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

Well, sort of discussed. As in, in private meetings and conversations, administrators get told by special ed experts and lawyers "You can't say THAT..." and then they keep fishing until they find a nicer (more legal) way of saying the same thing.

It becomes part of the default lexicon within the field of education administration, and one of the standard euphemisms.

I'm a native speaker, having had a public educator for a parent, so I'm not fooled into thinking that it doesn't mean what it actually means, which is "you're a pain in the rump... don't, um... go away MAD... but do go away."

The difference is that saying the euphemism skirts breaking the law, wherease saying what it MEANS overtly breaks it.

Maybe it's not an excuse; maybe it's just an honest description of the situation.

Our school system is a huge mess in many ways, and this is one of them. I expect that testing mania is influencing this problem. Schools under threat of losing funding would understandably react to the threat. So it's likely that reforming the testing mania would alleviate this problem.

Even so, IMO it seems financially wasteful to implement programs for a range of disabilities in every school. In a perfect world, everyone would get an appropriate education at the closest public school. But the world isn't perfect and I honestly don't think it's reasonable to expect every school to set up an expensive program that benefits a few students, especially if it comes at the expense of other students.

Remember that special ed spending in this country is huge. Look at the last graph on this page to see how federal grants for special ed have climbed in the last 15 years. The Wikipedia says that special ed funding in the US was over 21% of the total education budget 12 years ago. Given the trend in the graph I mentioned, it's reasonable to expect that special ed spending as a proportion of the total has gone up since then. At the time, special ed expenditures per student were roughly twice the expenditures on other students. And as HowlerKarma pointed out, how do we know that the interventions being used are useful? As someone who has reviewed education grant applications, I can attest to the validity of her question.

Same could be said of gifted programs, of course. (I suppose not all are expensive, and skipping is not expensive, though also not right for many kids.)

Exactly. I actually question the value of gifted programs, having read here and elsewhere that so many of them are not much more than a few hours a week of doing stuff that doesn't truly address the needs of gifted kids. When I was a kid, all the money for the gifted students actually went to special ed.

Mixing math classes and reading classes by ability rather than age would be very cheap. When I was a kid, this practice was the norm at my school.

The issue is that if a charter school receives federal/state funds, they can't really discriminate against children. They can't refuse to take disabled kids. What if they then said, we won't take kids with learning disabilities, or kids who don't speak English well, or kids who are African-American... etc. It becomes a slippery slope. If the tax payers are paying for the school, they do not have the right to discriminate against some kids and refuse them entry into the school.
Children with disabilities are protected by federal laws. They are entitled to receive a public education that places them in the least restrictive environment where they can learn.

Ok, but look at the Basis charter schools of Arizona. Their high school curriculum page https://www.basisschools.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92&Itemid=103 says

"BASIS Upper School offers an accelerated liberal arts curriculum that is among the most sound and rigorous in the country; a curriculum that asks students to work hard to reach their academic potential; and that offers the assurance of comprehensive benchmarking and expert teaching. It is a curriculum that holds students accountable for their own success; that fills in them a deep reservoir of knowledge; and challenges them to think creatively about that knowledge. It is a curriculum that arouses the confidence to engage intelligently with the world around them.

The curriculum for grades 9 through 11 is centered on the College Board's Advanced Placement program in all core subjects. Students must take at least six AP exams and eight AP courses throughout their high school tenure, with these exams counting as Final exams in the course and comprising part of a Board Examination system. All BASIS graduates complete an AP course in each of the core disciplines: English, math, science, and social science."

Pass six AP exams to graduate from high school!

In a recent thread I have cited a study showing that PSAT scores predict AP scores. In other threads I have argued that the SAT (and thus the PSAT) is largely an IQ test. Scores on AP tests, SATs, and IQ tests all show similar patterns. Students and parents look at graduation requirements and avoid the school if they think it is too demanding.

The Basis charter in Scottsdale, AZ http://www.publicschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/118950 is 0% American Indian, 33% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 1% Black, and 64% White. Arizona is 9% American Indian, 2% Asian, 27% Hispanic, 6% Black, and 41% White.

Kids who are LD or ELL are likely under-represented also.

If charter schools are free to set their own academic standards, this can result in a very different demographic mix than the surrounding area, without any explicit discrimination.

Remember, though, that the idea behind services and accommodations for kids with LD's and physical impairments is NOT to 'reduce expectations' but to evaluate what the student's potential peer group should be, if the disability didn't limit the student's ability to perform or access a particular program, and to then figure out a way to REMOVE the barrier so that the student reaches that level of actual performance.

