What Happens to Special-Education Students in a Landscape of 'School Choice'?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/education/special-education-students-landscape-school-choice



For New York City schoolchildren, the process of visiting schools in search of a good match, worrying about assessments and tests, filling out applications and writing long essays starts long before preparing for college. Some kids begin competitive testing and applications as early as pre-K, hoping to get into gifted and talented programs.

The opportunity to get into the best programs the city has to offer continues throughout elementary and middle school, and culminates with the high school application process. This is when all of the hundreds of thousands of students in the city rank their favorite schools, both public and charter, and compete in hopes of gaining admission to a school that will put them on the track toward a bright future.

This spring, a set of reformsby the New York City Department of Education (DOE) allowed an expanded group of students entry into the very best programs in the city. These students include about 900 general-ed and 300 special-ed students. The city’s “special education” designation spans an extraordinarily broad spectrum, from physical, developmental or intellectual disability to emotional and behavioral disorders. The decision has angered parents and community members, who feel the students didn’t deserve the spots.

As part of the DOE admissions for the 2013-2014 school year, more than 1,000 students were placed in 71 selective high schools around the city. Admissions for these high schools — selective for their exceptional artistic programs, rigorous academic standards or other types of specialized class offerings — are competitive, offering a limited amount of seats compared to the demand for kids who hope to attend. Admissions depend on standardized test scores, middle school report cards, interviews, essays and auditions for performing arts programs.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

1. I don't understand the objections ..

... it's just a form of affirmative action. It'll give some with less-than-stellar history a chance to compete and grow. And it'll bring diversity to the elite schools.

I don't much care for the use of essays as admission criteria. The students who actually write essays are competing against those who get essays from professionals, or their parents, or from the intertubes.

[LWolf]

3. Do you understand what "special education" is?

The bottom line: public education is not supposed to be about competition. It's supposed to be about making sure that every student, regardless of where they come from or where they start at, has an equal opportunity for a good education.

Every student.

"Choice" SHOULD be about being able to choose the best environment and program for the child. Not about competing for enrollment on the part of schools or students.

Special ed, by definition, is made up of students who are not going to be able to perform as well as the average motivated regular ed student. They can't compete. That's why they get special services.

[GreenEyedLefty]

2. "School choice" is opening up the rift between the haves and the have nots

Basically the haves are going to crowd "their" schools to the exclusion of everyone else, while the have nots get to languish in their underfunded, overcrowded schools. The state will punish the have not schools by withholding funding due to underperformance, while rewarding the have schools for consistently meeting their achievement criteria.

The "elite" schools will have entrance criteria that will be impossible for the have nots to navigate because the haves will have inside information or "know people" to gain admission to the "best" schools.

This has been in the works for a long time... the premise is to keep the "haves" happy enough to attend public schools and the bureaucracy is bending over backward to accommodate them.

Special education is an afterthought, always.

It's sick. I work in public education and it's thoroughly obvious to me. It's classist at a minimum, and, depending on the socioeconomics of where you live, racist.

[Recursion]

4. You're describing non-choice cities

In those, rich kids from rich neighborhoods go to good schools and poor kid from poor neighborhoods go to bad schools, in both cases because that's what the schools in their neighborhoods are.

[GreenEyedLefty]

5. That's what's in place here, at the moment.

I live in one of the most populous counties in the state of Michigan, where school choice is the norm in all districts but one, which happens to be the wealthiest. School choice is the prerogative of each district. School funding is based on two "count days" during the school year, with the vast majority of funding coming from the October count. A law passed during the 1990s made it impossible for districts to supplement their funding through millages, so they must compete with other districts to fill their seats. During the summer districts whose enrollment counts are lagging will run commercials advertising their districts in the hopes of filling their empty seats.

Districts who cannot meet their enrollment benchmarks are penalized by losing thousands of dollars per empty seat. The result is layoffs and cuts in programming. The arts and other electives are often the first to go. It is difficult to attract talented teachers to struggling districts, and even more difficult to retain them, as they are seldom given the time or resources to do their jobs effectively, and will jump to districts that are better funded as soon as an opportunity comes along.

At this time the governor is slowly attempting to break down the geographic barriers between districts in order to make all schools "choice schools."

I would like to think he has good intentions, but given his track record, I am deeply suspicious.

[MissB]

6. A state legislator tried to even it out a bit this year.

Our public school district has several ways that a student can gain admission: live in district, transfer with an open slot, pay tuition or receive a scholarship.

The tuition is over $10k/year. In-district students don't pay tuition. Our state only allows schools to charge the amount it actually costs to educate the child.

In-district housing is only affordable to the upper-middle or wealthy (or in our case, by buying the worst house in the neighborhood).

The state legislator wanted our district to take everyone that applied. I understand that sentiment, but our district also can't pull $$ out of its backside to cover the difference between cost and ability to pay. Our school model is successful because we keep small class sizes and great teachers (mostly with masters degrees, so $$). We can't bump the number of students per class and still have the successful stats that we currently have. And it isn't because we necessarily select only the best students - the kids that live in-district can go to the schools regardless of academic ability or interest. They are still successful, because the school pays as much attention to them as the high achievers.

We also have a remarkable number of kids with special needs, and some of them are even tuition students or transfer students. I think the numbers I last saw were 15% of total student pop was special needs (which obviously varies from physical to emotional to developmental).

The state legislator was unsuccessful in her push to keep our district from having an application process. In part, I think, because our process doesn't select out the ones who have special needs or aren't at the top of the class.

But it's a sticky issue. I agree that those districts with money are always going to have better schools than those with less money. Our state even has a school equalization formula, so that all districts get the same $$/kid. Our district doesn't keep most of our own educational tax dollars paid through property tax money.