In 2016, the Houston Chronicle ran a multi-part series on how Texas’s decision to create an arbitrary percentage of students allowed to receive special education status had led to an enormous amount of children being left behind.
Over a decade ago, the officials arbitrarily decided what percentage of students should get special education services — 8.5 percent — and since then they have forced school districts to comply by strictly auditing those serving too many kids.
Their efforts, which started in 2004 but have never been publicly announced or explained, have saved the Texas Education Agency billions of dollars but denied vital supports to children with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, epilepsy, mental illnesses, speech impediments, traumatic brain injuries, even blindness and deafness, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.
This expose brought on the kind of outcry that forced Texas legislators to pass new special education laws and also led the federal government to begin their own investigation into the matter. Today, according to the New York Times those results came in and they are the same results the Houston Chronicle reported on last year. Texas has been illegally letting down tens of thousands of students with their idiotic and inhumane education policy.
The target, enacted in 2004 and eliminated last year, was set at 8.5 percent of enrollment, and school districts were penalized for exceeding that benchmark, even though the state and national averages had both long been about 12 percent. As a direct result of the policy, regulators determined, the share of students receiving special education services in Texas dropped from 11.6 percent in 2004 to 8.6 percent in 2016 — a difference of about 150,000 children. [...]
The order brought to an end one of the Department of Education’s most extensive reviews in recent history. Investigators spent 15 months holding public forums, interviewing teachers and visiting school districts. The letter represented the first major state monitoring decision approved by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who at times has been criticized for relaxing some special educations regulations.
I’ll believe it when I see it from this education department; but this is indeed the kind of review that must be done in order to improve our education systems. Of course, pushing for more privatization of schools at the expense of public schools will not help create the money that these Texas schools will need to cover their special needs students.
“Every child with a disability must have appropriate access to special education and related services that meet his or her unique needs,” Ms. DeVos said in a statement announcing the regulatory action. “Far too many students in Texas had been precluded from receiving supports and services.”
Let’s not forget that this is the same woman who could not say out loud that schools should have to comply with the Disabilities Education Act during her disastrous confirmation hearings. So I won’t hold my breath that the department of education, under her leadership, will be able to or truly willing to make Texas do right by its children. And as the report found, creating the arbitrary number created a system where students who should have been diagnosed as needing more help were not, and that is a problem that will not just go away magically.
Among other issues, the federal regulators found that many Texas schools have trained teachers not to try to find out whether struggling students qualify for special education until regular classroom teaching techniques like Response to Intervention have been tried for years without success. That approach runs counter to federal law, which requires schools to evaluate students as soon as a disability is suspected.
A community member wrote about the Chronicle’s findings last year.