|
|
CAT Tracks for December 30, 2007
"FULLY INCLUDED" |
A couple of articles on the "mainstreaming" debate and alleged motivations.
From the Wall Street Journal...
Parents of Disabled Students Push for Separate Classes
By ROBERT TOMSHO
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Last fall, groups who favor placing disabled students in regular classrooms faced opposition from an unlikely quarter: parents like Norette Travis, whose daughter Valerie has autism.
Valerie had already tried the mainstreaming approach that the disability-advocacy groups were supporting. After attending a preschool program for special-needs students, she was assigned to a regular kindergarten class. But there, her mother says, she disrupted class, ran through the hallways and lashed out at others -- at one point giving a teacher a black eye.
"She did not learn anything that year," Ms. Travis recalls. "She regressed."
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, factions are increasingly divided. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers.
Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. People like Ms. Travis believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments -- including separate schools.
'Fully Included'
In 2005, more than half of all special-education students were considered mainstreamed, or "fully included," nationally. These students spent 80% or more of the school day in regular classrooms, up from about a third in 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
"The burden is on school districts and states to give strong justification for why a child or group of children cannot be integrated," says Thomas Hehir, an education professor at Harvard and former director of special education at the U.S. Department of Education.
That point of view frustrates many parents. Some have struggled to get services from their local school districts; others have seen their disabled children falter in integrated settings.
Mary Kaplowitz, a special-education teacher in Kingston, Pa., was a bigger supporter of mainstreaming before she had her son, Zachary, who has autism and is mildly retarded. She says his preschool classmates rarely played with him and he came home from summer camp asking why the nondisabled children laughed at him. On a visit, she saw them drawing away from her son.
"They shunned him and it broke my heart," says Ms. Kaplowitz. Earlier this year, she and other parents fought successfully to preserve separate special-education classes in Kingston like the one Zachary, now 9 years old, attends at a local elementary school.
Such parental pushback has prompted local school districts across the country to delay or downsize mainstreaming initiatives.
Last year, parents of disabled kids in Walworth County, Wis., clashed with an advocacy group over the creation of a new special-education school. As part of the battle, Disability Rights Wisconsin sued the county in Milwaukee federal court to try to block the school. The new school is currently under construction and the lawsuit is under appeal.
And earlier this year, parents in Maryland's Montgomery County asked the state to continue a special-education program their school district was scheduled to discontinue. After initial protests, the district agreed to phase out the program -- letting enrolled kids continue -- rather than close it outright.
The debate has grown contentious in New Jersey, a state with a strong tradition of separate education for the disabled. Only about 41% of the state's 230,000 special-education students are deemed fully included, compared with 54% nationwide. About 9% of the state's disabled students -- triple the national average -- attend separate schools.
New Jersey passed some of the nation's first special-education laws. In the 1950s, it began requiring public schools to pay for special-ed services that they didn't offer. State law also gave counties and groups of school districts broad powers to build stand-alone schools for the disabled. Today, there are 80 publicly funded separate schools for the disabled in New Jersey and about 175 private ones. They receive tuition from public districts for handling special-ed students.
But in 2004, the state, which had faced federal pressure to mainstream, placed a year-long moratorium on the opening of new special-education schools. Since then, it has stiffened the approval process for private facilities and bolstered funding for local districts to broaden in-house programs.
In a budget-strapped state where voters have been demanding tax relief, cost has been a factor. On average, New Jersey spends about $16,100 a year on each special-education student, including those who are mainstreamed. The average annual tuition at the various, separate public schools for the disabled range from $28,500 to $42,000; at private schools, it's $44,000.
Overall, tuition and transportation costs for out-of-district placements accounted for 39% of the $3.3 billion a year that the state spends on special education. "That's a huge cost driver for our education budget," says state Sen. John Adler, who last year co-chaired hearings on school funding reform.
Many parents, including state Sen. Stephen Sweeney, bristle at moves that could foreclose their options. His daughter, Lauren, who has Down syndrome, attends a regular middle school. But Mr. Sweeney says her nondisabled classmates never visit or ask her to hang out. Next year, he's moving Lauren to a separate high school operated by the publicly funded Gloucester County Special Services School District. The system's special-education facilities also include a new $14 million school for children with autism and multiple disabilities.
'The Choice of Parents'
"Just to put my child in a building to make people feel better because it's inclusion is outrageous," says Mr. Sweeney. "As long as I am in the legislature, they are not going to take away the choice of parents with children with disabilities."
The school funding hearings, held in various towns and cities last fall, were emotional. Ruth Lowenkron, a special-education attorney, testified that beyond being the right thing to do, mainstreaming would save money. "Repeat after me," she told the legislators, "inclusion is cheaper than segregation."
