By David Rovner

     Perhaps the biggest barrier to controlling the costs of public schooling is the escalating expense of what is called "special education." Year after year, cities and towns are confronted with the increased demands for funds for special ed programs, both because of pressure to spend more on staff and because of growing numbers of  children admitted to these programs. Since the law mandates that the needs of special ed be met by local authorities (with whatever aid the state chooses to bestow, and that is done somewhat erratically these days), school committees find themselves unable to control the situation, to their intense frustration. I will attempt to analyze the factors underlying the special dilemma, and to propose ways in which the runaway costs can be reined in.

1. An important factor underlying the dramatic increase in the numbers of "Learning Disabled" children is our culture's preoccupation with the medical model of problem-solving. Simply put, here is what this means. For about 150 years, modern Western medicine has been producing a seemingly unending series of spectacular successes. The process, based on the application of "scientific method", involves identifying a disease with precision; finding a universal cause for the disease; and creating a cure. So well has this process seemed to work in making Western populations  healthier, that the model is assumed to be applicable to others areas as well.

     This is not the place to discuss whether the model is valid even in medicine, or whether it works in such areas as social or political problem solving, where it has been widely used. But it is worth noting the effect the model has had on education, to which it has been assiduously applied for over thirty years. Schools are viewed as "sick," as plagued with "ills" that must be "cured". Periodically, and with great frequency, educators announce new "remedies" that they have found for specific pathologies in the education process. These remedies are supposed to work like antibiotics against bacterial infection: they are to be applied in a prescribed manner until the ill goes away. The fact that virtually every remedy that has ever been announced for schools has not worked, despite the willingness of the public to pay for them every time, does not faze the "doctors" of education: after all medicine too has had its share of false starts and unsuccessful panaceas, and that has not shaken the faith of the public in doctors, has it?

    The field of special ed is particularly noted for the application of the medical model to individual children who are pupils in the school system. Schools find themselves defining with increasing narrowness and precision what a "normal" or "healthy" child should be like, and "diagnosing" every departure from this norm as some sort of "disorder". In line with medicine's preoccupation with regular checkups for everyone, even for people who feel perfectly fine, the schools develop ever more sophisticated general tests for all pupils of all ages. These tests are used to bring to light alleged learning disabilities, as are the observations and reports of teachers and counselors, who -- though not trained at all in the way medical doctors are trained – become diagnosticians in the educational field. So dominant has the medical model become in schools, that children who are labeled as LD are by now generally considered to suffer  from real organic disorder in brain function, even though the evidence is UNIVERSAL that only a tiny fraction of children labeled as LD can be demonstrated to be actually suffering  from a neurological or physiological disorder that can be identified by accepted medical means. Anyone who doubts this should read the superb and thorough study written in 1987 by Gerald Coles entitled "The Learning Mystique", published by Ballantine Books. The validity of his conclusions has not been affected by any studies that have appeared since the date of publication.

    The medical model is simple, and therein lies its appeal. It makes simple statements, and points to simple remedies. But it just hasn't worked in the schools, and it never will, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T APPLY, Schools are not  hospitals, and the sooner we break away from the analogy the more quickly we will put special education into its proper perspective.

2. The second major factor affecting special ed expenditures is legislative in origin. State laws that were passed with the best of intentions have a built-in feature almost guaranteed  to produce escalating costs. Communities are REQUIRED BY STATUTE to pay the expenses involved in providing programs for special needs children. We can easily understand the motivation behind this requirements: the legislature was concerned that the local citizens, faced with varied demands on limited funds, would short-change children with serious disabilities in favor of the vast majority of children who do not need special attention. Well-meaning lawmakers -- and basically, aren't they all well-meaning, aren't they all trying somehow to do what they think is best? -- sought to protect disabled children from predations of the local citizenry by taking the matter out of the hands of the community, and forcing the community to ante up whatever  funds the special ed experts demand for adequate programs.

    Now, even the best of us are sorely tempted when a pot of gold is placed before us and WE ARE INVITED TO HELP OURSELVES. Imagine the inner conflict faced by professional educators, because of the way the law is framed. In an era when funds for schools are ever more difficult to come by, professionals are faced with the reality that the only sure-fire way to get more money is to increase the costs of special ed programs. This can be done either by making the programs more elaborate, or by increasing the number of students entering the programs, or both. Not even the angels of heaven could turn down such an opportunity, freely offered! It is no wonder, then, that special ed costs have risen steeply, and there is no way the rises will ever be stopped until the law is modified and/or serious restraints are imposed on the freedom of educators to write their own checks in this field. 

