This intervention will not increase differentiation, will not increase higher order thinking, and will do nothing to increase the intellectual capacity of students. Most of the curricula for these interventions are based on nonsense sentences, ‘the mouse moved the red house’ or ‘apples acting acrobatically’. Rti looks more like schools duplicating their failures, using the same failed interventions for rti as they have used for special ed students.

If we want to bring these students along intellectually while they learn reading and spelling we should give students access to Universal Design for Learning and multimedia assessments and learning aids and differentiated instruction.

Unfortunately, this would challenge the teacher led and the Carnegie unit models.
This is not about the money; it is about the structure of education. Teacher centered interventions or student centered, differentiated, content driven interventions. The old way or something new.

Looking back at the comment where I initially said that they’re revenue maximizers, I think I may have misunderstood what was implied by the idea of schools as “profit” maximizers. After all, the public school system doesn’t really have anything that’s unambiguously analogous to profit. All the money that comes in gets spent on something; there are no shareholders to pay dividends to.

In special education, schools seek to maximize special ed enrollments, but it seems to be fairly broadly acknowledged that in IEP meetings they seek to minimize their commitment to deliver services. I can see how that could be interpreted as “profit” maximizing.

Second, you provide excellent examples of how districts can establish procedures and policies that respond to the financial incentives that individual educators do not recognize as flowing from those incentives. For example, a district might arrange it so that educators can only get money to help struggling students by classifying them as disabled. The district may do that because they know they’ll get a subsidy. The fact that the district does not make funds available to schools otherwise is a perfect example of steering educators toward identifying disabilities.

Third, the lack of reliable data on costs does not undermine the argument that financial incentives are encouraging disability classifications. We see evidence of the incentive operating in the people’s behavior. That is, we look at what they do, not what they say their motives are. And we can look at the result without knowing every step along the way. Greg and I compared special ed growth in states with different funding systems. In states that rewarded additional diagnoses with additional funding, special ed enrollments grew much faster than in states that did not. And in the few states that switched systems to cease rewarding identification, enrollment rates slowed or reversed. So, we can see evidence of the incentive system by comparing outcomes under different funding arrangements. Julie Cullen also found that a change in funding incentives produced significant changes in special education enrollments, but you are right that she did not examine the issue nationally.

Fourth, you (and I thought it was Matt) may be right that schools act as revenue maximizers rather than profit maximizers. If that’s true, then my argument is even stronger, because any subsidy will encourage over-identification of disabilities even if the school loses money.

I should have been clearer on the Cullen, my point was that your study and findings and Cullen’s are very different and that lumping them together obscures these differences. “Large” is subjective. Most people would agree 62% is large; “over 35%,” is borderline large to many. It also seems that Cullen looked at other explanatory variables and from what I can tell from the link your study only looked at testing and funding structures as possibilities (please correct me if I am wrong about this). This isn’t a criticism of the analysis (you are free to include or not include whatever you want), just a desire to raise an awareness of what is and is not behind the word “confirm.” Policy discussions – especially on blogs — often suffer from inexact characterizations of research findings. We are all guilty of this. It can be awkward to include all the caveats and explanations instead of just linking, but sometimes it is worth it.

No, I wasn’t disagreeing about the reality of total revenue incentives and I hope it didn’t read that way, just noting that my experiences suggest that special education may be a one of those places where the opposite happens. It may not. That’s why I’d like to see the total revenue thesis as an alternative to the profit thesis more developed with evidence in relation to special education funding. I don’t see that in the chapters you mention.

…”special ed is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for identifying more students as disabled” may be an overstatement of Cullen’s findings…

But Jay was referencing not only Cullen’s study, but also the study he did with me. Our study found that the portion of special ed growth attributable to financial incentives was not 35 percent, but 62 percent. And given that Cullen’s study is a localized in one school district, whereas ours is a nationwide study, I think it’s fair to use our finding rather than Cullen’s to estimate the size of the effect.

