On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed its first major K-12 education initiative for the 110th Congress: “21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act,” (H.R. 3021) — legislation authorizing a new $6.4 billion federal program for school construction and modernization.
This is a great proposal…if you think that the biggest problem in American education is that public schools aren’t environmentally friendly enough. For anyone who thinks that federal power in education should be limited, or that states and localities are better positioned to decide how to allocate resources to improve school facilities, it earns an F.
I have an op-ed on National Review Online today discussing the bill’s problems. In short, the bill is a regulatory gift bag to environmental groups and labor unions.
The bill is unlikely to move in the Senate. And if it passed, President Bush would probably veto it. So Americans shouldn’t expect to see federally-mandated “green” public schools anytime soon. But the House vote serves as a preview of where federal education policy could be headed.
This is the central theme of the Education Myths book and there is a chapter in the book that specifically addresses special education. Despite current and past efforts to dispel some common false claims (myths) about special ed, they just keep going. As NYC Educator wrote in a comment, “Greene can argue all he likes, but…” [I’ll just go ahead and repeat the claim that he just debunked.] You can have your facts, say the myth-makers, but I know what’s really true.
Sigh.
Just to briefly review the unsubstantiated and false claims that have come up in this current discussion:
1) Parents are the driving force behind over-identification of disabilities. (Not true. If parents were the driving force, why are special education enrollments so sensitive to financial incentives facing schools?)
2) External developments, such as improving medical care for premies, deinstitutionalization, and socio-economic forces, account for a large part of rising special ed costs. (Not true. The number of premies and deinstitutionalized students pales in comparison to the growth in special ed, which has almost entirely occurred in SLD. And mental retardation has been declining and total severe disabilities have remained flat over time, contrary to what one would expect if premies and deinstitutionalization were at work. And poverty cannot, by definition, be the cause of a disability.)
3) Special education students are typically found in self-contained classes with tiny class sizes and high costs. (Not true. Most disabled students, especially those with SLD, spend a majority of their day in regular classrooms. Services for most disabled students consist of some accommodations in their regular classroom or a little pull-out, small group instruction. These services are not dramatically different in character or cost than what is provided to lagging students who are not classified as disabled.)
I’ve attempted to respond to each false claim where it was posted and these topics were previously covered in Education Myths, so I won’t repeat the complete refutations here. Instead, I’d like to speculate about why people are repeatedly drawn to myths about special education. Even normally smart and sensible people, including some very good ed reformers, are confident about claims that they cannot empirically support and that most evidence contradicts. Why?
First, many ed policy wonks live in the DC area and their perceptions of special ed are distorted by the highly exceptional practices in the District. For example, many people think that private placement, the education of disabled students in private schools at public expense, is a common and financially burdensome arrangement. In fact, there are only 88,156 such students in the entire country out of almost 50 million students in public schools. But in DC private placement is almost 17 times more likely than in the rest of the country. DC is just different (for a variety of reasons) but people feel comfortable generalizing from their immediate experience.
Second, many ed policy wonks run in relatively elite circles. They know or have heard of savvy parents who have extracted unreasonable services from the public schools. But as I mentioned above, the evidence contradicts the claim that special ed placements are driven primarily by parents. Most people aren’t like the ones who went to your selective college, live in your comfortable neighborhood, or who blog about education policy.
Third, school leaders and educators have a vested interest in complaining about the financial burdens of special education or the unreasonable demands of parents. But newspapers treat their claims as if they were those of disinterested experts. If the local superintendent says that special education costs are threatening what can be provided in general education or that parents are to blame for a rise in special ed enrollments, it must be so.
Fourth, the hard reality is that most people are primarily interested in their own children. If they are led to believe that special education is going to drain resources from their non-disabled kids, they want to stop that. Since this is what they hear from school leaders and the news, they learn to resent special education. No one repeats that extra money for Title I kids drains money from their children (which is as true as for special ed), so they don’t resist programs for poor and minority students to the same degree.
