THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210024
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
In recent reports on special-education programs in Virginia, The Virginian-Pilot has shown that there are real problems with the delivery of special-education services to those who need them. But there is also a real danger of getting so fixated on bureaucratic flaws that the students involved are forgotten.
Let's be clear. Special education lumps together many difficulties requiring special attention. Students may be mentally retarded, developmentally delayed, emotionally disturbed or speech and language impaired. And each may require a different educational approach.
By far the largest special-education category is specific learning disabilities. About half of all special-education students fall in this category, a dramatic increase over the past 20 years. Critics find something sinister in that fact, but actually a good deal has been learned about the causes, diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
Children previously dismissed as simply slow or lazy are now recognized to be suffering from a specific disability. Where once they failed in school, they can now succeed with proper teaching. It is now believed that between 5 percent and 15 percent of people have specific learning disabilities. Every classroom is likely to have several learning-disabled students, and every elementary teacher ought to be trained to identify them and get them the help they need.
For many years, special-education students were expected to sink or swim in regular classrooms without adequate help. Or they were shunted into special classes that could prove to be academic dead ends. Laws were passed to remedy these shortcomings, but there's now a backlash by those who feel the laws have gone too far.
Clearly, problems with providing special education must be addressed, but the answer is not social Darwinism. Children with special-education needs grow up, whether they get help or not. The question is whether they grow up to be productive citizens or burdens to the state. Education is the key.
Thus, doing the right thing and doing the pragmatic thing are indistinguishable. The only real question is how to educate students with special needs efficiently.
Some needed reforms are obvious. A rule protecting expelled or suspended special-education students from punishment, even if their problem behavior is unrelated to their learning difficulties, has drawn fire from state Superintendent William C. Bosher. He's right; this provision should go.
The Supplemental Security Income program gives needy parents of special-education students assistance, but it's been abused by con artists whose children are not legitimate special-education candidates. Obviously, eligibility requirements need tightening so aid doesn't go to unscrupulous parents trying to scam the government.
Current laws that call for schools to provide education ``appropriate to'' the needs of the child and to do so in ``the least restrictive environment'' weren't created out of a perverse enthusiasm for bureaucracy but to address real shortcomings. Still, complying with them entails needless red tape that should be cut.
Schools themselves are far from blameless. Too often, laws mandating individualized planning and mainstreaming are resisted. Schools often treat Individual Education Plans like busy work and don't deliver what they promise.
Saddled with more special-education students than resources to educate them, schools erect barriers that frustrate parents who are seeking services they are ostensibly entitled to.
Too many special-education classrooms remain dumping grounds for an indiscriminate hodgepodge of students - not just those with learning difficulties but delinquents and malcontents. Some education critics also believe minority students are disproportionately assigned to special-education classes, more on the basis of race than of need.
Thus, by a bitter irony, students who need special-education resources are denied them while others, who have no business in special education, receive benefits that are wasted on them.
Some of the resistance to special-education requirements is justified. Misguided idealism has done severely handicapped students no favor by trying to integrate them in mainstream classrooms. But schools are still too quick to oppose mainstreaming for students who could rise to higher expectations.
Often, bureaucratic inertia is at work. It's easier for schools if classes are homogenized. But the argument that it's too much trouble to individualize education for students with special needs ought to worry parents of students without such handicaps.
The days of education on a mass-production model in crowded classes are past. All education is going to be increasingly individualized. Schools had better get used to it.
Finally, there's cost. A lot of polemical mileage has been gotten out of a few rare cases involving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Critics who cite these extreme examples often subscribe to the philosophy: That school is best which costs the least.
In fact, 13 percent of kids statewide qualify for special-education programs that account for 7.4 percent of the school budget. It's true that special-education kids are double-dipping; they receive money on top of their share of the dollars spent on all students. But most special-education students do not get an abundance of special help. Many get the bare minimum.
Much criticism seems to result from resentment. Some parents seem to believe that each child should receive an equal share of school dollars and not a penny more, but even if special education were abolished that wouldn't be true. Some parents of gifted students say their children are being robbed to fund special-education programs. But if one program is underfunded, it doesn't mean another is overfunded.
Resources are finite, of course, and schools must not waste money on fads or frills. Governments must be restrained from tangling schools in red tape. Abuses must end or programs will lose credibility. But shortchanging or scapegoating students who need special education is an unseemly assault on the weak by the self-interested.
A well-ordered society ought to be able to educate all students economically, including those with special needs. But it won't happen in an atmosphere of antagonism. We must cooperate to find the best way to solve educational problems, not waste time trying to get the better of each other. by CNB