Special Ed handicap

belated

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AN 2 25

Irate parents taught an Oklahoma lawmaker a life lesson I bet he’ll never forget: Do not mess with the education of public school children who have been diagnosed with a disability.

Republican Dusty Deevers emerged last week from the dustup with parents, educators and therapists with a metaphorical black eye, reminding him that Oklahomans don’t like schoolyard bullies.

In case you missed all the hubbub, somehow Deevers got the idiotic idea that too many Oklahoma children are receiving special education services through the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. That’s the federal law that protects children’s right to a “free appropriate public education” and guarantees that they have access to special education and early intervention services.

He pointed to estimates indicating that as many as 1 in 6 Oklahoma school children are currently on Individualized Education Programs, better known as an IEP, which provides them access to services such as speech, language, physical, occupational and behavioral therapies to help them succeed in school.

Generally, legislators have tacitly acknowledged that these programs help students succeed academically even though state and federal leaders have long provided only a fraction of the funding necessary to operate them at their maximum potential.

But rather than urging his colleagues to ramp up funding and bolster support for those children, the lawmaker from Elgin hatched a harebrained plan to reduce participation numbers by removing eligibility for in-school services. The proposed law would have required parents to seek services on their own dime after school hours. If parents couldn’t afford it or find qualified therapists, too bad, so sad.

The plan also would have prohibited Medicaid from helping to pay for those in-school services as well as covering the costs of sight screenings.

At first the proposal flew under the radar, obscured among nearly 3,100 bills filed for consideration for the 2025 legislative session, but then the ramifications of Deevers’ plan began to dawn on folks and outrage exploded on social media.

Deevers swiftly discovered that there might be one thing almost as scary as incurring the wrath of God — Oklahomans furious that legislators are impeding on their “parental rights.” (You know, that popular buzzword that Republicans like to bandy about.)

Deevers tried to clean up the mess by promising to amend the bill because he said it wasn’t doing what he intended. However, he dumped gasoline on the raging Dumpster fire thanks to a lengthy post on X that revealed that he believes we might have “far over-diagnosed students;” that he wants to audit IEP spending; protect “parental rights;” force schools to stop providing students on IEPs “hormonal birth control;” and exclude “non-educationally necessary services.”

That unleashed a second torrent of anger because any parent who has a child on an IEP knows that schools are not willy-nilly thinking up ways to place children into services they don’t need. And that anybody who has set foot in a school knows how rare it is to hear parents complain that a school is doing too much and overperforming.

It’s much more common to hear they’re not doing enough.

They know that to get a child evaluated for a disability takes a considerable amount of advocacy work from adults in a child’s life, numerous meetings with the school, months of evaluations and tons of paperwork.

Based on the complexities of even qualifying for an IEP, I’d say probably more students need specialized services than are receiving them. Our numbers should probably be much higher.

They also know that parents have an enormous amount of rights when it comes to how children with disabilities are educated. Schools don’t randomly place children on IEPs without parental involvement. Parents have to agree to the placement and can also choose to end those services at any time. Parents get to set the parameters of how often they meet with school leaders and determine how often their child receives services. They can demand a meeting at any time to discuss perceived problems.

And anybody with an iota of sense knows that IEPs are not prescription pads that allow educators to dole out medication or birth control. Medical doctors prescribe that, not speech therapists. In fact, it’s such a farfetched idea, I’ve never heard of that being a concern in Oklahoma. Schools are required to operate within the confines of the IEPs, which parents must sign off on.

But who are we to allow facts to stop some good old fashioned fear mongering?

To Deevers’ credit, he appears to have taken parental feedback seriously. Last week, he announced plans to withdraw the bill and vowed that it wouldn’t be considered in the Legislature.

I hope that more lawmakers will take note, because we often see an unwillingness to take public feedback seriously and plenty of excuses why it should be ignored. A common excuse is they’re only interested in feedback from their constituents.

It’s time for that foolhardy mindset to stop, and the voices of Oklahomans to be taken seriously. People affected by legislation don’t necessarily live within a specific lawmaker’s legislative boundaries, but their tax dollars are keeping the lights on in every office.

I’m glad their message came through loud and clear: Picking on 116,000 children that have diagnosed disabilities is just wrong. And their Legislature shouldn’t be weaponized against them.

