Delaware’s Special Education Program “Needs Intervention”
Public schools are required to provide the educational resources to meet the needs of students with disabilities can make progress in school. Today, the Obama Administration announced that they were tightening oversight and the rules for assessing whether schools were doing what they are meant to do under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Part of today’s announcement was an assessment of the status of various state’s programs according to the new guidelines.
Until now, the agency considered how long states took to evaluate students for special needs and whether they followed due process and other procedures spelled out in the law.
On Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that in judging state performance, his department would now also consider outcomes — how well special education students score on standardized tests, the gap in test scores between students with and without disabilities, the high school graduation rate for disabled students and other measures of achievement.
In that reassessment, Delaware falls into the “Needs Intervention” category.
If a state needs assistance for two years in a row, IDEA requires the department to order the state to obtain technical assistance or label the state “high risk,” which means federal dollars could be withheld. States that need intervention for three consecutive years face other consequences, from being required to file a corrective plan to losing some federal money.
I’m not going to pretend to know much about this subject, but this categorization doesn’t look good at all (and the article doesn’t give you any idea of what the historical categorization was for any state). So what does this mean for Delaware’s Special Education students and parents?
For starters, standardized testing will never show how far a child with either autism spectrum or other cognitive disabilities is growing and improving. We can do a lot better with funding para programs in schools specifically for these children, and recreational activities as well. The measure of success may be acknowledging another persons presence and simply answering a question or following a command. There are issues with tactile stimulation, noise, personal space and changes in routine or caregivers that can greatly affect certain children. That can destroy progress in one second. Every child is so different, finding and maintaining the least restrictive learning environment, can vary greatly, and its hard to set a single standard and note progress over the large scale. I am not in education, but work on the recreational therapy side of special needs. I have learned and continue to learn every day. It is tough to answer and I know how very hard parents fight just to get basic needs met, it can be very disheartening to hear this.
We should invest as much in our special needs children as we do in the casinos.
The idea that the appropriate consequence for a state not doing what it should for special needs students is to withhold their funding is … bizarre. Typical but bizarre.
But some things to consider
1. Since its inception IDEA has never been fully funded by the Feds (at best only about 60%), but the requirements have been maintained in place. That said, Delaware receives (between regular state per-pupil and Federal funding) about $24K for each special needs student.
2. $24K sounds like a lot, BUT most school districts have this tied up in programs from ADHD or Autism or Specific Subject Area Disabilities or Emotional Disabilities, including paying for special ed teachers who only really know how to work with those. When a child comes along with a completely different kind of disability that falls under “other health impaired” the schools fight like hell to cookie-cutter “special needs” students into one of their pre-existing programs … which is something that IDEA specifically prohibits.
3. The problem is that parents without advocates do not have a prayer of negotiating these waters; there are no crack special needs attorneys in Delaware; and the office in DOE responsible for enforcing the law … doesn’t.
4. In addition, I will bet dollars to dimes that when the report comes out one of the things DE will get cited for is not identifying children with qualifying needs for a 504 plan (under ADA) or an IEP (under IDEA). Our statistics for special needs are significantly below national averages, which means that our schools are sweeping a lot of these kids under the rug, because that works better for them than taking the money.
5. Nobody in Vision 2012 2015 2025 has ever given a consistent rat’s ass about special needs students because their performance can’t easily be quantified on standardized high-stakes tests (that “I” in IEP does stand for “Individualized”). They’d prefer to think that the kids like the ones Mike Matthews taught at Richardson Park, or the ones I’ve attended IEP meetings for around the State … simply don’t exist.
That all said, even at the current level of funding there are a lot of things A LOT OF THINGS that Delaware schools could do better. Like create a common diagnostic testing regime for special needs and eliminating duplicative services in that regard. Like making the default to exempt ALL children with an IEP from high-stakes tests so that teachers can concentrate on their IEP goals. Like actually having the State enforce the rules about notice and what happens at meetings. Like taking steps to insure that every parent goes into an IEP or 504 meeting with a trained advocate.
In this, AQC is close to the mark: we are considering bail-outs for casinos; we give away tens of millions annually as corporate welfare; we fund state universities who don’t have to let us see what they do with the money; we fund law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance on hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t committing crimes; we bought the Delaware State Police a damn NAVY; …
… but for our most vulnerable children … crickets.
What Steve says and a shout to Kilroy who gleaned the real reason. Across America the opt out of standardized testing is growing… Delaware has a liberal opt out program for special needs kids.