II

    The basic premise under which public school system operate is that each classroom should contain children of a particular age who are performing at levels deemed appropriate for that age, and exhibiting behavior hat is supportive of the teacher's activities. To achieve these ideal conditions, schools periodically test children, from the earliest ages on, to identify children who are not functioning in a way that is the supposed norm for that age; and teachers regularly single out children whose behavior does not satisfy them -- children whose attention wanders from classroom work, who disrupt the class's peaceful calm by talking or moving about, or who exhibit hostility to the teacher or to school work in general.

     Once children are identified as being outside the norm, it is all but impossible to return them to the mainstream. Almost at once, teams of school personnel -- psychologists, testing specialists, nurses, physicians, social workers, guidance counselors, special ed teachers -- are assembled to take over control of the child's educational future. The views of the parents, of other lay people, or of the children themselves are considered to have little or no value -- indeed, to be counter-productive, much as these views are ignored by physicians when diagnosing and treating patients. There is an impressive array of official agencies lined up behind the schools' efforts, ready to use the full power of government to ensure that the programs of the special ed teams are carried out.

     All this activity is self-reinforcing. The financial incentive makes it profitable for schools to keep children in special ed programs as long as possible. Professional pride discourages special ed teams from admitting the limitations of their procedures, or the errors in their work. There are no outside controls or critiques that can operate effectively to limit the almost absolute power wielded by the specialists.

     Unfortunately, there are a number of fatal flaws in the whole procedure. For example:

     -- There are no serious grounds for believing that children have "normal" universal patterns of development. The work of developmental psychologists who are usually cited in support of this view is poorly supported, has been heavily criticized by other colleagues in the field, and flies in the face of the overwhelming body of experience, which points to VARIATION rather than similarity as the rule in children development.

     -- Even those who believe there is a developmental norm know that there is no way to designed standardized tests to measure children's performance against the norm. Existing tests are based on speculative hypotheses, and come under constant criticism even from within the testing community. Indeed the most widespread of these, such as the SAT's and the vaunted IQ tests, are well known TO MEASURE STUDENT'S PERFORMANCE ON THESE TESTS, rather than measuring "intelligence" or "aptitude" as their name imply. But the tests keep on being used nonetheless.

    -- The use of classroom teachers as sources of referral to special ed evaluation, based on the teacher's disapproval of child's classroom behavior, is a blatant violation of children's' rights and due process. A corresponding situation for adults would never be tolerated in a civilized society. Indeed, one of the most widely acknowledge outrages of Bolshevik governments -- condemned even by leftists who were otherwise sympathetic to those regime -- was the widespread use of mental institutions ("special needs" centers for adults) as places to which "misbehaving" adults could be sent without legal procedure, by authorities who didn't approve of their behavior.

    What can be done, here and now, to improve the situation? A great deal. Without further legislation or new programs, school committees can begin immediately to turn the tide. They can insist on a redefinition of learning disability based on demonstrable, hard medical evidence of neurological dysfunction, and NOTHING ELSE --  evidence produced by specialists, and applied to children with the same rigor as it is applied to adults. Also, school committees can severely limit the use of standardized tests in their systems. Most important, school committees can insist that school programs be designed once again, as they were for over 200 years, to accommodate comfortably a wide range of interests, rates of progress, and behavior, all of which would be considered quite normal.

     Such actions would not jeopardize the necessary therapeutic programs required for a tiny number of children who are, in accepted medical terms, really disabled. But all the rest -- and that is where the bulk of the money goes -- would drop away within a few years, as existing programs are phased out. Not only would the financial benefits to society be enormous, but, more importantly, the social benefits would be incalculable, as hordes of children who have been labeled LD and have faced life with miserably low self-esteem would be able to find their rightful places in society as productive members of a variegated community.

["SPECIAL EDUCATION" -- a Noble Cause Run Amok", Education In America -- A View From Sudbury Valley, Daniel Greenberg, 1992, pp. 202. The Sudbury Valley School, www.sudval.org ]*

* [see also: "'SPECIAL EDUCATION' -- a Noble Cause Sacrificed to standardization",  Education In America -- A View From Sudbury Valley, Daniel Greenberg, 1992, pp. 198. The Sudbury Valley School www.sudval.org ]