The Education Gadfly Weekly

In a searing exposé, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair and the heyday of journalistic muckraking, the Houston Chronicle has assembled persuasive evidence that Texas has placed a de facto cap of 8.5 percent on the number of kids who can be placed in special education. Assuming it’s true—state officials seemed to waffle, fiddle, and redefine when asked tough questions by the reporter—this would go a long way toward explaining why the Lone Star State has for years had a rate of special-ed placements below just about everyplace else in the union, and far below a handful of jurisdictions (such as Massachusetts) that are pushing 20 percent. The national figure is about 13 percent, but the state-to-state variability is wide—although Texas, along with California and a handful of others, has long been a low-end outlier.

The protestations, lamentations, and handwringing that swiftly followed were to be expected—Matt Ladner weighed in (on Jay Greene’s blog) within hours, for example, terming Texas “nothing short of disgraceful” and urging that it try Florida-style special-ed vouchers—and the feds will surely look into whether Texas has violated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), versions of which have been on the law books since Gerald Ford (with misgivings) signed the first such measure in 1975.

Assuming that kids don’t differ all that much from Boston to Austin, one may fairly wonder what accounts for the big discrepancies—and there’s no doubt that state and local implementation practices must account for a lot.

A child typically qualifies for special education placement upon being “referred” by a teacher or petitioned by a parent, and then evaluated for evidence of disabilities by people—mainly psychologists—who are presumed to know what they’re looking for. Once brought into the special-ed system, children qualify for all manner of extra services and accommodations, and parents gain all sorts of rights and prerogatives with regard to their children’s education that other families don’t have—most of which add to school-system costs.

It’s no secret that, from the standpoint of state and district education budgets, special ed is expensive, often accounting for a quarter (or more) of their entire K–12 operating outlays. Although the historical record indicates that Uncle Sam once committed to cover the extra cost (estimated at an additional 40 percent of regular per-pupil funding per disabled student), except for a brief windfall in 2009, the actual federal appropriation has been more like 17 or 18 percent. The estimated federal shortfall in fiscal 2014 was $17 billion—costs that end up being borne by states and districts. Because special ed, once conferred on a child is, in essence, a civil right, those jurisdictions don’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

Although, as Nathan Levenson showed in a 2012 Fordham report, savvy districts can take steps to make their special-ed programs both more effective and more cost-efficient, it’s understandable why a state or district might want to keep the number of special education students within bounds. It’s equally understandable why parents of youngsters who face behavioral, physical, or learning challenges in school—parents such as those profiled in the Chronicle—will move heaven and earth to get their daughters and sons the added services, assistance, and considerations that come with special ed. One can hardly blame them.

How many children belong in special education is a question with no definitive answer. The Chronicle cited a recent Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that 15.4 percent of young children have been diagnosed by doctors as having “a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.” Back when IDEA’s antecedent was enacted, policymakers expected the take-up rate to be around 6 percent. The federal financial contribution is supposed to plateau at 12 percent. But the percentage gradually crept up to almost 14 percent by 2005 as more and more youngsters were referred on one basis or another, especially under the broad and rather nebulous heading of “learning disabilities.” It’s declined a bit since then—and one must wonder how much of that decline is due to Texas intentionally cutting its special-ed numbers.

Those bases for referral, however, are often subjective and discretionary—one reason that state special education rates are so discrepant—and in some cases (beyond the most conspicuous, indeed unarguable, physical, mental, and emotional disabilities) referrals to special ed may fairly be questioned. When they’re based on “behavioral” issues, it’s no secret that many a teacher would just as soon rid her classroom of that kid who keeps acting up. When they’re based on “learning” issues, a typical diagnosis is based on test-derived discrepancies between a child’s ability and his or her achievement. Yet how to know whether an achievement shortfall is due to something inherent in the child? As former NIH executive Reid Lyon—the moving force behind the National Reading Panel in 2000—once wrote, many kids diagnosed as “learning disabled” are actually “teaching disabled.” Because nobody ever taught them to read properly, they naturally fare poorly on gauges of academic success that rely on their reading prowess. Does that mean they need special ed—or better reading teachers in the early grades?

It’s also no secret, unfortunately, that more than a few parents, having learned of the extra attention and accommodations that special education students get—such as extra time to take college-entrance tests!—have pushed hard to get their youngsters so identified. And it’s even less of a secret that more than a few psychologists and attorneys have earned a nice living by helping parents advance these demands upon the school system.

This is akin to pharmaceutical companies that appear to dream up new ailments that their pricey miracle drugs might cure—ailments that people sometimes didn’t even know they had until they learned about them on TV or the Internet. There’s public money out there to capture, after all, and when all is said and done special ed is essentially an entitlement.

