On special education, the Bush administration is taking one step forward and one step back. One new policy is making a major move in the right direction. But at the same time, another one could stymie the progress of thousands of children across the nation.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that it would improve schooling for students with disabilities by bringing in line the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. The new regulations do away with the requirement that states diagnose students with disabilities by comparing intelligence tests with academic achievement records. If there was a discrepancy between the two, the student was deemed to be learning-disabled.
Advocates for disabled students and civil rights activists concerned with discrimination in education have criticized the discrepancy model for not being an adequate diagnostic tool. They also say the method resulted in a disproportionate number of minority and poor students being diagnosed as learning disabled.
Intelligence tests have long been criticized as being culturally biased against people from racial minorities and poor people. Doing away with this model is a good thing, but in the same bundle of policies there is a provision that schools be required to review individual student education plans only once every three years if the parents agree. There is no guarantee that the parents would be notified of the review, advocates for disabled students say. This idea invites catastrophe. If a child truly has a learning disability and can get the appropriate educational help, he or she can progress rapidly.
Three years is a lifetime in the education of a child, especially a child who faces the constant frustration and humiliation of trying to do what is expected but still cannot learn to read or write or do arithmetic. Historically, school districts have dumped children into special education programs for reasons that have nothing to do with disability.
For years, many Latino students with Spanish accents were judged to have speech defects simply because they had Spanish accents. In the days of busing for integration, some school districts said that large numbers of black students were learning disabled. This diagnosis allowed school officials to keep black and white students separate from each other despite being in the same school buildings and sometimes even the same classrooms. Sincerely dealing with the needs of students with learning disabilities requires a wide range of specific educational skills.
But many school districts do not have staff members equipped with those skills. U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that there are not enough education professionals for special education programs, and predict that the gap will grow rapidly over the next few years. President Bush has railed against "the soft bigotry of low expectations." But bigotry is rock hard in many of our public schools. Properly revising the way we diagnose disabilities in the schools will chip away at that rock.
Starita Smith is an award-winning writer and editor based in Denton, Texas, where she is a doctorate student in sociology at University of North Texas. She is a former reporter and editor at the Austin American-Statesman, the Columbus(Ohio) Dispatch and the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.