SENTINEL EDITORIAL: The evolution of special education
Indisputably some of the biggest civil rights advances in recent decades have involved people with disabilities, and nowhere do those changes register more than in schools. As documented by The Sentinel’s Sarah Palermo in a three-day series of reports, special education has expanded well beyond its original expectations to account for as much as 20 percent of the enrollment in Keene schools, and involves more than $13 million in annual spending, the lion’s share of which is handled by local taxpayers.
The expansion of special education populations is attributed to a number of factors, including improvements in survival rates of babies born with disabilities and changes in the practical definition of disability to include not only cognitive and physical difficulties, but also emotional problems that get in the way of a child’s capacity to learn.
This dimension of education is receiving added interest these days thanks to the No Child Left Behind education reform that holds public schools accountable for the performance of their students — all students, including those who are “coded” as being in need of special services. This means that a school is marked down (it’s labeled as being “in need of improvement”) if its overall student test scores don’t show adequate progress toward proficiency.
Putting aside the reasonableness of this approach, Palermo’s report shines light on remarkable advances in the field, such as crafting learning opportunities outside the classroom and beginning the planning for a student’s transition to the real world well before he or she reaches graduation age. The picture is one of dedicated and flexible teachers and administrators. In the best circumstances, the picture also includes informed parents who play active roles in their children’s education.
The picture also includes government. Special education is civil rights with a big price tag. For a variety of reasons, the federal government has never come close to making good on its pledge to pay 40 percent of the costs. The state government has stepped in to help with catastrophic aid, to substantially help out school districts that are faced with special placements that can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; but budget pressures in Concord are expected to reduce that level of support.
Some suggest that shortfalls in financial support partly balance out overdiagnosis — that is, some children are in special education who really shouldn’t be there. Lacking hard evidence to that effect, the federal government needs to pay its fair share of a social imperative that it itself wrote into law: To give all students a chance, regardless of physical, cognitive or emotional condition. That responsibility needs to be honored before the increasing incidence of autism and other developmental disorders really begin to pound school budgets.
*To read the three articles in the Keene Sentinel series, go to:
Disability isn’t usually part of the parenting plan