Learning-disabled students - or teaching-disabled educators?
Kids who have trouble learning to read tend to get tracked into special education classes - where things don't get any better. Lisa Snell reports in Reason Online that schools may now be using the "learning disabled" labels as a way to get more money - and avoid rectifying bad educational programs:
This winter Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which dispenses $60 billion a year to school districts around the country. While there’s no question that IDEA has provided legal protections and services for students with handicaps, it has also created perverse incentives that encourage schools to call kids disabled as a way of attracting more funding and masking instructional failures...
Nearly 12 percent of American students in kindergarten through 12th grade are assigned to the special education system. Children with severe disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism, blindness, and deafness, account for only a tenth of these students. The remaining 90 percent are described as suffering from conditions that are less obvious and harder to verify objectively...[specific learning disability] SLD is the most common label, accounting for more than half of all students covered by IDEA. SLD diagnoses, which have risen by 34 percent since 1991, are the main factor contributing to the dramatic increase in special education enrollments since 1976.
To prevent overuse of the [SLD] label, federal regulations stipulate that it be limited to students who show a "severe discrepancy" between their achievement in one or more subject areas and their intelligence, usually as measured by an IQ test. For example, a child who scores lower on a standardized reading test than on an IQ test might be classified as having a reading disability.
Or, it just might mean that the child is generally bright but has been given a lousy method of learning to read, such as the "whole words" method. I fail to see how a discrepancy on an IQ test automatically translates into a failure to be able to learn to read - a true disability - rather than a reflection of poor teaching of reading skills. Of course, if schools can get more money for special education, there's certainly more incentive to just label poor readers as learning disabled.
The entire article is very good, and Ms. Snell states that an alternative to the "special ed" track exists - early intervention with intensive reading instruction:
The experience with early intervention programs that emphasize phonemes (basic units of speech) indicates that the rate of truly intractable reading problems is close to the rate of other serious disabilities. In five recent studies, when kids with poor phonological skills were given intensive instruction in phonemes and phonics, the expected incidence of learning disabilities, originally 12 percent to 18 percent, was reduced to around 1.5 percent.
That's a big whopping reduction. Think schools will be willing to give up that federal money earmarked for disabilities and switch to phonics? They should, but I'm not holding my breath.