Fifth, there is a false image in some people’s heads that disabled kids are basically basket cases and that money spent on them is money wasted. We even see this, to some degree, in school spending analyses by people like Richard Rothstein, who argue that special ed costs should be excluded when examining increases in expenditures over time and the relationship to student achievement. It’s as if they assume that that money is poured into a black hole and couldn’t possibly improve student outcomes. Crusty, conservative reformers are also drawn to this black hole view. Don’t waste the money on losers, they think but don’t quite say. Survival of the fittest!
Of course, these explanations for the extra prevalence of myths about special education are just speculation. I don’t have evidence to prove them. But I do have evidence debunking a number of false claims that are regularly made about special education. It would be a shame if smart people ignore the systematic evidence and repeat myths because they trust their direct experience and prior prejudices more than facts. This is why we have systematic evidence — to check the errors that regularly occur from following one’s gut.
In an attempt to keep viewers tuning-in after many years on the air, the sitcom Happy Days produced an episode where Fonzie jumped a Great White shark on water-skis. This episode brought the phrase “Jumping the Shark” into the pop-culture lexicon. Jumping the Shark denotes a tipping point in which something becomes absurd and suffers a noticeable decline. Arizona once was a leader in the standards and accountability movement, but those days are long gone. Days ago, Arizona lawmakers dispensed with AIMS as a graduation requirement, making the sad decline of AIMS into farce complete.
The credibility of Arizona’s K-12 testing has suffered the death of a thousand cuts. In 2004, Arizona schools faced a problem in that No Child Left Behind requires schools to be judged by ethnic subgroups, and Hispanic scores were all but certain to force many schools to be ranked failing under federal guidelines.
Instead, the state simply made AIMS much, much easier to pass. Presto-chango, Arizona Hispanic students (and others) were transformed from having been projected to fail the federal standards in almost all subjects at all grade levels in 2005 to passing almost all of them. A study by Peterson and Hess noted that Arizona’s dummy-down was the largest in the country.
Hop on over, the water’s fine!
Around that same time, the Arizona Department of Education recommended replacing the Stanford 9 exam with an Arizona version of the Terra Nova to imbed into AIMS. Happily, the new “Terra Zona” exam found that Arizona students are above the national average in every grade and in every subject tested.
One small problem: the results aren’t the least bit credible. The Arizona Department of Education recently mailed out the latest state report card, and the evidence of the farcical nature of this home-grown exam can be found in ADE’s own booklet.
On the one hand, the ADE touts the above average Terra Nova scores, but in the same booklet, it presents an analysis from the RAND Corporation showing that if you control for student demographics, Arizona’s scores on the Nation’s Report Card are average instead of rock bottom. The Nation’s Report Card- or NAEP- represents the nation’s most highly respected source of K-12 testing data.
The RAND report is entirely credible. Arizona has a far more difficult to educate student body than the national average- with a much higher percentage of low-income students, English language learners and minority students than the national average.
Controlling for demographic factors is a huge step to take. For instance, Arizona has a percentage of children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch more than twice as large as the national average. Our ratio of children who are English Language Learners is almost four times the national average.
If you pretend that Arizona has an ELL population one fourth its actual size, and about half the number of low-income children that we actually have, and some similar heroic assumptions, Arizona’s adjusted scores near the Minnesota middle instead of close to the bottom.
Arizona’s Terra Nova, however, does not control for demographics at all but somehow finds our students above the national average in every single subject without any adjustment whatsoever. If you are willing to buy that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you in Brooklyn.
Finally, AIMS has suffered what ought to be its final indignity. The legislature passed “AIMS Augmentation” in order to allow 6,000 high school seniors to graduate despite an inability to pass what at most amounts to a test of basic skills.
If you can’t pass a 10th grade level test, the original thinking went, you don’t deserve to graduate. A diploma should mean something. After delaying the graduation requirement several times, the augmentation bill has effectively killed it.
State policymakers should rethink our entire system of testing. Research shows that children who fail to learn to read in the early grades later drop out in huge numbers. Using AIMS as a graduation requirement addresses the problem at the back end. Arizona should look to Florida, which uses testing to require students to repeat grades if they don’t learn to read in the early years. Florida’s 4th grade reading scores used to scrape the bottom with Arizona, but now they greatly exceed us. Florida’s system set kids up to succeed, rather than to fail.
Parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers all require a credible and transparent system of student data. The AIMS/Terra Nova exam is not delivering. ABC eventually cancelled Happy Days and replaced it with another program. Arizona policymakers should do the same with AIMS.
Lately he’s been commenting on how teacher hiring continues to far outpace enrollment growth; even states where enrollment is flat or shrinking are still hiring like crazy. Maryland, for example, expanded its teacher workforce 10 percent from 2001 to 2006, while enrollment grew less than 1 percent. California, which is still carrying around an extremely bloated teacher workforce from its apparently failed experiment in class size reduction, has just announced that it’s cancelling the large majority of its planned teacher layoffs.
This isn’t a new phenomenon; as somebody pointed out you-know-where, the teacher workforce has been expanding relative to the student population for decades.
What effects does this have? You might expect it to reduce class sizes. The benefits of class size reduction are seriously doubtful and can’t possibly be cost-effective anyway, but never mind that for now. The fact is, class sizes don’t seem to have been reduced. Data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics indicate that while the system’s student/teacher ratio has been falling, class sizes have been flat, partly because each teacher teaches for fewer hours per day; there are also probably more teachers with non-teaching assignments (as mentor teachers, etc.) but I don’t know if we have data for that.
One effect the teacher glut is almost certainly to exert negative pressure on teacher salaries. Now, despite what you’ve been told, teachers are not underpaid. (See also the chapter on this in . . . well, you know.) But teacher salaries have remained stable, growing only a little faster than inflation. If we didn’t have a teacher glut, the laws of economics tell us salaries would be growing faster.
So who benefits? Well, the teachers’ unions make out like bandits. More teachers means bigger budgets without the hassle of selling the membership on dues hikes, and more political clout because the public school gravy train is larger. And while the unions’ political clout is badly overestimated – witness, for example, the startling political success of school choice – they do have enough power to exercise significant influence when no one else is looking, such as where staffing policies are concerned.
All of which reminds me of a story Antonucci covered recently (see Item 5 here) about a complaint filed with the IRS by the Ohio teachers’ union against White Hat Management, a charter school operator. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported: “Susan Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said White Hat, which is supposedly hired by the schools’ boards, exercises too much control over the schools, boards, and finances, violating IRS rules, she said.”
The teacher’s union files an IRS complaint because a tax-exempt organization has too much influence over education policy. So when does the union disband?
In Arkansas, as in many states, standardized tests are given well before the end of the school year. This year the augmented benchmarks for grades 3 through 8 were administered April 13-17 and the “end of course exams” for geometry, algebra, and biology were given April 21-29. Apparently the end of the course occurs 6 weeks before school breaks for the summer.
After the tests are done academic work grinds to a halt. Instead, academic content is increasingly replaced with field days, watching movies in school, parties, etc… as the end of the year approaches.
Don’t get me wrong, field days, watching movies, parties, etc… all have their place in a healthy school environment. It’s just odd that some educators who so often complain that testing narrows the curriculum and prevents them from pursuing the higher order instruction they really want seem at a loss about what to do when they no longer have the test bearing down on them. One would think that they would use those last 6 to 8 weeks to find their inner Alfie Kohn. Instead, a lot of it is used as play time.
Given how important time spent on instruction is to academic achievement, it would be great if we made full use of the academic year. Perhaps we can push back the tests closer to the real end of the school year. I know that grading tests, especially with open-ended items, is very slow. But frankly open-ended items add nothing to the predictive power of standardized tests, so eliminating that would allow faster grading, later testing, and fewer wasted days.
Like many well-meaning instructional reforms, Response to Intervention (RTI) is likely to fail if it is not coupled with other reforms that address the perverse incentives blocking its proper implementation.
