Chairwoman Landrieu and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you this morning about an issue of such importance -- ensuring high quality education for students with special needs. Senator Landrieu, I would like to acknowledge, for the record, all of your efforts on education in the Senate. I've been consistently impressed at your willingness to tackle the tough and controversial issues that don't lend themselves to easy or simple solutions.
Special education is an issue that bears on students around the country whether or not they have special needs. While I am not an expert on the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), as an analyst of special education the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) work should be useful to the subcommittee as you consider the issue of education, and special education in particular, in the District of Columbia.
In advance of the current reauthorization cycle for the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), PPI partnered with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation to examine special education a quarter-century after the passage of IDEA. While we share some common goals, PPI and Fordham are certainly not ideological soulmates on the issue of education. But we believed that by coming together to jointly investigate this issue we could stimulate some fresh thinking about IDEA and helping students with special needs and demonstrate that addressing the challenges they face need not be ideologically divisive. The initial result of our collaboration was a two-day conference and the subsequent publication of Rethinking Special Education for a New Century. Rethinking is a volume of 14 original papers along with analysis and preliminary recommendations from PPI and Fordham. On behalf of trees everywhere I will not submit Rethinking for the record but it is publicly available and widely cited and we would be happy to furnish committee staff with copies if you would like.
Not surprisingly, we found that special education and IDEA have accomplished a tremendous amount for students with special needs. This groundbreaking legislation not only opened our schools to students with special needs but also literally became the catalyst for a major culture shift that opened the doors of opportunity for these youngsters. However, despite these accomplishments, we also found that IDEA has developed problems that demand the attention of policymakers. These problems are not the fault of any particular policymaker or lobby but are rather the consequence of an inevitable collision between complex procedural legislation, changes in the educational landscape in this country, and advances in research. More to the point, it's important to remember in the context of what we're discussing today that many of the problems with special education are outgrowths of larger problems with education generally and must be treated as such. It's no coincidence that many of the communities struggling with special education challenges are the same communities plagued by general education deficiencies.
Rather than go through all of the analysis and recommendations in Rethinking, today I will focus on three points that are national issues and also issues DCPS should consider with regard to special education. These are over-identification of students and minority students in particular for special education, inadequate student outcomes, and fiscal issues. As opposed to other policy areas in education where the bulk of policy is largely determined at the state and local level, it is important to remember that most, but not all, special education policy is derived from federal statutes, particularly IDEA.
The issue of over-identification of minority students for special education is not a new concern and has been discussed in special education literature for some time. However, renewed attention to the achievement of minority students has sparked increased attention and research into this issue. In the District of Columbia, according to the most recent data we found, a slightly higher percentage of students were enrolled in special education than the national average of 12 percent.
As part of the PPI-Fordham special education conference researchers Matthew Ladner and Christopher Hammons presented a paper analyzing over-identification and found that race predicts identification for special education more than any other variable they examined including class size, spending, and poverty. Most significantly, Ladner and Hammons found that as minority enrollment in a school district declined, special education identification for minorities increased. This is a counter-intuitive and important finding. The paper is included as a chapter in Rethinking.
Subsequently, research from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the National Research Council (NRC) elaborated on these issues. The NRC recently issued a report by a commission headed by former Council for Basic Education president and Bush Administration education official Christopher T. Cross. The NRC found that there are, "biological and social or contextual contributors to early development that vary by race and ethnicity." Specifically the NRC report pointed out that minority students are disproportionately poor and thus more likely to be exposed to effects of poverty such as, "higher rates of exposure to harmful toxins, including lead, alcohol, and tobacco." However, like the Ladner-Hammons study, the NRC also found that school experiences contribute to differences in special education participation among various racial and ethnic groups.
According to the NRC report, while African-American students comprise 17 percent of the student population they account for 20 percent of students identified for special education. More troubling, black students account for 33 percent of those identified as mentally retarded as well as 27 percent of those identified with emotional disturbances.
This means that an African-American student is 2.28 times more likely to be identified as mentally retarded and 1.58 times more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed than a white student. Thus while a higher incidence of disabilities may be partly explained by poverty and related factors, the data clearly indicate a more substantial education problem as well.
The larger over-identification problem is exacerbated by inadequate reading instruction, which I will discuss in a moment, and also insufficient attention to heath and prenatal care for women and children in too many communities.
Special education has accomplished a great deal with regard to student performance. Increased access to the general curriculum and an increased emphasis on performance is helping to improve achievement for students with special needs. Nonetheless, substantial challenges remain.
The high school graduation rate for students with special needs is unacceptably low. According to the Department of Education in 1998 only about 55 percent of students with disabilities left high school with a diploma. It should be noted that this is almost a 4 percent rise since 1994, but it still leaves almost half of special needs students facing life in the knowledge economy without a high school diploma.
