Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional NYT article: lack of disabled students at charters

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/education/in-charter-schools-fewer-with-disabilities.html?src=recg


"Some parents choose public schools that have more established programs for students with disabilities, while some charter schools do not have the resources or teaching staff to support individual students’ needs. But in some cases, the report said, school administrators tacitly discriminate by discouraging students with disabilities from enrolling. "

This was absolutely done at DD's former charter. Not only that, students were encouraged to leave the school when LDs were discovered. This contributes to the school's excellent test scores, which IMO are not as much about the school's quality as about cream-skimming (they also are careful about who they admit--it is a lottery, but there is also an application, and they do a lottery from those who meet the desired qualifications on the app; legal where I live). My DD does not have LDs, but I find this situation unacceptable.

I moved to an affluent suburb with good test scores so that my children will have smart, high-achieving classmates. Charters may be bending the law, but it does not bother me that their parents are trying to accomplish what we did. If admission to schools must be based on residence or a lottery, should we do away with public exam schools like Stuyvesant or Boston Latin?

I think vastly too much money is being spent on special ed. Here is a recent story on over-the-top spending.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/e...w-york-city-have-doubled-in-6-years.html
Cost of Prekindergarten Special Education Is Soaring
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: June 5, 2012
New York Times

New York City is paying private contractors more than $1 billion this year to operate a little-known special education program for 3- and 4-year-olds, nearly double the amount it paid six years ago.

The program serves 25,000 children with physical, learning, developmental and other disabilities. While the number of children in the program has risen slowly in recent years, annual costs have soared to about $40,000 per child, according to an analysis of city education spending by The New York Times.

...

City officials said some of the growth in spending stemmed from more awareness of autism: some special-ed pre-K students, for example, are receiving behavior-modification therapy as many as 35 hours a week, driving their costs as high as $200,000 a year. But the officials acknowledged that autism services accounted for only part of the increase.

Ah, but these school are above-board about what they are. Charters who skim the cream, tacitly discourage kids with LDs or kick them out, then boast about their amazing success rate are not being above-board at all. What's more, they may be contributing to the decline of public education in other ways.

I actually am not necessarily anti-charter--but boy, this kind of thing really gets me steamed.

As to whether "too much" is being spent on special ed--what is the right amount? I can't claim to know, but shall we go back to warehousing these kids in insitutions or deeming them uneducable? I dare say not.

"Some contractors have billed the program for jewelry, expensive clothing, vacations to Mexico and spa trips to the Canyon Ranch resort, The Times found in a review of a decade’s worth of education, financial and court records. Others have hired relatives at inflated salaries or for no-show jobs, or funneled public money into expensive rents paid by their preschools to entities they control personally. "


Well, duh--obviously, this is no good. Corruption is no good wherever it is. But if we're talking about investing in proven early intervention for kids with disabilities--look, early intervention is where it's at, in so many ways. If you want these children to succeed later on, to graduate from high school and hold productive jobs and not become a drain on the system, yada yada, as I'm sure you do, you need to reach them young.

One thing which I have seen and heard about from other parents (repeatedly and from vastly differing sources) is that there is actually a fairly subversive method of 'encouraging' special ed students to 'go away.'

One of the hallmarks of this strategy is the one that shrugs and says "Well, what can we do?? This is what we do here... maybe {school} isn't a good fit for {child}..."

rather than, (as federal law MANDATES, by the way) either;

a) determining the interventions necessary to allow the child educational benefit from the program,

or, under section 504, the less stringent of the two laws,

b) determining and then implementing accommodations so that the disabled student has the same access to the educational program as unaffected peers, regardless of inconvenience or expense.

In the case of both, what I've seen is a sense of "here's the menu, and what you need isn't on it. Go to another restaurant if you don't like it." That assumes that you can even GET your child properly classified to start with... and even if you can and you can get the district/school to agree to particular services, good luck getting them moving on actually implementing anything. I know of a profoundly DEAF child who waited for SIX WEEKS to get an aide and a classroom ASL interpreter was another three weeks coming.

In the case of A, there is foot-dragging about implementation. Because that's where the loopholes are, see. The rest is specified under law.

In the case of B, there is foot dragging all through the process, and often parents are told that what the child needs is "not reasonable," evidently with the (mistaken) understanding that this means that while it might be what the child NEEDS, it certainly can't happen. (This is wrong, by the way, and the Office of Civil Rights has said so in no uncertain terms-- but most parents don't know that.)

Call me cynical, but I see far, far fewer parents milking the system for special ed services than I do those who give up and choose to leave because they know that their child needs help NOW, not in 18 months or four years.

