(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Jay and I have a column on Pajamas Media this morning with our take on Response to Intervention. A sample:
Five years ago, we published a study with disturbing implications — literally millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability. Since then, we’ve been struggling to get past the many myths and misconceptions surrounding special education, trying to get people to see the problem.
Now there’s finally been a change, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, federal special education authorities have at last acknowledged the problem and adopted a policy designed to address it. The bad news is, the policy is no good.
That’s the way it usually goes in education reform — two steps forward, one step back. And the obstacles to reform in special education are unusually large, so the steps are baby steps.
But you know what they say: the first step is admitting you have a problem. And we’re glad to see that step has been taken.
UPDATE: Whoops, forgot the link.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I saw a lot of comments on the other site. As a former CST members here’s my perspective. Sure there’s a problem of kids being labeled as having a disability when they don’t. Many CST members and school personnel already are fully aware of this but there is a great pressure to classify children anyway because as you said it’s a funding issue. It’s also more than that, in my experience teachers and administrators push for classification and get parental support so that the teacher no longer has to be responsible for the same standards of education of the child. It’s just an easy way out and teachers and administrators see no harm in it. One time I tested a child and then told a teacher I couldn’t classify the child because clearly (since he was only in the country for a little over a year and no English was spoken at home) there were environmental impacts and we can’t classify when we suspect the disability is linked to environmental impacts. She said she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do it so that he could just get a little bit of extra help besides ESL services. In her eyes I was wrong, but classifying him wasn’t ethical and I knew it. I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident but it wasn’t. Examples like this are extremely common. As a CST member it’s really, well you know the expression, you’re d*ammed if you do and d*ammed if you don’t. Talk about school bullying! At least RTI offers a little light at the end of the tunnel, if it there weren’t so many potential things that could wrong with it.
Glad to hear you did the right thing. And one point your comment helps illustrate is the causal loop between schools and parents. A lot of people (including the first commenter over on PJM) blame parents for growing special education placements. The data we found don’t really allow the possibility that parents are the ultimate drivers of the growth – two thirds of the growth is attributable to schools’ funding incentives. However, schools may be adept at recruiting parents to support diagnoses, especially by promising more services (as you point out). So that can lend greater plausibility to the claim that parents are the driving force.
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