them to special-education services, write Ashley Jochim and Alexander Kurz of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). That's nearly twice as many as when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was passed 50 years ago.

Yet, "the special education system is failing to provide the educational support students "need to succeed in school or life," they write on The 74.

Both have "watched our own children’s struggles compound due to their schools’ failures to provide the 'basics,' such as a high-quality curriculum, evidence-based instruction, orderly classrooms and a little extra academic support," Jochim and Kurz write. "These are the same things millions of students without identified disabilities also need — but that neither the general nor special education system reliably delivers."

Every year, more students are labeled, more money is invested, and yet the results remain the same: Millions of children unable to read, write or calculate proficiently.

CRPE's Unlocking Potential project aims at rethinking the system to meet the needs of students who struggle in school -- whether they have a diagnosis or not. It includes data on the expansion of disability categories and the disparity in who gets services and who doesn't.

Learning disabilities, autism and "other health impairments," which includes attention deficit disorder, have driven the rise in special-ed enrollment, Jochim and Kurz write in a policy paper. Diagnosis is subjective. "In 1976, just 1-in-4 students in special education were identified with a learning disability, OHI, or autism. As of 2023-24, more than 2-in-3 were."

A disability diagnosis entitles students to a "free and appropriate education," though parents often must fight for services. But students with the same learning issues and no diagnosis aren't entitled to help.

Jochim and Kurz want to entitle students to services based on their needs, not on a subjective diagnosis, writes Erica Meltzer on Chalkbeat.

"Imagine two elementary students." she writes. "One struggles to read because she has dyslexia. The other struggles to read because she received poor reading instruction. The first student is entitled to specialized instruction — after an expensive evaluation process. The second student is entitled to nothing."

Both probably need the same sort of reading instruction, Jochim tells Meltzer in an interview. Why not focus time, energy and money on treating the problem rather than deciding why the student can't read?

Special-education parents and advocates are very worried that the federal government will weaken enforcement of IDEA. "The paper comes as the Trump administration is considering moving special education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, and after hundreds of staff who worked in civil rights enforcement and special education were laid off from the Education Department," writes Meltzer.

Education reformers have treated special education as an untouchable "third rail" for too long, writes Checker Finn. He thinks CRPE has "a great diagnosis, but the wrong prescription."

Creating a "needs-based entitlement" to services wouldn't reduce the cost of identifying who gets help, Finn writes. It would "spur vastly more litigation" as a huge pool of parents would sue claiming their child's education was inadequate.

I wrote about three charter schools' approach to special education for a 2008 CPRE report. "There’s nothing special about how special education students are treated at Roxbury Prep," a Boston middle school, I wrote. "Most students don’t know who is officially classified with a disability and is entitled to an Individualized Education Program (IEP) and who is not. Everyone is mainstreamed and many students who don’t have IEPs get extra help."

“The reason why our special education program is successful is because our regular education is successful,” says co-director Dana Lehman. “We could designate most or all of our students as special ed."

. . . many of the accommodations typical of IEPs are standard procedure at Roxbury, says special needs coordinator Jamie Thornton. The school’s philosophy is that all students benefit from structure, monitoring, clear and repeated directions, and work that is broken into learnable chunks."