The Special Ed Conundrum

Someday soon, on one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s overcrowded, dilapidated campuses, a little girl in a portable classroom will raise her hand for help with a math question but the teacher will be busy attending to the special needs of a new classmate. The new student may be blind or deaf or autistic. More likely he will suffer from what is known as a “behavioral disorder.”

What’s certain is that he, like the other 35,000 “disabled” children that a federal order will “mainstream” from special-needs schools into regular classes, will require more attention and additional teaching skills. Also certain is that the district, already strapped for cash and administrative competence, cannot add this responsibility without subtracting from the education of the 19 or 29 other students in the class.

This is the sad legacy of a district that did the wrong thing (by failing for years to provide equal educational opportunities to disabled students, who have as much right to reach their full potential as any other student) and then (when challenged by angry parents in a 1993 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union) took the expedient way out and adopted a federal consent decree that was guaranteed to make matters worse.

Make no mistake, studies show that most physically and psychologically disabled students progress faster when they are placed in at least some classes with nondisabled peers. But what about the other students and the mainstream teachers? School districts such as New York and San Francisco that are well ahead of the LAUSD on mainstreaming have documented some unintended consequences. Already overworked teachers bailing out of their careers is one. Cost is another.

The L.A. district currently spends more than $1 billion on its 86,000 special ed students, more than half of whom already attend regular classes at least part of the time. That cost is about to get much higher. Thousands of teachers will need training, and some who don’t want this particular challenge will quit. Principals, who have too much on their plates already, will get another priority. Hundreds of schools will require renovations. No one at district headquarters knows how much all this will cost. What Supt. Roy Romer does know is that the district doesn’t have the money.

Even before the state’s current economic crisis, making the required accommodations would have required the district to make deep, painful cuts elsewhere. And, lest anyone need reminding, this is a district that is already struggling to raise test scores while cutting 17 school days from many students’ academic calendars and while following a year-round schedule in order to accommodate a vastly swollen student population.

The fact is, the district has no choice but to ease these disabled students into the mainstream by the agreed-on deadline of 2006.

As a stopgap reaction to this untenable situation, Romer needs to lobby Washington harder. In 1975, when Congress passed the law that now governs special education, it promised to provide 40% of the additional expense. It now pays only about 12%. President Bush plans to include an additional $1 billion for special education in his proposed budget. The LAUSD alone could absorb that amount.

Long-term, the district’s only hope is to introduce the sorts of sweeping reforms that will make the schools work for every student--disabled or not. A well-conceived plan that considers the needs of individual students in the context of the entire student population could bolster disabled students’ learning and enrich the experience of those students whose only challenge is overcoming the complexities of reading, writing and algebra.