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Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

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no lnx

Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

John Stoehr November 13, 2024

For now, I’m not getting involved in the debate over what Kamala Harris did wrong. For one thing, whatever conclusions are drawn now will almost certainly be forgotten by the time of the next election. For another, the debate takes vital attention away from the choice of the majority of American voters, which is to say, their terrible choice.

Why did they break for Donald Trump? Lots of worthy people are going to spend lots of time exploring that question. I won’t, though. What I know is that Trump campaigned on easily proven lies. What I also know is his supporters chose to believe them. What I care about now are the consequences of that choice, and those consequences are going to be bad for all of us, including everyone who voted for him.

Yesterday, the president-elect said among the first things he’s going to do is eliminate the US Department of Education. That agency not only sends federal money to local school districts, it makes sure children are treated equally. This is usually understood in terms of race, but special-education is protected too, and it needs it. There was a time in American history when special-needs kids were told to sink or swim.

My kid is one of those kids, and if the funding and protection she now has disappears, I’m going to take that personally. I’m going to blame everyone who supported Trump. I won’t care if they didn’t believe he’d follow through on his pledge. I won’t care if they didn’t know about it. I won’t care if they were lied to by the rightwing media apparatus. I won’t care if the kids of Trump voters are themselves victims of their parents’ bad choices. I’m going to blame them and I will be right to.

Ignorance is no defense in law.

It should be no defense in politics either.

Trump has also promised to impose punishing tariffs on imported goods from countries like China and Mexico. Tariffs are a tax and every adult knows how a tax works. Yes, some of his supporters pretended not to know that importers pass that cost on to consumers. But whether they did or didn’t is going to be irrelevant to me when I’m paying two or three times more for necessities like food and clothing.

As I’m standing in the checkout at Stop & Shop, sticker-shocked for the umpteenth time, I’m not going to be wondering what Kamala Harris could have done to persuade white working-class Americans to vote for her. I’m not going to feel sympathy for them, knowing that they decided to impoverish themselves out of spite and resentment. No, I’ll be too busy cursing them for the titanic assholes they are.

Trump has also promised to deport millions of so-called illegal immigrants. He said he’ll only go after “the bad ones” and his supporters, even some Latinos, decided to believe a liar. But I’m not going to care how they came to that decision if the government starts snatching taxpayers out of their homes, arresting and detaining whole families, including US citizens, in the insane belief that doing so is going to make America great again. Why should I care about why they voted the way they did when the consequence of that choice brings chaos to communities, decimates the labor supply and raises prices?

Trump has denied it, but his Republicans are looking forward to taking another crack at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Obamacare, including independent businesspeople, like me, who could not do what we do without the law. Voters who supported Trump are included in that number, but again, it does not matter to me whether they knew a vote for him was a vote for abolishing affordable insurance. I tend to lose interest in the reasons behind another person’s choices if those choices ruin me.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump inflamed resentments in order to win. What’s missing from that story is that the resentments are over race, or rather racism. Fact is, lots of white people feel like nonwhite people are taking something from them when they do better for themselves. Trump has made an art form out of getting white people to believe nonwhite people are robbing them, making them poorer, even when the economy is rapidly benefiting those same white people.

Well, when it comes to resentment, you haven’t seen anything yet.

If Trump does what he says, by the time he’s done, America is going to be poorer, sicker, weaker and more chaotic. In some cases, he will have done irreparable harm, as he did last time he was president, including to the people who supported him. And he will have done it because … well, it doesn’t matter. They made their choice and it was terrible.

And the rest of us will be right to resent it.

Proponents of charter schools insist that they are public schools “open to all students." But the truth is more nuanced. As an education policy researcher – and as author of a new book about charter schools I wrote with fellow researcher Wagma Mommandi – I have discovered that charter schools are not as accessible to the public as they are often made out to be.

This finding is particularly relevant in light of the fact that charter school enrollment reportedly grew at a rapid rate during the pandemic. Specifically, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, enrollment increased 7% from 2019-20 to 2020-21. The organization says that is the biggest enrollment jump in a half-decade.

In our book, we identify and describe 13 different approaches that charters use to bring certain types of students in and push other kinds of students out.

Here are four examples from our book.

1. Targeted marketing and advertising

By using specific types of language in their promotional materials and by targeting those materials to specific audiences, charter schools often send a message that they are looking for a certain type of student. This is a way for charter schools to reach or appeal to a certain audience but not others, which in turn shapes who ends up applying to a given school.

