The Problems with Special Ed

Perverse incentives cause schools to misuse special ed for remedial education.

By Jay P. Greene
National Review Online (NRO)
September 14, 2009 4:00 AM

Officially reported disability rates in public schools are entirely unreliable and are almost certainly inflated ‎indicators of how many students are actually disabled. Eventually, school and government ‎officials are going to have to acknowledge that our current procedures for identifying ‎students as disabled are fundamentally flawed and commit themselves to improving these procedures.‎
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One of the reasons we know that reported disability rates lack credibility is that they vary ‎dramatically from state to state. In New Jersey, for example, 18 percent of all students are ‎classified as disabled, but in California the rate is only 10.5 percent. There is no medical ‎reason why students in New Jersey should be 71 percent more likely to be placed into ‎special education than students in California. ‎
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Consider also how rapidly special education has grown over the last three decades. ‎Today almost one in seven students is classified as having a disability. That’s 63 percent more ‎than when federal programs for special education began in 1976. Do we really believe that ‎our children’s medical well-being has deteriorated so severely over the last three ‎decades? ‎
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What is especially odd is that almost all the growth in special education over the last ‎three decades has occurred in just two of the 13 federal categories for disabilities: ‎specific learning disability (SLD, which includes dyslexia) and “other health” (which ‎includes attention-deficit disorders — ADD). The size of the remaining eleven federal categories combined has remained relatively flat, while SLD has tripled and “other health” has ‎quadrupled. Those two categories account for 86 percent of the increase in special-‎education enrollments. If there really were a medical plague afflicting the nation’s children, we ‎would expect to see an increase in more objectively diagnosed categories, like ‎mental retardation, blindness, and deafness, and not just in the relatively mild and ‎ambiguous categories of SLD and “other health.”‎

If special-education rates can’t be explained by medical factors, what causes them to vary ‎so dramatically from state to state and across time? Part of the explanation could be ‎benign. Perhaps over time, and particularly in some states, awareness and acceptance of ‎disabilities has improved. To the extent that has been the case, some students are ‎currently being counted as disabled who were wrongly excluded from special ed in the ‎past. We know that there are in fact some students who continue to be wrongly excluded from special ‎education.‎

But much of the increase in special-education rates has been caused by less benign ‎forces. Public schools have been using special education as a remedial-education ‎program. Students who are struggling academically — but have no true disability — are ‎being wrongly placed in special education. The students may be struggling because they ‎have been taught poorly or because they have a difficult home life, but these are not ‎disabilities. There are probably hundreds of thousands of these students wrongly identified ‎as disabled who really need only remedial education.‎

Schools have discovered that they can get extra funding from state and federal ‎governments for small-group instruction to help lagging students catch up if they say that ‎the students are struggling because of a processing problem in their brains. School officials who admit that the students are lagging because of poor previous instruction or a difficult ‎home life, by contrast, are left to pay the costs of small-group instruction entirely out of ‎their own budget. ‎

What’s so bad about using special education as a remedial program if that is the only way ‎to get resources to help kids who are behind? First, it is an incredibly inefficient way to ‎provide remediation. Classifying students as disabled imposes all sorts of ‎administrative costs on schools to keep up with the paperwork and procedures required by ‎the laws mandating special ed. These costs are not so great that they deter schools from ‎incorrectly identifying students as disabled, but in ‎aggregate they impose a considerable, unnecessary burden on taxpayers.‎

Second, wrongly labeling lagging students as disabled imposes on those students an academic stigma and, often, lowered ‎academic expectations. ‎

Third, miscategorizing those students prevents schools ‎and the public from identifying their own problems and trying to correct them. If we blame ‎processing problems in children’s brains for academic struggles rather than poor prior ‎instruction or issues outside of school, we’ll fail to take the necessary corrective steps.‎

And fourth, let’s not forget that reducing over-identification would allow special-education ‎resources to be focused on students who are truly disabled and in need of extra ‎assistance, including students truly suffering from SLD and ADD.‎
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Schools are not reliable at distinguishing between true, medical disabilities and academic ‎difficulties caused by poor instruction or difficult home lives. We need to develop procedures for identifying and auditing disability classifications independent of the school ‎systems, which suffer from obvious conflicts of interest. If reforms are not instituted, it won’t be ‎long until we live in a Lake Woebegone where all children are above average, and the ones ‎who aren’t are labeled “disabled.”‎

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— Jay P. Greene is endowed professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new report with Marcus Winters, "How Special-Ed Vouchers Keep Kids From Being Mislabeled as Disabled,” can be read online here.