But the panel also heard often from parents who argued for continued access to separate schools.
They included Adela Maria Bolet, of Teaneck, N.J., whose suit-clad son, Michael, sat beside his mother while she testified. The 17-year-old, who has Down syndrome, now attends a private high school on the state's tab. In earlier years, Ms. Bolet fought to get Michael into regular public schools only to find that he sometimes became depressed and had little positive interaction with nondisabled peers.
Until high school, he had few friends, says Ms. Bolet. Her voice still quivers when she talks about what happened when the family rented a pool in town and invited classmates from Michael's neighborhood elementary school to a swimming party for his 13th birthday. "Nobody came," she says.
Concurrent with the funding hearings, another debate was boiling at New Jersey's publicly funded Middlesex Regional Education Services Commission. It had already supported and built a network of six special-education schools, and planned to open two more, including a 24-classroom facility. The commission, controlled by a consortium of school districts, had built its other schools using bonds guaranteed by Middlesex County's governing board. Its school projects had never faced significant opposition.
This time was different, as the proposed schools became a target for mainstreaming advocates. Critics like William England, a school board member in South River, N.J., wrote to local papers. To endorse the sort of segregated special-education schools that most of the country is busy abandoning would be "a waste of county resources," he said in a letter to the Home News Tribune, East Brunswick, N.J.
Mark Finkelstein, the Middlesex commission's superintendent, scoffs at such criticism. He estimates his schools save local districts $10 million a year over the cost of placement in privately owned facilities. "It's easy to say that all kids should be in mainstream schools but let's talk reality," he says.
On a recent morning at the Bright Beginnings Learning Center -- one of the Middlesex schools -- a hallway painted mint-green was lined with children's wheelchairs and walkers. In one classroom, a teacher and four aides were working with seven disabled students, most strapped into devices designed to help them stand or sit.
Mary Lou Walker, an aide, crouched beside the desk of Teresa Condora, a petite 7-year-old who suffers from cerebral palsy and is largely nonverbal. "All right T, come on," Ms. Walker said, gently urging the girl to press a big red plastic button attached to a buzzer. Responding with a soft moan, Teresa pushed against the button as though it were impossibly heavy.
Factions Face Off
Last September, pro- and anti-mainstreaming factions faced off at a meeting where the fate of the proposed new Middlesex schools was to be decided.
At the microphone that evening, Paula Lieb, president of the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education, cited multiple examples of severely disabled children who had been successfully mainstreamed. She said that "the vast majority of children can be included in the public schools."
But the parents of children already attending the commission's schools had also been organizing, urging each other to come to the hearing and bring their disabled children.
Sandy Epstein's family had moved to New Jersey from Oregon a decade earlier to take advantage of specialized schools for students like her son, Brandon, who has autism. For the hearing, the 48-year-old homemaker dressed her teenager in a bright red polo shirt and sat near the front. "I wanted him to stand out," she says. "I wanted these politicians to see what we are talking about."
Ms. Travis, a 41-year-old bookkeeper from Milltown, N.J., says that while waiting to speak that night, she grew angry with the criticisms of the inclusion advocates. She thought they had no idea what her daughter Valerie, now 11, needed.
The Travises had spent eight months on a waiting list to get Valerie into the Academy Learning Center, one of the Middlesex schools located in Monroe Township, N.J.
During that time, she says, the progress Valerie had made learning to speak all but disappeared. Along with reports of her outbursts at school, Ms. Travis says the family had to cope with frequent meltdowns at home. Valerie slept fitfully, ripped up her homework and beat up her little brother to the point that he once needed stitches.
"It was the worst eight months of our lives," Ms. Travis told the county officials, adding that families like hers needed schools like the Academy, where Valerie is now learning geography and double-digit subtraction.
Mr. Finkelstein believes parents' testimony helped convince county officials to unanimously back the bonds needed for the new construction, which is under way.
"If inclusion worked for all of our residents," the superintendent says, "they wouldn't be fighting so hard for these new schools."
Their efforts are far from over. In June, a coalition of disability-rights groups sued the New Jersey education department in U.S. District Court in Newark. Taking a page from the racial desegregation battles of the 1960s, it alleges the department isn't moving fast enough to integrate disabled students and asks the federal court to take over the process.
Also from the Wall Street Journal...
Schools Accused of Pushing Mainstreaming to Cut Costs
By JOHN HECHINGER
GREECE, N.Y -- For years, Jonathan Schuster's mother begged the public schools here to put her son in a special program where he could get extra help for his emotional problems. By 11th grade, Jonathan had broken his hand punching a wall and been hospitalized twice for depression -- once because he threatened to kill himself with a pocket knife.