If you’ve seen the Smarter Balanced Assessments you would know that most successful professional adults cannot get them correct. The Department of Education has insisted that Special needs children be included. Why? They state it is for the child, but anyone with an autistic child (to use one type of liability), knows you don’t put him on a championship team… A… it embarrassingly points out his deficiency. B… it brings down the entire team… When you lost the championship game because rules said you HAD to put up someone who’s never hit at bat with based loaded and 2 outs, you can imagine only a saint would say it didn’t matter and tell that child not to worry…
Point is … there has to be an ulterior motive behind the Department of Education here. At best guess looking in, and this is based on the chatter other educational reformers are making, the insistence of including Special Ed children is designed to lower the average scores of public schools…. The only motive for directly lowering the averages of public schools, is that it appears to make Charters more attractive because they can pick and choose not to have special ed children in their schools… Just like charters in Sussex County ask if “your mama picks watermelons” on the entry application, Charter schools can wean out everyone who doesn’t “make the grade so to speak.” Therefore when charter schools have higher scores than public schools, the attractiveness of Charter’s becomes enhanced…. Without it, why would anyone send their child to any charters school destined once open to perform like Pencader, Moyer, or Reach, due to lack of a support system, all of which were or are in danger of being closed down, when they have an awesome public school on their feeder pattern?
This report is not really a condemation.. I too reacted to the title. Kilroy read it first and explains it better.. It is all about opting out…. Delaware allows special ed children to opt out on the test and the Himmlers in the Education Department of the United States of America, think that shows too much softness…. Instead of this being a Schindler’s list,…. it is a Himmler’s list… I say thank goodness Delaware is on the bottom…. This charter school thing of Duncun reminds me of George Bailey at the dissolution of the Bailey Savings and Loan…. Addressing Potter he says…. ” You’re talking about something you can’t get your fingers on, and it’s galling you.'”……
That is all this report is about.
One late fact. Massachusetts 2013 is also listed at the bottom of this list. Yet, Massachusetts reputedly has the best educational system in the world…
Things are not alway what a headline spells… My, don’t we live in a suck-ass age?
Serious question — are there charter schools that serve special needs kids? Because it seems that this might be the real place where parents need other choices.
Serious question — are there charter schools that serve special needs kids?
Gateway Lab, and Positive Outcomes both have about 60% special ed. I don’t know too much about them.
it appears to make Charters more attractive because they can pick and choose not to have special ed children in their schools
US ED and Justice both recently aimed new guidance directly at charters reminding them that civil rights obligations of public schools apply to charters too, including rights of special ed children. It is nonetheless true that overall, charters in Delaware have a ridiculously low percentage of special ed students. It is not always clear how they are being selected out, but the enrollment percentages tell the story. The Enrollment Preferences Task Force is grappling with this issue right now.
Thanks. Are the charters with majority Special Ed catering to specific populations, do you know? I’m trying to understand if they are just as choosey as regular charters, but with different criteria.
cassandra,
Not in DE. Positive Outcomes is as close to that as you can get. There is, however, an entire industry sprung up for that–dozens if not hundreds of schools–in New Jersey, and it is important to look at why that’s happened.
If a school cannot provide what it admits is the necessary accommodations for an IEP, what they do in NJ is agree to take the student’s combined funding and pay the student’s tuition at a “private therapeutic” school. That gets the original district off the hook. But there are major problems …
1. Unlike with DE and charters, there is no “right of return” guaranteed. If the school doesn’t work out, the district can throw up all sorts of legal and procedural roadblocks to keep from having to take the child back.
2. Since a lot of these “therapeutic” schools are private and not charters, they hover around the edges of certified legitimacy, and many kids attend for years and years and never qualify to graduate. They receive certificates of attendance at about age 21, and the school gets 5-8 years worth of tuition.
3. There is very little (which in this case means “almost NONE”) supervision, inspection, or quality control by the State or the Feds of any of these schools. Some are literally warehouses for special needs students; a few do a reasonably good job. But it is impossible to dig up meaningful reports or statistics on most of them. In large measure they resemble the “voucher-charter” schools that have grown up like kudzu in Louisiana.
It would be difficult to create charter schools in DE that did specialize in special needs because the definitions of different special needs are now quite … diverse. What works with autism won’t necessarily work with ADHD, and what works with Dyslexia is of absolutely no help to a child with an autoimmune disorder.
So if they are “private theraputic” schools, they are exempt from this testing and oversight that Duncan talks about here?