American Special Ed System (part 2)

The school district and bureaucrat perspective

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the academic year 2009-10, there were 6.5 million students receiving special education services in the US. However, school budgets have been cut significantly and schools do not have the money to provide all the needed services to students. Yet if the services are not provided, schools become legally non-compliant and vulnerable to lawsuits.

Let me explain this situation with an example. If you have ten children and one hundred dollars to spend on them, you will spend ten dollars on each child. Then over time the number of children increases to twelve, the price tag for services increases to fifteen dollars per child, and the total funding is reduced to ninety dollars. Then when one parent comes with a lawyer and threatens the school, that particular child will get twenty dollars’ worth of services at the expense of the other children. And if that parent is not appeased, all ninety dollars may be lost in litigation.

Bureaucrats are sincerely trying to deal with the crisis. However, instead of taking proactive, innovative, and simple steps to solve the root causes, schools often take a defensive stance, alienating parents and special education professionals. By increasing paperwork and bureaucracy as a protection and barrier, they add more jobs for themselves and substantially increase administrative costs. Per a study done in the year 1994, fewer than 50 percent of the personnel employed by US public schools were teachers. The self-generated administrative overhead is not a solution, but circumvention of the real problem. This is an old, failed method, but they continue with it, expecting a different result. Had the schools recruited more teachers and decreased the teacher-to-student and professional-to-student ratio, or given intensive therapy and services during the child’s early years, or provided parental training, they would have had some positive results instead.

According to a 2005 OECD report, America is ranked as the second highest country in educational spending per student (second only to Switzerland), but out of twenty-one industrialized countries, US twelfth graders ranked nineteenth in math, sixteenth in science, and last in advanced physics. According to a 1999 article by William J. Bennett, former US secretary of education, increased levels of spending on public education have not made schools better. Since 1983, over ten million Americans have reached the twelfth grade without having learned to read at a basic level. Over twenty million have reached their senior year unable to do basic math. Almost twenty-five million have reached twelfth grade not knowing the essentials of US history. So the bottom line is we are spending the money on the wrong things.