Surge in L.A. Special Ed Placements Questioned

By LOUIS SAHAGUN

May 23, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A surge in the number of students placed in special education programs has alarmed Los Angeles school officials, who say that thousands of children may have been erroneously diagnosed.

Over the last three years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has seen a 13% increase in the number of special education students--nearly twice the growth rate of the general school population. Officials are particularly concerned that blacks are being placed in special ed classes in disproportionate numbers.

Statewide, the special education population and the general population have grown at roughly equal rates.

Rene Gonzalez, director of psychological services for the district, said the existing system for evaluating and diagnosing disabilities is “being too quick to refer kids to special education and we should be concerned because it’s a question of whether we’re really helping our kids or not.”

Mistakes can be long-lasting for children placed in a special education program they do not need. Students rarely shake off the special ed designation, let alone raise their academic skills to grade level, officials said.

“Sometimes, we’re misidentifying kids as emotionally disturbed and learning disabled when we’re looking at more of a social adjustment problem than a psychological one,” Gonzalez said. “Is this the best way to proceed? Or should we stop, take a step back and reassess?”

In an effort to improve the district’s assessment of academically troubled students, officials have drafted a proposal to spend $25 million to $30 million to turn 430 teachers into administrators in charge of overseeing special education matters at every elementary school in the district. The proposal will be presented to a board of education subcommittee Monday.

Separately, district officials are considering a formal review of African American placements.

They are worried that disproportionate numbers of black children are being identified as “emotionally disturbed” and “learning disabled,” a category reserved for students with a wide range of information-processing disorders.

“I expect that situation will be looked at,” said deputy superintendent Liliam Castillo. “I think there may be a potential for misdiagnoses from teachers trying to deal with a student’s behavioral problems.”

Of the 15,784 African American students--most of them male--currently in special education, 651 have been classified as emotionally disturbed and 10,617 as specific learning disabled. By comparison, there are three times as many Latinos in special education, yet 639 of them are labeled emotionally disturbed and 28,980 are regarded as learning disabled. Other special education students are distributed in an array of categories, including physically, medically and psychologically disabled.

Overall, about 11.3% of the district’s students are now in special education. District authorities contend the figure should range from 7.7% to 10%. By some estimates, as many as 26,000 youngsters may have been inappropriately placed in programs designed for the physically handicapped, learning disabled and emotionally disturbed.

“If we’re giving something to kids they don’t need, or putting them in a place they don’t belong--they aren’t learning, and that’s a problem,” said attorney Bonifacio Garcia, who represents the district in court cases involving special education. “It’s also extremely expensive.”

The cost of running special education services has climbed from $584 million in 1995 to $811 million this year.

Special education covers a broad range of physical, emotional and psychological disabilities that can challenge a child’s ability to learn.

The district educates the students in a variety of ways, ranging from placing them in mainstream classrooms to providing their lessons in off-campus residential schools. Some special ed students merely receive a few minutes of speech therapy each week in addition to their general education classes.

The fastest-growing category involves children with learning disabilities, which can include a wide range of auditory and visual processing problems, as well as difficulties with math reasoning and reading comprehension.

The 1973 Individuals With Disabilities Education Act required schools to seek out disabled students and provide them with free education tailored to their needs.

A class-action suit filed in 1993 on behalf of special-needs students claimed that the district’s disabled students were receiving a grossly inadequate education.

In a landmark settlement of that lawsuit, the district agreed in 1996 to a federal court consent decree requiring it to comply with federal and state laws by doing a better job of identifying and serving children with special needs.

School officials theorize that some portion of the recent increase in the special ed population may be due to pressure to comply with the consent decree. At the time the decree was signed, one in every 10 students in the district was enrolled in special education programs. Today, one in nine district students is in a special education program.

By signing the agreement, called the Chanda Smith Consent Decree, the district also agreed to create a computer system to track the progress of all 697,000 district students.

