A study in England recently reported that some 700,000 students in special education were put there in error. Or that might be the charitable explanation.
Some folks claim that teachers move kids into special education just because the kids need a bit of extra help. And their schools come out looking rosy if they can point to numbers showing how well their students in special education are doing.
Also, funds are handed out according to the number of kids in special ed, an obvious incentive to classify kids who may not have an actual learning disability.
Meanwhile, back on this side of the pond, we’re seeing an opposite phenomenon. Recent numbers out of the Department of Education show that there has been a fairly significant drop in the number of kids being diagnosed with learning disabilities. For the first time in years, the trend is downward rather than sky-high.
The number of students tagged with the “specific learning disability” label dropped from a high of 6.1% in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2% in 2007-08, according to the Department of Ed. The numbers of students with LD, which climbed steadily each year from 1976 to 2004, has dropped each year since.
So the question is, why? And is it real?
Some credit the dropping numbers to Response to Intervention (RTI), a protocol that gives varying levels of early intervention to kids who are struggling with reading. The theory was that a lot of kids in special education didn’t really have LD, they were just the victims of bad teaching (the England phenomenon).
So this may mean that it’s working. Or it could mean that RTI is delaying the identification of kids who really do have learning disabilities. Does it improve their skills just enough to get by, but never enough to make them great students? Some folks speculate that by taking kids out of special ed, they’re eliminating them from the subgroups reported in standardized testing, which makes the school look like it’s performing better than it is.
So England may be filling the ranks of special ed simply to make their schools look good, not to help kids with LD. Strangely, and also not admirably, American schools may be depleting theirs for the same reason. Hope this isn’t the case — being the eternal optimist I am, I’m going to hope and believe that it really is the happy result of RTI at work.
Because if that’s not the case, it’s just one more depressing case of our kids being pawns of a flawed system.
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