None of which is to dismiss the legitimate claims of youngsters with true disabilities to some extra help with their schoolwork, and I do not doubt that the Houston Chronicle (like other investigators), had it kept digging, would have come up with more heartstring-tugging instances of arbitrary and wrongful denial of special education services.

If you train a different lens upon all this, however, you realize that you’re looking at a badly messed-up system, one that privileges some kids over others, that extends rights to some citizens that others don’t have, that invites finagling by both seekers and suppliers of education services (and countless intermediaries), and that ends up being costlier than it needs to be, not to mention sitting substantially beyond the reach of policymakers tasked with apportioning scarce education dollars across multiple legitimate causes, needs, and priorities.

It’s also, in my view, an antiquated system that’s long overdue for a thoroughgoing overhaul. At a time when, assisted by many new technologies, the concept of “personalized learning” for every child is on the agenda of many educators and philanthropists (not least Mark Zuckerberg), why do we persist in personalizing the educational experiences of some kids while batch-processing everybody else? At a time when other federal and state policies are focused on achievement, school results, and the narrowing of learning gaps, why do we carve out a huge subpart of K–12 education for a program that’s still centered on inputs and services? At a time when revving the engines of upward mobility is among the great domestic challenges that America faces, why do we continue with practices that are especially susceptible to manipulation by canny upper-middle-class families pursuing advantages for their own children as well as by just about everyone else who in some way benefits from the maintenance and expansion of the current arrangement? Almost nobody wants out of this system—well, a handful of charter-school parents don’t want their kids “identified”—and just about everyone except the taxpayer gains from its continued growth. (To be clear, while teachers may benefit from getting those troublesome kids into somebody else’s classrooms, when kids with IEPs are “mainstreamed” into their own classes, there’s a ton of unwanted paperwork.)

Though many states have special education laws of their own—a few of them as innovative as Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program—and other federal statutes also influence how society does (and doesn’t) treat disabled individuals, both in school and beyond, the principal policy engine in the K–12 realm remains the federal IDEA statute, which has not been reauthorized since 2004 and—as many others have noted—is due for a top-to-bottom review.

Which I fear it isn’t going to get because everybody is scared to touch special education, much less fundamentally alter it. Elected officials do not want to be accosted by the angry parents of kids with (or whose parents are sure they have) disabilities. Nobody wants pictures of plaintive children in wheelchairs to appear on TV or YouTube. Everybody is super worried about autism and ADHD (radically over-diagnosed though the latter appears to be—with pharmaceutical companies again minting money from it). Multiple adult interests now benefit from keeping special ed the way it is—and continuing to expand it. Insofar as policy analysts, academics, and think tanks pay any attention to the topic, they almost always do so within the fundamental structures and parameters of the forty-plus-year-old policy regime that was inaugurated with President Ford’s signature. Nobody wants to get outside this box nowadays, not even the kinds of private funders that generally support fresh education-policy thinking.

Fordham (and the Progressive Policy Institute in the days when Andy Rotherham was there) tackled this in a big way back in 2001. A federal commission did much the same the following year. Since then, there have been sundry efforts to ensure that kids with disabilities—and their schools—are subject to the accountability expectations of NCLB and, most recently, ESSA. This has not gone well, however, and such issues as how to accommodate these students on state assessments—and which among them to excuse from those assessments—have been big, sore, contentious issues. Yet fresh thinking about the fundamentals of special ed has taken place in the past decade, save for the indefatigable Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, whose forthcoming book, Special Education 2.0: Breaking Taboos to Build a New Education Law, will outline a new way forward.

It would be nice to think that Congress might eventually steel itself to tackle the rethink that IDEA needs, as it finally did with ESEA/NCLB. But I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, two cheers for the Houston Chronicle for surfacing this problem in Texas—but let’s also choke out a word of understanding for Texas for trying, however clumsily, even in some ways cruelly, to live with a federal law that isn’t working at all the way it should but that nobody seems ready to fix.

Last October, we lamented New York City’s neglect of high-ability students, particularly in its low-income neighborhoods. Since then, the district and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña have taken steps to mitigate the problem.

Unfortunately, their efforts fall way short.

We surfaced multiple problems in Gotham’s approach to gifted-and-talented education, beginning with the once-a-year entrance exams that determine admission to the city’s skimpy and badly distributed supply of such opportunities for primary and middle school students.

Scored with a single citywide cutoff level, it’s a disaster for poor kids. In parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, just 14 percent of test-takers passed the January 2016 test. In parts of the South Bronx, it was 15 percent. Yet on Manhattan’s Upper East and West Sides, a whopping 46 percent reached the threshold.