But the computer system is still on the drawing boards and may not be online for another three years, officials said. Without it, the district cannot determine, for example, whether the African American students being classified as emotionally disturbed and learning disabled are from a single neighborhood or scattered across the city.

“Right now, there’s a vacuum in data,” Gonzalez said.

In the meantime, requests for special ed evaluations are pouring into the district. In the 1997-98 school year, the district experienced a 68% increase in the number of referrals from teachers and parents to assess children for possible disabilities. It is not clear how many of those referrals have resulted in actual placements in special education programs.

Under the consent decree, a given school must provide the evaluation, which is usually administered by a psychologist working closely with the parents, teacher and the student.

If the child is found to be two grades behind--an informal benchmark for determining eligibility--he or she becomes a likely candidate for transfer to special education, officials said.

By that standard alone, however, an estimated 214,000 additional students would be currently eligible for special education.

Referrals will probably skyrocket with the new ban on bilingual education required by Proposition 227 and impending plans to do away with social promotion.

“In this district right now, if you are referred, you generally get placed in special education,” said Louis Barber, who helps administer the consent decree for the district.

Barber believes the plan to add administrators at schools will help ensure more accurate assessments, and offer alternative strategies to keep a child from going into special ed if it’s not needed.

The proposal is a streamlined, less costly version of one that was under consideration by the district a month ago as part of its plan to end social promotion.

That plan drew fire because it would take teachers out of the classroom and create a new layer of managers who would earn $64,741 to $80,740. The average teaching salary in Los Angeles is $46,601. The new plan would include some outside hires.

Not everyone is sure that the revised proposal will work.

Special education teacher Dan Ackerman of Central Continuation High School argued that “the district already has too many people working outside of the classroom.”

Some Believe More Belong in Programs

But Ackerman agrees that the district must take immediate steps to do a better job of screening candidates for special education, and providing alternatives to it, such as remedial reading programs.

“I’ve seen a few kids with real brain problems--dyslexia, short-term memory problems and so forth--in my classes,” said Ackerman. “But I usually get kids who can’t read. Their remedial problems became behavioral problems--not the other way around.”

Even as a growing number of educators worry about the growth of special ed, two activists at 9th Street Elementary School are advising Latino parents to refer more academically troubled students than ever to such programs.

Over the past three years, the number of 9th Street students referred to special education has grown from 27 to 54. Activist Alice Callaghan figures the number should be a lot higher.

“The system blames the inabilities of too many kids on the fact that they are English learners,” said Callaghan, who helped spearhead Proposition 227. “But this is not a language problem. We’re identifying kids as learning disabled if they have had four or five years of school and still can’t read.”

Principal Eleanor Vargas-Page said, “We don’t always agree with those referrals.”

“I would hope that the people making these referrals know what they are asking for,” Vargas-Page said. “I don’t feel comfortable pulling a child out of a regular classroom with a credentialed teacher and putting them in a room with a teacher working on a credential, which I’ve had to do.

“I can’t deny applications for special education filed by parents,” she added. “But what’s happening here should raise a red flag in front of those in power.”

“It already has,” said Victoria Castro, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education. “In borderline cases, there’s been a tendency to err on the side of learning disability. But our emphasis should instead be on mainstreaming students and providing more support services.

“I’ll never accept,” she said, “that there’s something inherent about male Latinos and African Americans that makes them more likely to be in special education.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Special Education Concerns

L.A. Unified School District officials are concerned that a disproportionate number of African American students are being placed in special education programs. In particular, they fear many young blacks are mistakenly identified as “emotional disturbed” and “learning disabled.”

Ethnicity: Black

% of student body: 14%

In program for emotionally disturbed: 651

% of total ethnic group: 0.7%

In program for learning disabilities*: 10,617

% of total ethnic group: 11%

Total special education students: 15,784

% of total ethnic group: 17%

Ethnicity: Latino

% of student body: 69%

In program for emotionally disturbed: 639

% of total ethnic group: 0.1%