Charters are very, very, very guilty of point B. The other thing that I've seen with my own two eyes is that EMO's that act as private contractors with LEA's will occasionally give with one hand what the law obligates them to do.... but take away with the other, so as to preserve their own bottom line. So sure, your child might qualify for OT... ohhhhhh, but the only TIME available is when {elective} is being offered. Guess you have to choose which you want your child to have. Heheheh.

Hmm. The Times article said that New York spends 6% of its budget on one pre-K program for students with disabilities. That's over a billion dollars a year and $40,000 per child. In my opinion, this is way too much money --- especially when other schools in New York can't even make basic repairs and teachers are being laid off, not to mention what parents go through to get their gifted kids into one of the very few slots in the public gifted programs.

Worse, the contractors who run the city programs were stealing some of this money and using it to buy jewelry and take fancy vacations. This is what happens when you provide too much money and too little oversight (happens too often in public school systems).

Unfortunately, if someone says, "Maybe we're spending too much on these programs," people react viscerally. It's as though suggesting that special ed spending is too lavish is really a ploy to send disabled kids to a damp, unheated, dungeon of a boarding "school" where everyone eats gruel and sleeps on bedbug-ridden straw mattresses. Maybe you weren't trying to say just that, but it kind of sounded that way.

I'm curious as to why people are so willing to sacrifice an appropriate education and/or good environment for other kids so that special ed kids can have a billion-dollar program. I'm not saying that disabled pre-K kids don't need something extra. They do. But a billion dollars? Why do we bend over backwards to do as much as possible for them while basically ignoring everyone who's above average? Why do only special ed preschoolers deserve an appropriate education In NYC?

As for the OP, I can see Bostonian's point. I also see your point about a need to be honest. I also think it's possible that the situation is more complicated than charter schools just not "wanting" disabled students. Maybe they didn't know they were disabled and when they found out, they realized that they didn't have the resources to help a kid appropriately. If a school doesn't have a system in place for a disabled student, setting one up would be very expensive and would probably require that the school remove other programs that would benefit dozens or more kids. This seems like a waste of money when the public schools already have these systems in place. Not to mention a duplication of effort.

"I moved to an affluent suburb with good test scores so that my children will have smart, high-achieving classmates. Charters may be bending the law, but it does not bother me that their parents are trying to accomplish what we did."

I am really bothered by the premise that disabled children are by default not "smart, high-achieving classmates." So MANY disbled childen and adults are BRILLIANT people that in which you should be honored to be in the company! I mean seriously. I could list many prominent briliant people who are (or were if they have passsed) "disabled" in some way. These children have much rto contribute and share, they are not undesirables to be avoided.

Val, I agree with you. I think that two things are grossly, maybe even profoundly, wrong with the system as it is;

a) a very low bar as to what constitutes "educational benefit" for a child. Does this include completely bogus things that have NO proven benefit in anything resembling an unbiased study? Often, it does. So spending $$$$ on things which have no real proven benefit is certainly wrong. Those dollars are not unlimited, and what we spend here has to come from somewhere.

b) gifted ed is special ed. I wish that the Feds would step in, here, and define it that way for once and for all. Just as with special ed students with lower-than-average ability (or specific challenges), their educational needs are not met by "average" educational offerings. Those gifted students have many more things in common with SpEd than with the middle two-thirds of the distribution; we can sometimes (but not always) meet those needs in a regular classroom with interventions/differentiation, the students need something different from their unaffected classmates, and they are an "at risk" population if their needs go unmet. Call it what it is and mandate it. Special Education. That would really cut down on the number of parents looking to spout lofty-sounding labels to all of THEIR friends, too, and therefore fewer bright-but-not-gifted kids would be shoved/coached into GT programs.

That's my opinion, though.

Lol, you almost quoted the principal of a local charter/option school. I looked at the school for kindergarten for my oldest. It's very close to my house and has some of the highest test scores in the state. When I approached the principal and mentioned that there was a good chance that my kids were gifted and that at least one might have 2e issues, she actively discouraged us from considering the school. She said that they wanted average kids that they could push to become high achieving. They only offered "whole class" instruction and that there were no options to "change the menu." She then said something about them only serving Italian and we probably wanted Chinese.

Unfortunately, I also have heard that our traditional public school which has high test scores also pushes kids out. They use the excuse that they don't have special programs for what the kid needs and recommend that people go to a different school in the area that specializes in "those kind of kids."

You also just quoted DD's former school here. (This was not said to us but to other parents--multiple other parents.)

Okay, I find this kind of creepy. Seriously. Is this a known strategy that is discussed among educators?