Further, while more special needs students are participating in assessments of performance -- a key accountability tool -- their performance is still disappointing. According to the National Center on Educational Outcomes at the University of Minnesota, in only 15 states are special needs students performing better on assessments than in previous years. In 18 states performance is unchanged and it is lower in 4 states. Thirteen states lacked this data illustrating that despite the 1997 law, data about special education participation and outcomes are still too frequently incomplete. While some of the problems here in Washington are extreme, DCPS are not alone in terms of inadequate data collection and analysis for special education.
While IDEA has largely accomplished the goal of ensuring access to schools, that accomplishment remains insufficient: The goal is ensuring access to education.
We must now view civil rights in education as an issue of quality not only of access. In Rethinking we conclude that some of the problems with performance exist because current special education policy rewards and penalizes schools for compliance rather than outcomes and schools are responding to these incentives at the expense of performance and quality.
Surprisingly, despite the attention to special education spending over the past few years, only recently have well documented spending numbers emerged. In Rethinking, after reviewing several estimates and analyses we concluded that spending is in the $35-$60 billion range annually. Last month, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) released a study stating that special education spending is approximately $50 billion annually. This means that the cost of educating students with special needs is 21.4 percent of K-12 spending in the U.S.
When thinking about special education costs it is important to remember that the lowest incidence disabilities that carry the highest costs. Thus, anecdotal and apocryphal stories about students who cost tens or even hundreds of thousands to educate must be viewed in the appropriate context. Nevertheless, for small and rural districts these students can present enormous fiscal problems because while funding for special education is dispersed based on identification-neutral formulas, educational costs for a particular high-cost child are concentrated in the particular school or school district where that child resides. Although it is beyond the scope of this subcommittee, PPI believes that some mechanism for direct payments for students with severe disabilities should be incorporated into IDEA. Rethinking included this recommendation as well.
In addition, the category of special education identification that has grown the most during the past 25 years carries with it, generally speaking, lower costs than other disabilities. This is the learning disabilities category that has ballooned from 21.6 percent of students identified for special education in 1977 to 46.2 percent in 1998 and is now over 50 percent. As Wade Horn and Douglas Tynan pointed out in Rethinking, this 233 percent growth stands in contrast to 13 percent growth among all other special education categories combined. Some of this expansion can be explained by more sophisticated diagnostic measures but there are also clearly more complex issues involved not all of which are understood. One that policymakers can deal with from an evidence-based standpoint is reading problems among young children -- too many of whom end up in special education needing remedial help that could have been avoided with proper instruction. This is a teaching disability rather than a learning one, and better training for teachers, research-based reading practices, and high-quality early childhood programs with early screening for problems will help address this issue.
There is currently no analysis of the net fiscal and special education enrollment impact of a better emphasis on prevention of reading problems (including more robust pre-k education) coupled with better screening to identify those who do have genuine learning disabilities but now go undiagnosed. It is counterproductive to withhold increased funding for IDEA pending resolution of these issues but IDEA funding should be considered in the context of these broader reforms.
Teacher Quality
First, a common thread that runs through many special education issues and K-12 education overall is teacher quality. Although a generalized problem, this issue is particularly acute with regard to special education. Today other witnesses are testifying about how competition in public education through charter schools and public school choice can improve education. PPI strongly supports public school choice and charter schools. However, policymakers must remember that Adam Smith's rules do not apply only to some parts of the education universe and not to others. Teachers too will respond to competitive incentives.
A shortage of special education teachers means that extra incentives must be in place to attract and retain these teachers in challenging positions. In part this is a working conditions issue, particularly with regard to paperwork issues. According to the Department of Education, the average special education teacher spends 5 hours a week on paperwork compared to 2 hours per week for general education teachers. This is as much time as special education teachers report spending on lesson preparation, five times as much as they report spending on professional collaboration and ten times as much as they do communicating with parents. In large part, however, addressing this challenge is a money issue. Attracting scarce professionals to these positions requires breaking away from an antiquated single-salary scale based on degrees and experience and instead compensating teachers with skills that are in high demand through increased compensation. Special education teachers are clearly in this category. In addition, as increasing attention is rightly focused on pre-k education it's important to remember that salaries are a key part of addressing teacher quality problems in that area as well. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, the mean salary for pre-k teachers is $20,100 annually or $9.66 per hour.
The 7-point plan for special education improvement that DCPS developed includes measures to increase the emphasis on training general education teachers about special education issues. This is a key component of reform. Too often special education and general education operate in isolation from one another and too few teacher preparation programs adequately address special education for general education teachers.