For instance, Mueller Charter Leadership Academy in San Diego told prospective families that “All eligible students are welcome to apply. However, it should be noted that because this is a highly advanced, demanding program, it may not be appropriate for everyone."

Targeted advertising can also carry a message. LISA Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2016 sent out targeted recruitment mailers to area neighborhoods – skipping over the three zip codes for the heavily Black and Latino parts of town.

“They're sending a message they don't want the kids on the east side of town," Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, remarked after his newspaper exposed the practice. The school later apologized and explained that its plan was to subsequently reach out to those populations through digital advertising.

2. Conditional applications

Charter schools sometimes require multiple essays or a minimum GPA as a condition for initial or continuing enrollment.

Roseland Accelerated Middle School in Santa Rosa, California, for instance, required applicants to submit five short essays plus an autobiography using “well constructed and varied structure."

Minimum GPA requirements can be imposed at the application stage or once admitted. At Lushor Charter School in New Orleans, parents and students are asked to sign a contract that requires students to maintain a 2.0 GPA in core subject areas for continued enrollment.

3. Parents required to 'volunteer'

Some charter schools require parents to volunteer a certain amount of time at the school, or pay money in lieu of volunteering. Pembroke Pines Charter High School in Florida, for example, required each family to complete 30 such “volunteer hours" per year, but allowed 20 of those hours to be “purchased" – US$100 total to buy out the first 10 hours and $200 more for the next 10 hours. These requirements place an additional burden, in terms of time and money, on families that are already struggling economically.

4. Aggressive use of discipline.

At so-called “no excuses" charters that “sweat the small stuff", students have – at least historically – been subjected to harsh discipline for minor infractions, such as chewing gum or failing to constantly keep their eyes on the teacher during class.

Some of these schools repeatedly suspend students and call parents to leave work to pick up a suspended child. The most high-profile example is Success Academy charter school in Fort Greene, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, where school leaders created a “Got to Go" list of 16 students who were then subjected to harassing discipline. In one case, a school official threatened to call 911 on a 6-year-old because the child was having a “bad day." Nine of the 16 students did in fact withdraw from the school.

Functioning like private schools

Cumulatively, these and the other approaches we detail in our book – titled “School's Choice" – make charter schools more like private schools than the public schools they claim to be.

These practices influence which students are admitted to charter schools and then stay in those schools. Charter school choice therefore affects schools' demographics, including the degree to which they are segregated.

They affect funding equity as well, since state school-finance formulas often don't adequately account for the actual costs of educating different students. In Pennsylvania, for example, charter schools are funded through a system that creates problematic incentives related to access for students with special needs. As explained in a report by the state's bipartisan legislative Special Education Funding Commission, the current funding system provides charter schools “the same funding for each student with a disability, regardless of the severity of that student's disability."

“This creates a strong incentive to overidentify students with less costly disabilities and to under-identify (or under-enroll) students with more severe (or more costly) disabilities," the report states. A speech impediment, for example, is an example of a mild disability, versus a student with, say, a traumatic brain injury, which is a more severe disability. As the report explains, “A student with a mild disability can be a financial boon to a charter school, given that the funding the charter receives will exceed the charter's cost to educate a child."

Notably, Pennsylvania's funding system does not create these incentives for district-run public schools.

These practices also can play a decisive role for comparisons of academic outcomes between charters and traditional public schools run by a school district. Overall, research consistently shows little if any difference in the average test-score outcomes for the two types of schools. But the comparisons may not be fair and accurate. If charter schools can improve their test scores by screening out students they don't think will do well, it can give them an unfair advantage in comparisons with public schools that accept all students.

Policy incentives revisited

So what can be done to make charter schools more accessible? One way is to change policy incentives such as the Pennsylvania funding system mentioned earlier. States can also change the way they reward schools for how well their students do on tests. Arizona, for instance, has policies that give extra funding to charters and other schools with higher achieving students.

In the final two chapters of our book, “School's Choice," Mommandi and I point to a future with charter schools that don't screen or push out students who are lower achieving or more expensive to educate. First, we hold up examples of charter schools that have resisted the incentives to limit access by, for example, working to support their communities' most marginalized students. We then offer a design for a healthier charter school system that doesn't put these exemplary schools at a disadvantage when it comes to accountability and funding systems.

Even in a post-pandemic world, charter school enrollment may continue to grow. But until the public has more access, charters will not be truly public.

Kevin Welner, Professor, Education Policy & Law; Director, National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado Boulder