But teachers insisted that Jonathan, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and bipolar disorder, could get by in regular classrooms. His mother, Kathleen Lerch, says the reason was cost. "It was all about the bottom line," she says. Citing confidentiality, school officials declined to discuss Jonathan's case but said they seek to provide an appropriate education to all children.
Advocates for the disabled have long promoted the inclusion of special-education children in regular classes, a practice called mainstreaming. Many educators view mainstreaming as an antidote to the warehousing of children with special needs in separate, and often deficient, classrooms and buildings.
Now, some experts and parents complain that mainstreaming has increasingly taken on a new role in American education: a pretext for cost-cutting, hurting the children it was supposed to help. While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can't meet their needs. Inclusion has evolved into "a way of downsizing special education," says Douglas Fuchs, a Vanderbilt University education professor.
Districts have a powerful motivation to cut special-education costs. U.S. schools spend almost twice as much on the average disabled student as they do on a nondisabled peer, according to a 2004 federal study. But the study also found that, in recent years, per-student special-education costs rose more slowly than for the general population. One of the likely reasons, researchers found, was cost savings from mainstreaming.
In 2003, Fairfax County, Va., an affluent Washington, D.C., suburb, hired Gibson Consulting Group to study its special-education program. Gibson, a firm specializing in education, says it has saved clients millions of dollars by "improving productivity and eliminating inefficiencies." The firm's president, Greg Gibson, says mainstreaming nearly always saves money because regular classrooms have fewer teachers per student.
Gibson found that Fairfax spent an average of $14,671 per special-education student in all types of classrooms -- 85% more than for a pupil in general education. At 21 special-education centers, the per-student cost was even higher: $22,195. Mr. Gibson estimated that the district, which currently has a $2.2 billion school budget, could save $229 million through 2015 by closing 16 of the centers and taking other steps to teach more disabled children in regular classrooms.
Fairfax shut down the centers, prompting some parent protests. Fairfax officials acknowledge that the moves reduced costs, but say that children are better off in mainstream classrooms. They would not specify how much has been saved but said it was far less than Mr. Gibson's projections because special-ed students have received additional support.
Robert MacMillan, chair of the special-education department at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, says the Plymouth, Mass., public schools are currently cutting costs by moving students from separate centers -- either public ones operated by multiple districts or private facilities -- back into community schools and, where possible, into regular classrooms.
'For the Kids'
Cheryl Jacques, director of Plymouth's Pilgrim Academy, a separate public center primarily for students with emotional and behavioral problems, says her center's enrollment is dropping because districts are trying to be "economically responsible." Though she supports bringing students back to local schools if the children are ready, in some cases districts are likely "keeping kids that don't belong there," she says. Pilgrim charges districts $24,000 a year for each student. At Plymouth's public schools, the average cost of a special-education student runs $13,343. Bruce Cole, Plymouth's director of special education, counters: "I do what's best for the kids."
In the Greece Central School District, with 13,000 students, the push for more mainstreaming began in 1998. That year, Steven Walts, a former Maryland schools administrator, took over as superintendent in this middle-class suburb near Rochester, N.Y., where many work for Eastman Kodak Co. and Xerox Corp.
At the time, Mr. Walts was under pressure from New York state to include more disabled children in regular classrooms. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that students be taught, when possible, in the "least restrictive" environment.
Making Gains
Since Congress started pushing for mainstreaming more than a quarter century ago, many academic studies have found that the practice helps children with disabilities make academic and social gains. The two largest federal studies, each examining the records of 11,000 disabled school-age children, concluded that while failure rates rose, mainstreamed students overall tended to have higher grades and test scores than their counterparts in separate classes.
In Greece, Mr. Walts slashed the number of students referred to special outside schools, cutting separate classrooms and limiting "resource rooms," or learning centers for students with disabilities.
From 1998 to 2005, the percentage of Greece special-education students considered fully included -- spending 80% or more of their day in general education classes -- more than tripled, to 71%, far exceeding the national average of 54%. The number of students receiving special services at all fell below state and federal averages, to 8% from 15%.
Special-education budgets plummeted, too. Between the 1998-99 and 2004-05 school years, Greece reduced its spending on programs for disabled students by 26%, to $13.1 million from $17.6 million. Spending on special education dropped to 8% from 15% of total expenditures.
Upset at what they describe as the district's increasing refusal to provide services, a group of parents began meeting and comparing notes. They suspected that the district was effectively mainstreaming by simply capping the number of students eligible for services. Some children who were classified as special-education students were declassified and placed in regular classrooms with little or no additional help.
