Response to Tough Teaching: The 2% Solution

Abstract

From its inception in 1975, modern special education seems to have forced us to concentrate on percentages, and not always for clearly useful purposes. For example, when Congress was considering Public Law 94-142 thirty years ago, lawmakers naturally wanted to know the number of students with disabilities. Congress cared mostly about cost, and to estimate cost, it needed to know the percentages. So the history of public policy in special education that followed reflects guesses about prevalence and has never reflected much about incidence, or how many new kids with disabilities will appear each year and, more important, why. For example, professionals and researchers once suggested that about 6% or 7% of all students had serious emotional disturbance (SED). Congress thought about the cost, and then thought otherwise. As a result, Congress created a 2% solution, and then wrote the law in a way that discouraged identification of students with SED. Schools must obviously also have seen the fiscal wisdom in fewer identifications of such expensive students because they have never identified as many as 2% of all students as SED. This 2% solution pops up repeatedly in special education. In 1975, most professionals also figured that the prevalence of students with mental retardation was about 2%. Again, we glossed over the difference between counting and accounting for the percentage of students with disabilities. In this case, we wanted to know the percentage of students from various ethnic minority groups who should or should not be identified as having disabilities and, therefore, receive special education. That is, how proportional (or disproportional) to population percentages minority students should be as a percentage of special education enrollments. On one hand, we want to acknowledge the effects of poverty and disadvantage and developmental risk but, on the other hand, we want to think that distribution of disabilities should be inherently just. The argument cannot be resolved without making some heroic assumptions about the etiology and epidemiology of disabilities. We have managed to think up various creative ways of measuring proportion, though, and the students of concern in this debate tend not to do very well in school, which means that teachers tend to find them difficult to teach effectively. Congress also heard few reliable predictions of the percentage of students with learning disabilities in 1975. Ultimately, the opinion that prevailed assumed that perhaps 1%-2% of students had specific learning disabilities. Imagine everyone's surprise in the early 1980s when that prevalence estimate looked more like 5%. Schools, many argued, must be identifying them incorrectly, or didn't understand how to do it, or else were, for some inexplicable reason, subverting the law, despite the obvious irrationality of such behavior in that schools end up paying the lion's share of special education costs. It's worth mentioning in passing that large-scale efforts to implement multitiered instruction as an alternative approach to identifying students with learning difficulties have found a residual of non-responsive students very close to 5% of the population, even after expending an average 150 hours of instruction. …