As for your response to my comment, you’re not really disagreeing with me that schools have incentives to maximize revenue, you’re pointing out that schools can also have other incentives that counteract those. And verily they can! But the question then becomes which of these incentives is usually stronger. The statistical evidence pretty consistently finds that, on average, schools are more likely to maximize revenue than not. Obviously that doesn’t mean there are no particular times and places where the opposite happens; it only means that on the whole, across large numbers of schools over long periods of time, the tendency is to maximize revenue.

If you want to see this “more developed with evidence,” you can start with the Education Myths book; chapters 2 and 15 are relevant to this question.

I think that your initial characterization — “suggests that schools have financial incentives to increase their special ed rolls” — is fair, but that “special ed is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for identifying more students as disabled” may be an overstatement of Cullen’s findings.

You also wrote that you did not “mean to suggest that educators…are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details” and that “the systems that school districts have adopted for the evaluation and identification of disabilities are shaped by these financial incentives so that even well-meaning practitioners will tend to over-identify disabilities when there are financial rewards for doing so.” If I read this correctly you are saying that the system is shaped by an awareness of the incentives that “educators” don’t know exist (the same educators who often believe that special education creates a net district level financial loss). It doesn’t make sense to attribute actions to incentives – real or not – that are outside of or contrary to the beliefs of the actors. In order for the supposed benefits to become an incentive, they have to be recognized.

Incentives come in many forms. I think it is unlikely that teachers and others initiating and handling special education referrals (including parents) are motivated by any possible financial benefits to the district as a whole, if only because, correctly or incorrectly, most believe that the state money accompanying a special education designation does not cover the costs associated with that classification. I do however think that many are motivated to initiate referrals because they see students struggling and know that one way to get services to a child is via special education. Special education also enjoys legal protections that make it relatively immune to budget cuts. Other interventions don’t have this protected status. I propose a different read on the institutional/systematic dimensions of classification and even over classification, one not based directly on funding but on a desire to get some children extra services via whatever means are available. Interventions outside of special education are often seen, correctly and incorrectly, as less available, consistent or thorough. If these perceptions are true, then there do need to be systematic and institutional changes to correct this. RTI is probably not sufficient, but it may help.

This brings up another problem with the logic of your case. As I understand it the assertion that special education supplemental funding is a net gain for school districts is based on the assumption that “The positive financial incentive for identifying students as disabled exists when the subsidy is greater than the expenditure required by the special ed label beyond what would have been spent on that student anyway.” You note that we don’t have the accounting to prove or disprove this. You also write “If a student is lagging academically and the school would have to devote some resources to helping that student catch-up, the school could either choose to say “my bad” and pay for those extra resources out of their existing budget.” However, there is an implication throughout that districts are not providing these extra services outside of special education, “out of their existing budgets.” I would guess that the availability and costs of non-special education interventions vary widely, but we don’t know. The “what would have been spent on that students anyway” is an open question. As long as this is open, the question of the net financial benefits or harm of special education classifications is also open.

Greg Forster’s comment about “total revenue” incentives as opposed to “profit” incentives introduces a different thesis. That argument gives no weight to the money that would be spent on struggling students outside of special education. Districts do have incentives to increase total revenues, but they also have pressures that work against all spending increases, particularly those targeted to what many see as “other people’s children.” Superintendents from around Wisconsin who I have worked with on school finance reform have opposed revenue cap increases tied to high needs/high cost special education classifications because they know that many taxpayers in their districts resent the money already spent on these students. In light of their rejection of this total revenue enhancement, I’d like to see Forster’s thesis more developed with evidence.

I do know that the Madison, WI district where I live — based on a belief that special education classifications have a net financial disincentive for the district and red flags raised by disproportionate minority referrals and classifications — has worked to reduce referrals and classifications (see here: http://dpi.wi.gov/sped/ppt/dis-jorgensen.ppt).

See here:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_32.htm