Why the GAO Study on Special Education in Charter Schools Gets It Wrong
As the New York Times reports a new GAO study finds that charter schools enroll 3 percent fewer students labeled as special education than traditional public schools. [Note: In North Carolina, the difference is about one percent.]
Across the country, disabled students represented 8.2 percent of all students enrolled during the 2009-10 year in charter schools, compared with 11.2 percent of students attending traditional public schools, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis of Department of Education data.
The basic premise of the GAO report is questionable. The assumption that schools with higher rates of special education are some how doing a better job of serving special needs children is suspect–just because you label students does not mean you are serving them. This type of analysis implies that a higher rate of special education designation proves that certain schools are serving special needs children better.
In fact an alternative explanation might be that public schools are better at gaming the funding system by labeling a larger number of children as special education. There has been significant debate over the degree to which the largest special education category of specific learning disability (SLD) reflects a true disability or an instructional failure in reading in the early grades. As education researcher Jay P. Greene has long pointed out in articles such as the “The Myth of the Special Education Burden,” specific-learning disabilities has been the fastest growing category of disability and has grown at a rate much faster than other categories of special education.
A 2002 report from the President’s Commission on Special Education estimated that 80 percent of students who receive an SLD diagnosis-two out of five special education students-are assigned to the program “simply because they haven’t learned how to read.” In a similar vein, an in-depth analysis in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, a 2001 report published by the Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute, estimates that nearly 2 million children would not have been classified as learning disabled if the public schools they attended had provided proper, rigorous, and early reading instruction. A plausible explanation for the 3 percent differential between charter schools and traditional schools is that many charter schools do a better job of teaching students to read, have agressive early-intervention programs, and simply do not label as many children as special education in the first place.
Read the rest of the article here.
