Texas failed to educate, monitor disabled students: federal report

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas violated federal law by failing to identify and educate students with disabilities and deliberately working to decrease the number of students enrolled in special education programs, the U.S. Department of Education said in a report on Thursday.

The report concluded that Texas ran afoul of federal law by failing to locate students in need of special education, failing to ensure free public education was made available to children with disabilities and failing to adequately supervise and monitor the state’s special education program.

Texas has the second-largest U.S. public school system, with about 5 million students.

“Far too many students in Texas had been precluded from receiving supports and services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,” U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement.

-snip-

#U.S. JANUARY 11, 2018 / 4:23 PM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO
Jon Herskovitz
3 MIN READ


Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-texas-education/texas-failed-to-educate-monitor-disabled-students-federal-report-idUSKBN1F02WP

[pecosbob]

1. Undoubtedly some way she wants to kick that taxpayer money down to religious schools

[AtheistCrusader]

2. That and a healthy dose of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' fallacy.

[Initech]

3. Good ol' compassionate conservatism at work!

[Igel]

4. No, this is silly.

Not so long ago Texas was one of the states raked over the coals for having too many students receiving SpEd services and taking modified tests.

My school was put on probation. The number of students receiving modifications on their standardized tests was too high. The excess number were assigned a 0 for their standardized test scores, which brought the average for the school too low for a passing grade for the school.

Two years ago, too many students get services. Bad school!

Last year, you're in compliance. Good school, you've got the percentage of students receiving services under control.

This year, same percentage ... Bad, bad school! You have students who should receive services who aren't.

The word for what this produces is "learned helplessness." Some call it a catch-22. They look at numbers, they assume they understand the data. They don't. They delude themselves. It doesn't matter if it's DeVos or Duncan, both are dunces.

The problem was straightforward: It was easy for underachieving schools to ID a lot of those students most likely to fail standardized tests as needed modifications. They get modified tests, they get people reading the test to them. More kids pass. The school receives okay ratings. The graduation rate's okay, and while their diploma is sometimes dinged most of the kids aren't college bound anyway. But a lot of such kids don't need services. They don't learn, and the school's punished for the kids' behavior. The kids should graduate with some sort of "you put in your time, but you really didn't learn what you needed to" diploma.

The downside is that school districts with a lot of upper-middle-class helicopter parents, who take their slightly underachieving kids to doctors and get diagnoses of dyslexia, ADHD, various cognitive impairments and dysphorias also have too many kids with special services. Often these parents want help for their kids. "My kid has a B, should have an A, he must have a learning disability."

GT-classification works about the same, except that low-achieving schools have no motivation to place kids in GT programs while upper-middle-class parents take their kids to all kinds of GT-test-prep classes or constantly have their kids tested.