These wealth-correlated pass rates mirror the city’s supply of gifted-education opportunities. Four of the poorest of Gotham’s thirty-two school districts have no gifted program to speak of, and many others have too few and do little to get the word out about those they’ve got.

This summer, Fariña and company launched an experimental program to make these programs more inclusive by targeting ill-served neighborhoods, such as those mentioned above and Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville. They’ve replaced the old aptitude test still used elsewhere in the city with entry to new third-grade gifted classes based on multiple gauges, including attendance and school performance. And they’ve opened programs in neighborhoods that had none.

The early results are promising, as far as they go: 221 families applied for spots in the new program and half were accepted. Those kids started this month. Best wishes to them and kudos to the city for doing this. But it’s just a start, and a hesitant one at that.

The new system still leaves it to parents to initiate the process of pursuing gifted classes. Before a student can take the entrance exam, a parent must submit a "Request For Testing" form in the Fall before the January-administered test. And then the district suggests that moms and dads prepare their children for the assessment's verbal and non-verbal components. This gives an edge to savvy, pushy parents—a typical problem in American K–12 education and one that invariably favors more advantaged kids.

What’s more, the experimental program is overcomplicated. Its holistic approach is time consuming and—when used alone—can misfire. What if a youngster’s middling grades and spotty attendance have naught to do with her ability, but are instead caused by a tough home situation? What happens when a kid with great potential daydreams in class because his current curriculum moves too slowly?

Above all, adding 112 kids to a new pilot program doesn’t get you very far in a city with more than a million pupils. There’s an acute shortage of gifted-and-talented opportunities that’s worst in poor neighborhoods. A portion of students in every school would benefit from such opportunities, lest they remain stuck in classes with teachers struggling to differentiate instruction across a broad spectrum of pupil abilities and prior achievement.

There’s a better way. Screen every third-grader using an universal assessment—like the annual state achievement test that everyone takes—instead of relying on a separate gifted exam or complex new admissions procedures. Use this to find the top-scoring kids in every single school, not citywide. When Broward County, FL, employed this approach, it worked really well for poor and minority youngsters, report economists Laura Giuliano and David Card.

Next—and here the city’s new program gets it partly right—ask teachers to use a holistic approach to nominate additional youngsters who don’t earn top marks on the exam but show uncommon potential. Consider grades, other scores, and attendance, but also look for sparks that perceptive teachers are adept at noticing. This part need not be formalized but it has to be encouraged.

Use of this two-step approach is fairer to students because it doesn’t depend purely on overworked parents to initiate the application process. And it simplifies the process for busy teachers who aren’t required to go through formal screening efforts for potential entrants.

The last piece of the puzzle is, of course, to provide a sufficient supply of gifted classes. No amount of fiddling with the admissions process will close the excellence gap unless New York finds ways to serve more of its high flyers. Fortunately, there’s an easy, inexpensive solution. Our school-specific two-step model would yield enough pupils to fill designated separate classrooms that provide enriched and accelerated curricula. Neither new staff nor new buildings would be required.

Fariña and the New York City Education Department are right to take steps to maximize the potential of high-flying poor kids. But they’ve only just begun to address the challenges that this presents.

This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in the New York Daily News.

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright take Texas to task for capping the number of kids eligible for special education services. During the research minute, Amber Northern examines efforts to replicate college mentoring programs at scale using technology.

Amber's Research Minute

Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic, "Student Coaching: How Far Can Technology Go?," NBER (September 2016).

“As policies are debated, we often have to rely on research that is ill-suited to the task. Its methodology is frequently too weak to form a firm foundation for policy,” write Sarah Cohodes and Susan Dynarski in this Brookings brief on Massachusetts’s ballot proposal to lift the state’s charter cap. “This is not one of those times.” To the contrary, they note, “it is hard to think of an education policy for which the evidence is more clear.”

Well, thanks for clearing that up.

Like many states, Massachusetts sets a cap on the number of charter schools, as well as the share of district funds that can be spent on charters. A “smart cap” established in 2010 prioritizes applications from charter operators with a proven track record that wish to expand in low-performing districts. At present, there are seventy-eight charter schools in Massachusetts, while tens of thousands of students languish on waiting lists. The ballot initiative would raise the cap, allowing twelve new charters to be approved and opened each year.

If improving outcomes for underserved kids is your goal, voting to raise the cap would appear to be a no-brainer. Massachusetts is home to some of the nation’s highest performing charter schools, with gold-standard data to prove it. “Charter schools in the urban areas in Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes, far better than those of the traditional public schools that charter students would otherwise attend,” Cohodes and Dynarski attest. “The effects are particularly large and positive for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low scores.” The duo cite ample “natural experiment” studies comparing lotteried-in students to those who failed to win a seat that make it indisputable that urban charters in the Bay State are producing “very large increases in students’ academic performance.”