Those are distinct methods of accommodating a student with a disability; the old way of thinking had us reducing expectations, and the new way has us 'removing barriers' and keeping appropriately lofty expectations.

I'd argue, however, that there are probably some accommodations which are questionable in this sense, since they will NEVER be applied in the "real world," and they would likely prove helpful to "unaffected peers" as well (for example, extended time on the SAT has been shown to raise scores-- ALL students' scores, not just those with documented disability). So those things may or may not be the true equivalent of a wheelchair ramp or braille materials. On the other hand, those accommodations (like extra time on assessments) are not expensive, either, and they do allow students to learn and demonstrate understanding in a way that shows marked improvement over not having those accommodations.

Along those same lines, while I realize perfectly well that the "real world" argument is a bit specious here (remember, my DD has accommodations for school that aren't "real world" reflective), there is another angle to consider... reality doesn't really care in particular what a person's accommodations 'need' to be. That is, if you have impairment X, then career options A, B, and C are simply off the table. Pretending that this isn't so is kind of wrong in some sense, becuase there ARE people who, with no accommodations whatsoever, are well-suited to A, B, and C. Making someone LOOK as though they are in that group via accommodations is... um... unfair to everyone? And I get how painful it is to face those things. Believe me, I do. My kid cannot serve in the armed forces. Period. She's DQ'ed automatically, which is kind of unfair. But that is life.

There is also an ethically sticky portion to this entire mess, which is this: should students whose intellectual disabilities are profound be allowed "educational benefit" at any cost, even if that benefit is minimal and the costs are crippling? I'd argue "perhaps not" in a system where dollars are a scarce resource. I know that it sounds cruel, and it makes me sad because it isn't what I'd like to say... but the majority of children deserve to have desks and textbooks even if that means that a child with the cognitive ability of a 2 year old doesn't recieve one-to-one tutoring at life skills and skilled nursing care for eight hours a day on the school district's dime.


I also agree that with administrators (necessarily) focused on meeting AYP, there is a truly insidious incentive for schools to shuffle marginal, questionable, and failing students elsewhere-- using whatever means necessary. This is partly the same phenomenon which drives a reluctance to challenge HG+ kids, too, by the way. Because our kids are a guaranteed test score within the group of their chronological peers. Why risk that?

It's all rather icky, honestly.

Charter schools do accept public funds and do discriminate - at least that's what happened to us in NYC. My DS got accepted by lottery into a local public charter school. This local public charter school in NYC accepts public money to fund said school.

The local public charter school took a look at my son's IEP and then ripped up my son's acceptance in front of me. The principal told me that she could not accept my son on the basis of him needing ot and pt services. She said they didn't have any ot/pt resources and that I would have to send my son to the public school. Well, we moved back to MA instead.

Here in MA, I discovered my son is eg/pg; no longer needs ot/pt; and cannot be accommodated in a private gifted school due to being eg/pg. In NYC, my son took the G & T test, but he didn't qualify for the G & T program. Oh, yea, he had an IEP then and the G & T discriminated against him there.

Public schools have to accept ALL students regardless of abilities or disabilities. Charter schools apparently can accept public funds and then choose NOT to accept particular students. Ditto for G & T programs. I'd happily join a class action lawsuit if I could. Where's the ACLU?

Yes, it really is.

I knew a student who had a certain disability. Her counselor encouraged her to take a class that required abilities she just didn't have. She did poorly, and no accommodation could have compensated for her problems. Every day was a reminder of what she could never do. It was a sad and difficult situation for everyone in the class, including me.

To me, when the counselor encouraged her to take that class, he was far more cruel than he would have been if he'd just said, "Well, I'm not sure this one will be the best choice for you. What about x, y, or z?" There was other stuff she could have done just fine, but the philosophy that "everyone deserves a chance" prevailed and made a difficult situation worse for her.

ETA: Not saying she was 2E or had a disability that could be accommodated. She was really just plain disabled. This anecdote is somewhat OT and more a response to the "icky situation" statement.

I sympathize with the frustrations people have mentioned here. Personally, I think addressing them properly would require a huge shift in thinking among our schools --- in particular, a move away from high-stakes industrialized testing and a focus on real education over test prep.

My point was simply that there are federal rules in place that prevent schools which receive public funds from (supposedly) discriminating against disabled students.
Should huge sums of public money be spent to publically educate, say, a profoundly disabled autistic student who is non-verbal and confined to a wheelchair? That is a broad discussion not really relevant here.
My son is hearing-impaired and has an IEP. He gets minimal services due to that. He is highly gifted and, so far, has gotten nothing special for that. Still, I don't begrudge kids who are really disabled from receiving federal/state funds.