Anchor Lead:
The same principals found in the No Child Left behind Act are being applied to Special Education. But making Special Ed more accountable through testing and tracking student achievement is giving educators and policy makers pause for concern. In the latest installment of our series, "The Learning Curve," KPLU's Jennifer Niessen looks at the complexities of special ed in Washington State and whether new federal mandates to hold these students to higher academic standards are realistic. 6:43

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Informative weblinks:

The Council for Exceptional Children

The President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education

Link to HR 1350, the BILL reauthorizing Special Education

Washington State's Office of Public Instruction/ Special Education

Jennifer Niessen (JN):
Trouble makers to kids with severe mental retardation... these are the students who nearly 30 years ago would have been banned from the public school classroom.
Doug Gill who oversees special education for Washington State says up until the mid 1970's thousands of children were not allowed in public school.

GILL: "There were significant numbers of students with disabilities who did not even have the opportunity to come to school. These were kids who were kept at home, institutionalized, put in separate environments and never really were considered part of society to any large extent."

JN: When they did become a part of society it was often within the confines of the criminal justice system.
Then in 1975 the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act was enacted.

CURTIS: "The original concept was that when we get this law that when kids go into special education it's going to be more intensive, they're going to take these kids and work with them really hard and they're going to put them back into the general ed. environment."

JN: Professor Steve Curtis is the director of Special Ed at Seattle University's school of education.

CURTIS: "What people have criticized is that this often doesn't happen. What happens is that they get into special education, people reduce their expectations of these kids and they go into these resource rooms and they have less intensive education so they fall further behind."

JN: Today in Washington State more than 100-thousand children are eligible for special education. These students are twice as expensive to teach. They require customized education plans, and the population is growing.
The state spends more than one billion dollars annually serving their needs. Doug Gill says due to the wonders of modern science, the disabilities are more complex than ever.

GILL: "Here are better diagnostic tools than they've ever had before, more medical interventions, kids surviving trauma for example today that would not have survived ten years ago because of surgical advances and other kinds of things."

JN: And even though the federal government mandates these children receive a "free and appropriate education", it pays a fraction of the cost: about 18 percent.
Another expense burdening school districts is lawsuits.
Special education was created by lawsuits and continues to be shaped by lawsuits. Attorneys build their careers on taking school districts to task on behalf of parents who feel their children aren't being given proper attention and services. The Seattle School District estimates it spends up to 200-thousand dollars a year on special ed legal cases.
Brenda Little, an attorney for the district says that's just the money spent on settlements. To try and avoid lawsuits, Seattle spends about one million dollars a year employing "one on one" aids.

LITTLE: "These are shadows that we give a child and we tell this one on one instructional aid to follow that child around and keep him out of trouble. A million dollars per year."

JN: About ten years ago, most of these aids were assigned to students with severe physical disabilities. Little says a shift is happening. More one on one aids are shadowing students with emotional behavior disorders who are violent and pose a physical threat to themselves and the people around them.

LITTLE: "Kids are so volatile, so dangerous, so ill equipped to sit in a chair for more than 5 minutes. That you just get to the point where it would be in everyone's best interest to hire a one on one aid. And that's just a real tough position for us to be in. We have one on one aids for kindergarteners, 1st graders."

JN: Special education teachers and aids injured on the job by such students are becoming more litigious. Everything from bruises to broken bones and head trauma gets reported. In 1999 the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of two classroom aids in Stanwood. They were awarded more than 400-thousand dollars after arguing the district failed to protect them from students known to be violent. Nearly three decades of looking to the legal world to remedy differences has resulted in a heavily documented system. Steve Cutis with Seattle University says teachers spend at least half of their time on paperwork.

CURTIS: "I had a special education director tell me that it's great these teachers want to go into the field of special education... but they have to understand that the kids are important, but their main role will be working on the paper. Get the paperwork done. And I personally find this appalling, absolutely appalling that our tax dollars are being spent on paperwork when you have these teachers who love kids and want to work with the kids."

JN: Cutting down is one of the goals laid out in a bill passed by congress last month, which is now being reviewed by the Senate. The federal act that created special education is being reauthorized and a number of changes are being proposed.
It tries to reduce lawsuits by setting a one year statute of limitations from the time an alleged violation occurs to the time when a parent files a grievance.
The bill also requires states to align special education with their accountability systems. This means every student's progress would have to be assessed every year via a testÉthe same process laid out in No Child Left Behind. Doug Gill with the State office of Public Instruction says a lot of work needs to be done to make that happen.

GILL: "Let's take the student with mental retardation, a person who has an IQ half to three quarters of a peer. Is it reasonable to expect that a student be able to achieve the same things that someone else at that level would? Probably not. I don't believe that question has been answered yet."

JN: There is a fear among school administrators that making special education more accountable, and then failing to meet those new, higher expectations will open school districts up to more lawsuits. But the more ominous concern is that special education students who consistently fail high stake tests could be a major liability for public schools trying to meet the achievement standards mandated in the No Child Left Behind Act.
Under the law all categories of students, including special ed, are expected to make steady progress. If one group fails, then the entire school fails and is subject to funding cuts and possible closure. Currently in Washington State at least 20 percent or more of students in special education are being tested above and beyond their ability.

Jennifer Niessen, KPLU News.