The Will to Leave No Child Behind?

Abstract

YEARS AGO, my feisty mother-in-law, known as Mamacita for her tireless work for the poor in the Rio Grande Valley, was indignant about the local school's treatment of little Roberto, who lived next door. His grandmother climbed into a van before dawn every morning to go to work in the fields so her grandchildren could get ahead in this country. She never learned English, and Roberto had problems with the language. But he was a smart child. Unfortunately, he learned very little in school because he drifted listlessly through special education classes. It was the wrong place for Roberto. By describing Roberto's plight, I am offering some anecdotal input to a major federal policy debate looming on the horizon. And with this issue, anecdotes often override facts, so much so that policy makers are led to choose between the most egregious and heartbreaking examples of wrongs in their quest to decisions about the field of special education. On one hand, advocates for special education students accuse callous school officials of abridging the rights of children with disabilities by holding them to very low expectations, isolating them, filling the special education classes with students whom regular classroom teachers don't have the skills to teach, or being more concerned about discipline than about learning. Vying with these arguments are those from school officials. They add up the ever-growing costs of educating children with disabilities, which judges do not consider in their decisions. These school officials must deal with strong parent advocacy that often skews the original purposes of state and federal laws, and they contend that they are doing the right thing by placing students with problems wherever the resources can be found to serve them. Statistics, like anecdotes, can be bent to suit any argument, and both advocates and critics of special education are hard at work. Critics note that the number of children eligible for special education and special accommodations increased 65% between 1977 and 2000, partly as a result of pressure to expand the definition of those eligible for services. According to a spokesperson for the Council for Exceptional Children, most of these students make great strides, and their high school graduation rate has increased 30% in the last 10 years. During the same period, their college attendance rate has doubled. Since the 1975 passage of the first federal law guaranteeing the rights of students with disabilities - the Education for All Handicapped Children Act - there has been an enormous shift in identified problems, from predominantly speech problems to specific disabilities. The latter category jumped from 22% of those served in 1977 to 46% in 2000. However, because the definitions are so vague and so various, who gets labeled as learning depends partly on where a student lives. According to one expert, about 80% of all students in the country could be considered disabled under some of the definitions being used. These and many related issues will surely be raised this year as Congress takes up the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The process of reauthorizing federal laws governing the education of students with disabilities is always a difficult one because the defenders of the laws include parents and researchers who are more powerful and better organized than those who lined up behind Title I when it came up for reauthorization. In 1997 administrators and advocates battled over disciplinary policies and completely overshadowed the reauthorization's emphasis on including students served by IDEA under standards-based reforms. Consequently, many teachers and administrators have paid little attention to the matter of where these students fit into the standards-based reforms being played out in the states (other than to increase even more the number of children receiving IDEA services who are excused from state assessments). …