The idea behind RTI is that we could avoid placing many students in special education if only we provided them with well-designed instructional approaches in the early grades. The huge increase in special education enrollments consists almost entirely of growth in Specific Learning Disability (SLD), which is an ambiguous category that is difficult for practitioners to diagnose properly. Almost any student with a normal range IQ but sub-par achievement could be labeled as SLD. But of course, students may lag in their achievement because they have been poorly taught, not because they have a problem processing information, as is characteristic of a true SLD. Schools have a variety of incentives to discount the former explanation and instead push students into special ed.
RTI is a federally-backed program that attempts to address this problem by allowing schools to divert 15% of their special education money into well-designed instructional programs for the early grades. If students are taught well, they won’t be lagging academically and so will not end up being identified as disabled.
This all sounds great, but it is almost certainly doomed to failure if we do not also address why schools were not previously providing well-designed instruction in early grades or why they are so motivated to identify students as disabled. Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing. Even if we thought that the problem was that schools were unaware of the effective approaches that RTI offers, we have no reason to believe that schools will truly adopt or effectively implement those strategies.
It is a a seductive but entirely mistaken reform approach to believe that schools are eagerly awaiting to be told by the federal government or philanthropists how to teach effectively but are just lacking the critical resources and knowledge to do it. Schools already hire certified professionals who have been exposed to countless hours of pre-service and in-service training. Why would we think that the only reason that they are failing to employ an effective technique is because they are unaware of it? And with school budgets increasing every year, why would we think that the next bit of money is the one that they finally need to pursue effective strategies?
Instead, we have to recognize that educators have reasons for doing what they are doing. They generally believe that the techniques they’ve adopted are effective, even if they aren’t. Getting them to switch to something else takes more than just offering it to them. This is especially the case when they’ve seen untold failed instructional fads come their way. They’ve learned to tuck their heads down and do what they think works based on their own limited experience and inertia.
RTI does nothing to address these barriers to instructional reform. In addition, it does nothing to address the incentives that schools have to place students in special education. In most states schools receive additional funding when a student is identified as disabled. 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, or they could say that the student is disabled and get additional money to help that student catch-up. Of course, they have strong financial incentives to choose the latter explanation. Research that I’ve done with Greg Forster and that Julie Cullen at UC San Diego has done, confirms that these positive financial incentives play a large role in the growth of special education. That is, special education is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for increasing their special ed enrollment.
I know that many people claim that special education is a horrible financial burden on schools because it costs far more than the subsidies they receive. But people who say this are either simply advocating for more subsidies or don’t properly understand what a “cost” is. A cost is an expenditure that one would not otherwise make. Simply showing that more is spent on special education students than subsidies received does not prove that the subsidy is less than the cost of identifying a student as disabled. More is spent on students lagging academically whether they are identified as disabled or not.
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. Because proper accounting is almost entirely absent in education, it is difficult to measure these additional costs directly. But from the research showing the response to financial incentives, we know that there is often a financial reward for putting students in special education.
I don’t mean to suggest that educators are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details. My point is 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.
Of course, RTI does nothing to address these financial incentives for increasing special ed enrollments. In fact, it may contribute to those perverse incentives because schools are rewarded even more by placing more students in special education because they now get to divert 15% of that money for general education, which is essentially fungible. And to make matters worse, diverting 15% of special education money away from disabled students may short-change truly disabled students who need those resources.
I’m sure that the people backing RTI are completely sincere in their confidence that we could prevent disabilities (and save money) if only we had proper instruction. But wishing does not make that happen. Reformers need to stay focused on combining promising instructional reforms with fixing the perverse incentive systems that undermine those instructional approaches.
The incentive reforms should include changing the process by which we provide financial subsidies so that there are not strong rewards for over-identification of disabilities. One way to do that is to provide vouchers for students with disabilities equal to the full value of what is spent on them in public schools. That way schools would have to think twice before identifying a student as disabled. Sure, they’ll get extra resources if they put a kid in special ed, but they also risk having that student walk out the door with all of his or her resources. It places a check on perverse financial incentives.
RTI with special ed vouchers could be a winning combination. RTI by itself is just increasing federal subsidies for the status quo.
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Jay P. Greene's Blog 