Pre-K and Prevention
The DCPS have made an effort to ensure access to pre-k and kindergarten programs. In fact, an irony in the debate over choice in the District of Columbia is that while voucher proponents focus on the plight of parents seeking to exit the public school system; some parents from other jurisdictions seek to illegally enroll their children because of DCPS' full-day kindergarten program.
However, according to DCPS statistics, for the 1999-2000 school year pre-k enrollment was only 55 percent of kindergarten enrollment. That's a gap that should concern policymakers. Ample research shows that high quality early childhood education is an important step toward giving students a strong start in school and lessening the effects of poverty. Most recently, a longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education and conducted by the University of Wisconsin examined early childhood programs in Chicago. The researchers found that low-income children who attended quality early-childhood education programs were more likely to complete high school and less likely to be in trouble with the law than their peers. In terms of special education, the study found that 14.4 percent of the students participating in high quality early childhood programs were later enrolled in special education programs compared with 24.6 percent of comparable students. Although outcomes for these students were still not on par with more affluent youngsters the results show that quality pre-k programs can help address disparities in opportunity.
The behavior of affluent parents indicates that they understand the importance of early-childhood education. The Department of Education found that nationally 65 percent of children from families with incomes over $50,000 go to preschool compared with only 37 percent of children from families with incomes under $10,000. But the opportunity gap is frequently starker than these numbers suggest because of differences in the quality of programs available to low-income parents.
In Rethinking, Drs. Reid Lyon, Jack Fletcher and others argue that early-childhood programs, along with strong literacy instruction in the early grades, can play a key preventative role with regard to special education. But, they caution that, "A major problem with such efforts is that special educators who typically provide instruction to children with [learning disabilities] have not been integrated into the early identification and prevention initiatives and have not had a role in efforts to design and implement early prevention programs. It is important that both regular and special education embrace these efforts and view prevention as part of their mission."
To help prevent the need for special education, the District of Columbia should focus on ensuring quality and enhancing access to pre-k programs. Beyond helping students before they fall behind, greater prevention has the potential for cost savings and allows special educators in the District more effectively to concentrate their efforts.
Finally, although it is beyond the scope of this morning's hearing, an emphasis in public policy on prenatal and health care issues for women and children is essential to addressing these issues as well.
Costs and Performance
Improving the performance of special needs students is embedded in the 7-point plan the DCPS has developed to improve its special education program. However, because of the nature of the current IDEA, compliance and regulatory issues also feature prominently. A focus on improving data collection and tracking is an absolutely necessary step. But, it is essential that officials remember the overarching goal of special education -- improving the performance of special needs youngsters.
Two steps we recommend with regard to costs and performance are:
- Restore a cap on routine legal fees so that special education dollars are spent on education while allowing larger fees in extraordinary cases;
- Expand and enhance DCPS' capacity to offer special education services and programs to lessen the need for private placements and improve quality.
A key problem with IDEA is that despite admirable and well-intentioned efforts, too many low-income parents are at a disadvantage in terms of accessing IDEA's procedural safeguards. In the case of Washington, there is no evidence that removing the caps helps address this problem. As School Board Chair Peggy Cooper Cafritz has pointed out in the Washington Post, the fee cap does not seem to impact private placements for poor African American students.
Moreover, Washington has a well-documented problem with abuses of the special education system. Most recently Justin Blum of the Washington Post documented rampant conflict of interest and abuse of the special education process by a private company. The cap should also apply to public charter schools.
The amount of money DCPS spends on private placements is appalling. By some estimates it is as much as $100 million per year. In 1999, a Washington Monthly article estimated the costs of private placements as at least $56 million. That alone would account for $791 per DCPS student in spending (assuming an enrollment of 70,762). Some of these placements are necessary because as in most communities there are students who have exceptional needs that the school system cannot meet. However, a combination of poor services and abuse of the system creates an untenable situation that thwarts reform. The ultimate victims are all students in DCPS.
The issues of capacity, legal costs, and private placements are interrelated and must be dealt with in concert. DCPS must deal with the issue of private placements by upgrading its own special education programs and capacity to legitimately serve students with special needs as well as retooling its administrative and legal approach to special education to avoid abuse. Curbing the torrent of money spent on legal costs is a difficult but important step in this process. Expanding the number of charter schools and other options for serving special needs students is another positive step if these schools and their programs are well designed and implemented and not a new incarnation of present shortcomings.
Reasonable and well-intentioned people can disagree about particular special education reforms in the District of Columbia and nationally. Nonetheless, it's clear that special education in the District of Columbia will not improve until the general education situation does as well. However, improvement of general education is also linked to special education reform in DCPS and around the country. Again, Senator Landrieu I applaud you for discussing these tough issues and appreciate the opportunity to testify before this subcommittee. I look forward to your questions and those of the other senators.
