KQED'd California Report: Health Dialogues ran a program this week called "Learning and Developmental Disabilities" which discussed how parents and schools deal with learning and development disabilities, including dyslexia and autism among others.
Special Ed consumes a significant amount of public school resources - schools directly spend on average at least twice as much on special ed students as they do on the rest of the student population (this does not count indirect costs of meetings with parents, etc, which are likely very significant as well). A federal law mandates that all special ed students should have an IEP (Individual Education Plan). By law, these plans cannot consider financial constraints when determining what is best for the students. I want to emphasize that again - they cannot consider financial constraints.
Most schools resist classifying children as Special Ed because the financial burden of IEPs is very high. This creates the undesirable situation where children who are in need of special services frequently do not receive the extra help that they need, particularly in their first few years in school where extra assistance would have the best chance of bringing the student back up to grade level. The parents need to push for the classification. Once the parents start pushing, they keep on pushing for more and more services.
Encroachment refers to the fact that the higher spending on Special Ed students leads to lower spending on the rest of the student population. On average, Special Ed students are 10% of the student body. Therefore, in a school with a budget of $100 and ten students, the school would typically spend $20 on the Special Ed student and $80 on the remaining nine students. Spending on the non-Special Ed students is 12% lower than would otherwise be the case ($8.80 instead of $10).
Tom Parrish, one of the guest on the program, who is the managing director focused on Education for American Institutes of Research, derisively refers to encroachment by giving an example quote of "our school can't buy three new souzaphones for the marching band because of Special Ed." He says that Special Ed students were "always there" and that it therefore doesn't make sense to think of the costs in terms of encroachment.
The problem with Tom's argument is that it does not take into account the fact that IEPs must by law be formulate without regard to costs and that the federal law does not allow local communities to think through the cost/benefit implications of spending limited funds on Special Ed students vs. the general student population.
At my mother's elementary school in suburban NH, they had one student a few years back who had such a significant disability that she had the mental capacity of a baby - she could not communicate and had to wear a diaper at all times. As per the student's IEP, she spent her days at the school under the care of a fully dedicated aide. This means that the school district was spending at least $20,000 per year 'educating' this student who will never be a functional member of society, instead of spending that money preparing the general student body for the 21st century workforce. It is very difficult to see how this is a good use of limited educational resources. While this is an extreme example, there are many other examples of students who consume large amounts of school resources for a very limited long term benefit (to those students or to society).
When I did a google search for 'encroachment', most of the search results were for California school districts. This issue seems to be better known in CA, I guess because the state does not finance Special Ed in a comparable way to its financing of general education. In NH, encroachment is not something that comes up in discussion of the public schools. Communities appear to be unaware that such a high percentage of their tax dollars are going to such a small number of students due to an unfunded mandate from the Federal government.
Local communities should be aware of how their public education dollars are spent and should be able to allocate their dollars as they see best. Should there be more money spent on kids that are slightly below average to bring them up to average? on kids who are above average to make sure that they are sufficiently challenged? or evenly distributed across all students? Different communities would undoubtedly choose different balances. Right now most don't have any idea how unbalanced public school spending really is.
(One of the benefits of vouchers, of course, is that the amount spent per student would suddenly become completely transparent.)