Growing rosters and excessive accommodations are making special education less effective for students who truly need it.
Growing rosters and excessive accommodations are making special education less effective for students who truly need it.
L ast year marked the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law that governs the regulation and funding of special education. Recently, lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced identical bills that would add dyslexia as its own category to IDEA, signaling an appetite to comprehensively reauthorize the law for the first time since 2004 — a much-needed initiative.
While its provisions rightly won access to schooling for students with disabilities — a demographic once turned away from many public schools — IDEA’s imperfections are increasing the strain on American classrooms.
IDEA itself has an inauspicious origin. When Gerald R. Ford signed it into law, he warned that, “Unfortunately, this bill promises more than the federal government can deliver, and its good intentions could be thwarted by the many unwise provisions it contains.” Two problems in particular have begun to emerge in recent years: expanding rosters of special education students and excessive accommodations.
In a recent article for The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch wrote about the nearly 40 percent of students at some elite colleges who claim disability status and therefore demand special accommodations, such as extra time on tests. While her essay focuses on the proliferation of “disability creep” in higher education, the same thing is happening in K-12 schools. In 2019, a New York Times report covered a similar growing trend in high schools, where students claim special education status to secure extra time on tests, fewer answer options, or a private room to take exams.
A report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, which dives into the data surrounding special education services in America, finds that the growing scrutiny of problems in special education is reflective of reality. The share of students identified with disabilities nearly doubled from 8 percent in 1975 to 15 percent today.
The report’s data includes an interesting wrinkle: In 1975, most students qualifying for special education had disabilities such as severe intellectual impairments, speech impediments, or hearing loss. Over the years, the number of students with these disabilities has barely budged. However, the share of students with what the report calls “modest behavioral differences” — conditions such as mild autism, dyslexia, and ADHD — has swelled from 25 percent to 66 percent of the students in special education. They write, “While autism was added to eligibility rules in 1990, diagnostic standards for the condition shifted dramatically in the intervening years in ways that enabled many more children with modest behavioral differences (especially those from affluent families) to qualify for special education.”
In other words, liberalizing eligibility requirements has swelled enrollment, creating ever-expanding accommodations that are unfair to general education students — and, counterintuitively, harmful to special education students themselves.
As special education scholar James Kauffman wrote, excessive accommodations certainly make the lives of special education students “easier” — but they ultimately “protect them from learning.” Kauffman explained, “Students who are consistently enabled and not challenged are never given the opportunity to become independent.” For students with only mild behavioral disabilities, allowing calculators on tests removes the incentives to learn basic arithmetic skills. Taking away penalties for late work incentivizes avoidance and poor habits. And offering adult scribes prevents students from improving their own reading and writing abilities. A blind student who needs a test read aloud is an entirely different situation from a child who struggles to focus getting unlimited test time.
But the flaws of IDEA manifest beyond rosters and accommodations. One superintendent, Jim Howard, told the Independent Women’s Forum recently about the behavioral accommodations that come with an individualized education program (IEP). Regardless of their behavior, schools cannot suspend a student with an IEP for more than 10 days. When a student makes headlines for causing a violent incident in a school but then returns to class, Howard said, “every administrator who reads that headline knows exactly why — that kid had an IEP.”
Meanwhile, special services require extensive equipment and personnel, which are placing an increasing financial burden on schools and school districts. When Congress passed IDEA, they committed to funding 40 percent of the per-pupil cost for special education services, but the federal government has only managed to cough up 12 percent of those costs, leaving schools to pull money from elsewhere. Indeed, there is considerable evidence of this crowding-out effect, where for every dollar spent on special education, schools spend less on general education and the rest of the student body.
Finally, the law all but ensures that legal antagonism between schools and parents will fester. IDEA itself guarantees a “free appropriate public education” for students with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment.” Through a written IEP, students who have been labeled with a disability receive a variety of accommodations and supports.
IEPs are legally binding documents, where parents are the enforcement mechanism. Miriam Freedman, a lawyer who spent her career mediating special education suits, explains that IDEA “set up an adversarial private-enforcement system for the rights it created,” all built on the premise that parents “need to advocate for their children against their schools.”
As a result, in the words of a report from the National Association of Scholars, the provision of special education comes as “a patchwork response to lawsuit” — not necessarily a well-reasoned, evidence-based selection of services. In other words, the services received can depend on whether a parent has the resources to sue.
As both a teacher and an administrator, I saw how the special education system, as it currently works, serves no one well. Students with mild conditions get coddled into helplessness, with the IEP functioning as an excuse for poor habits rather than a document to explain needed supports. Meanwhile, those who really do need assistance cannot get it, as school personnel and budgets are stretched thin.
The prospect of overhauling IDEA is a political third rail. It’s unlikely that any politician would dare touch it beyond mere tweaks, and any who tried would be vilified in the media. That shouldn’t be the case, though. No law should be above criticism or reform, however sacrosanct the topic. IDEA was a landmark reform in American education — but it could be far better, and I hope our politicians will have the courage to tackle its current flaws.