Note that Dynarski and Cohodes cite urban charter schools as runaway successes. Elsewhere, it’s a very different matter. “We find that the effects of charters in the suburbs and rural areas of Massachusetts are not positive,” they write, explaining this is unsurprising since many students in non-urban districts have access to excellent schools. Thus charters are hard-pressed to improve upon their already strong results. Of course even where charters run up the score, some may still oppose charters as a matter of principle, favoring the governance and structure of traditional public schools. “That’s their prerogative,” the authors conclude. “What we find distressing and intellectually dishonest is when these preferences are confounded with evidence about the effectiveness of charter schools. The evidence is that for disadvantaged students in urban areas of Massachusetts, charter schools do better than traditional public schools.”

Any questions?

All that remains is to be seen is if the voters of Massachusetts—famously our highest achieving state—are, for all their educational attainment, swayed by data and evidence, or something else.

SOURCE: Sarah Cohodes and Susan M. Dynarski, “Massachusetts charter cap holds back disadvantaged Students,” Brookings (September 2016). 

Summer learning loss affects all children, but low-income students, who don’t have the same access to enrichment opportunities as their more affluent peers, tend to fall further behind during these months, widening the already yawning achievement gaps. Voluntary summer learning programs are one way to combat this slide.

A new study from the Wallace Foundation and RAND Corporation takes a look at five such programs in different urban school districts around the U.S. (Boston, MA; Rochester, NY; Pittsburg, PA; Dallas, TX; and Duval County, FL) and determines what factors were most likely to produce successful results. While the district’s programs may have varied in their approaches, there were several consistent factors among them. All were full-day, five-day-a-week, free-of-charge voluntary programs that lasted a minimum of five weeks. They all also provided three hours of academic instruction a day from certified teachers in small classes no larger than fifteen students. They even offered free transportation and meals, along with various enrichment activities such as art, music, and sports.

The study included 5,637 rising fourth graders, 3,192 of whom were randomly selected to partake in the programs for two consecutive summers (the treatment group), while the rest, who were not selected, were assigned to the control group. When the researchers compared the academic achievement of the control group to that of the entire treatment group, the results were modest because not all kids attended the summer programs regularly. However, when they compared the control group to subsets of the treatment group, such as those who attended for at least twenty days, the results were more significant (more on that below). The researchers also accounted for student characteristics and prior academic performance in both analyses to ensure any positive academic improvements were a result of participating in the summer program and not selection bias. Ultimately, the primary finding was that kids who attended more frequently benefitted more from the programs. Important, if not all that surprising.

In the first year, 2013, about 80 percent of students in the treatment group attended the summer program. Only about half showed up the next year, as some students left the district before the summer or dropped out for other unspecified reasons. Half of all the students who showed up in 2013 were “high attenders,” meaning they attended for at least twenty days, and these students saw the most significant benefits in math. When they entered fourth grade in the fall of 2013, their advantage over the students in the control group was about 25 percent of the average annual learning gain for math. By spring of 2014, they still had about a 13 percent advantage of a student’s average annual gain. Those high attenders who came back for the second summer saw even greater gains in both math and language arts, enjoying an advantage between 14 and 21 percent of the usual annual gains in mathematics, and between 17 and 25 percent in English language arts.

Another factor that positively affected student achievement was “academic time on task.” Treatment group students, who received at least 25.5 hours of math and reading instruction (“high academic time”), experienced greater typical annual gains than the control group: 15–21 percent more in math and 13–33 percent in reading.

The study also includes recommendations for summer learning program leaders to maximize the benefits. Analysts suggest that programs run for a minimum of five weeks and focus on instructional quality. They also offer tips on how to maximize attendance rates up and minimize costs. For the former, they suggest offering programs to various age levels so some students won’t have to stay home to take care of younger siblings, and making sure that program activities excite and engage students. To minimize costs, they recommend using the study’s findings to predict likely attendance rates and adjust resources, such as space and teachers needed, to meet those rates.

While the findings of this study may not be surprising, they are certainly valuable in helping to close the summer learning gap between low-income students and their peers. Hopefully this study and its recommendations will encourage more urban districts to improve and expand such programs for disadvantaged pupils.

SOURCE: Catherine H. Augustine et al., “Learning from Summer: Effects of Voluntary Summer Learning Programs on Low-Income Urban Youth,” RAND Corporation (September 2016).