The seven broken premises of special education in California

October 13, 2011

(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.)

It’s not a typo. It’s meant to be an “e.” Today’s special education system is built on many broken premises that detract from the law’s purpose: to provide students with disabilities (SWD) a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive (appropriate) environment so that they can  learn and make progress. The system should promote services and opportunity, focused on teaching and learning. It’s really not that complicated when you think about it. But it has become so.

Special education matters to all of us. It affects all schools and educates 13-14 percent of all students, some 6½ million students nationwide. We spend some $110 billion annually on special education. In California, during the 2008-2009 school year, there were 678,105  students with disabilities, 10.8 percent of all students. California spent 23 percent of its public school funds on special education. Statewide and nationwide special education is big business.

As we move to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, the 35+ year old federal law, let us first examine how many of its flawed premises undermine its purpose.

For starters, consider these seven broken premises.

To feed that broken premise, we’ve created layers of “protections” and “rights” for parents and schools. IDEA is 120 pages; its regulations add 113 pages, all small type, single-spaced. California adds more laws and regulations. What is a parent or school to do?

I suspect that one reason for the complexity and regimentation of this system is that it serves a very diverse group of SWD – from the most severely disabled, including mentally retarded, multiply handicapped and deaf and blind students (for whom the law was initially written) to students with milder disabilities, including those with  specific learning disabilities, speech/language impairments, or other health impairments, including ADD and ADHD. Notably, this second group now makes up the vast majority of all SWD. In California, of the 609,665 students served in 2007, according to the last-available 29th Annual Report to Congress by the Office of Special Education Services, students with learning disabilities, speech/language impairments, or other health impairments added up to 483,613 students – 79 percent of all SWD in the state! Surely we can agree that their needs are very different from the first group of SWD. Yet this system is premised on treating all SWD the same in terms of process, bureaucracy, regulations, legal requirements, etc. In any event, this piece focuses on the latter group – 79 percent of California’s SWD – with milder disabilities.

Finally, the belief among many that a wordy IEP (individualized education program, written by school personnel and parents for an individual student) somehow helps the child learn and the teacher teach. Improbable. Indeed,  longer IEPs, some reaching 10, 20, 30, 40 or more pages, may actually reflect a lack of trust between home and school. Micromanaging classrooms with excessive verbiage demoralizes teachers, doesn’t help students, and may give parents a false sense of security. There are not enough hours in the day for all that paperwork!

In creating this role for parents, the law skewed common sense. First, it requires a cooperative team effort by schools and parents and then it allows them to sue each other. How can that be? Second, it imposes no responsibility on parents to work with schools to help their children learn. It’s time for President Obama’s eloquent call: turn off the TV, help with homework, put kids to bed at night. Parents should parent their kids, not fight their schools.

Related to this premise is the one that holds that if students don’t learn, it’s the schools’ fault that parents can seek due process for. This premise, too, ignores common sense and reality – the students’ role and the need for motivation, effort, and hard work – and the parents’ role. Teachers cannot educate students alone.

This premise fits into our obsession with “closing the gap” for students who are not yet at grade level, while ignoring the other gap between students already at state standards and their higher potential.  Data now shows that our brightest students are not competitive with their international peers. This premise, focusing on student weaknesses and one gap only, serves our nation poorly.

Yet, in spite of the broken system, this premise holds that it’s OK to keep special education largely off limits in school reform efforts. While we continue to tinker on IDEA’s edges with each reauthorization, the system remains largely as it was 35 years ago.

As we move to reauthorize IDEA, let us first fix these broken premises. We need to create a system to focus relentlessly on improving teaching and learning for all students, including SWD, and treat teachers like experts and professionals, not defendants in actual or threatened litigation. Let’s build trust into this system and end the broken premise that spawned the adversarial approach. Distrust cannot be a sound basis for education in our country.

With these transformative steps, we can finally begin to meet the promise of educating all students, beginning with where they are and taking them as far as they can go. It is time to move the needle from broken premises to fulfilled promises.

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, author of Fixing Special Education, is a parent,  former public school teacher and hearing officer, an attorney, consultant, and authority on special education. She is of counsel to Stoneman, Chandler & Miller LLP in Boston. She divides her year between Boston and Palo Alto, where she is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  For more information and her blog, visit www.schoollawpro.com.

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