Mr. Walts left Greece in 2005 to become superintendent of the Prince William County public schools in Maryland. His office referred questions to Keith Imon, an administrator who also worked with Mr. Walts in Greece. Mr. Imon says Mr. Walts's office never directed employees to deny needed services or set quotas on classifying students as disabled. "I can say without a doubt that he makes all decisions based on what's in the best interests of the kids," says Mr. Imon.
Some school officials agreed with parents' concerns. Josephine Kehoe, who served as interim superintendent after Mr. Walts's departure, says principals told her that before she took over, they felt "pressure to spend the least amount of money possible" on special education.
In 2005, eight families, including Jonathan Schuster's, filed a lawsuit, accusing Greece of denying disabled children a "free appropriate public education" by restricting access to special classrooms, eliminating students' special-education eligibility and dumping them in regular classes.
The suit, which became a class action in U.S. District Court in Rochester, cited a 17-year-old 11th-grader with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. The student, identified only by the initials "K.B.," made the honor roll when receiving instruction in a separate, 15-student class. But when placed in a regular classroom in the 2004-05 school year, K.B. got failing grades, the suit says.
To settle the lawsuit, the families and the school district agreed to appoint Margaret McLaughlin, a special-education professor at the University of Maryland, as a joint expert to evaluate the district's program. After examining documents and conducting extensive interviews, Prof. McLaughlin says she was "quite stunned" by how much cost was influencing the push toward mainstreaming.
"It was, boom, one year, the kid was in a private placement and the next year he was dumped into a regular school with really limited support," she says.
No Deficiencies
In a legal settlement in August, the district acknowledged no deficiencies but agreed to place no limit on the number of students who would be placed in separate programs or receive other services. Under the consent decree, the number of separate classrooms with eight students and a teacher and an aide would increase from nine in the 2006-07 school year to a dozen in 2007-08. Already, since the 2004-05 school year, the percentage of students in fully inclusive classrooms has declined to 59% from 71%.
Steven Achramovitch, who became superintendent in November 2006, declined to discuss the lawsuit's allegations or Prof. McLaughlin's conclusions. Over the past year, the district has hired about 35 new special-education teachers, a 25% increase, and added $3 million to the 2006-07 school year's $14 million special-education budget. "It's going to be more costly, no question about it," he says. Mr. Achramovitch adds that the moves are unconnected to the lawsuit. "We'll do whatever is in the best interests of our kids," he says.
Deborah Hoeft, Greece's special-education director, says district surveys show that most parents of disabled children are pleased with the system's services.
Example of Success
Amid the controversy, Greece received national attention last year when Jason McElwain, then a 17-year-old senior with autism, scored 20 points in the last four minutes of a high-school basketball game. Jason met President Bush, and school officials hailed the student as an example of the success of including disabled children in school-wide activities.
Some parents praise recently added programs. Sharon Eddy says her son Ryan, now a fifth-grader, floundered in mainstream classes until third grade, when he transferred into a separate autism class with only eight children. The new setting "has been wonderful," she says.
But others say the district is still denying services in the name of mainstreaming. Christine Latus, a former elementary-school teacher, says her son Michael, a fifth-grader with dyslexia, needs a separate, specialized program either within the district or at a local private school for children with learning problems. Instead, the system has placed 10-year-old Michael in a mainstream classroom with 30 students, 12 of whom have special needs.
On a recent morning, Lisa Farina, Michael's teacher, asked him to stand in front of the class since he had grasped the meaning of a graph during a smaller discussion. At first, Michael froze, his eyes downcast. Then, he muttered a few nearly inaudible words about his findings.
At home after school that day, Michael, even with the help of a computer, struggled to write 10 sentences about a book he had read. "In reading, we're not getting too much help, except when we go into the smaller group," he said.
Michael's reading lags behind his peers by at least two grade levels. On a homework assignment this year, analyzing a political cartoon, Michael wrote in a nearly indecipherable scrawl: "The message seas that the it dos not wreak."
Individual Attention
Ms. Farina says she won't discuss individual students. But she says she has full-time help from a special-education instructor, as well as visits from other support staff. She says the school doesn't have enough students for a special class for dyslexia. She says students receive individual attention, working in groups of six to eight.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Schuster, the student whose mother sought help for his emotional problems, says the school system should have pulled him out of mainstream classrooms much earlier.
Around the time the lawsuit was filed, the Greece schools agreed to put Jonathan in a separate class especially for children with emotional problems. He settled down and graduated -- though with a 2.0 grade point average. Now 19 years old, Jonathan lives at home and works in a supermarket stockroom.
"It was too late," Jonathan says. "I don't feel I met my full potential."