Taking Children out of Special Education Schools to put them into the Regular Public School System
New York has decided that there are just too many children with learning disabilities the state has for it to handle adequately with its current policies; and schooling them at dedicated special education schools they feel is a good way to bankrupt the public education system in New York. So instead, the state is moving away from dedicated special education. It turns out that the system can save a lot on its investments, just trying to equip existing general-purpose public schools to handle children with special needs. Starting this fall, about 250 schools in the state will take in most students with special needs. And in fall next year, all of the states 1500 schools will take in children with special needs - all the children except the ones with needs that will require truly specialized training and help.
This may be a somewhat novel practice to New York, but cash-strapped school districts nationwide have been moving in this direction for quite a while. In New York, this is all part of the drift weve been seeing in the education policy, towards giving school principals are great deal more responsibility for seeing schoolchildren through. One just wonders though how exactly are they to handle all the responsibility special education schools used to, when they dont have the training for it. Isnt it enough that schools have a regular children running out of control in their hallways to deal with as it is?
For instance, do these schools have testing procedures in place to show them that they are doing a good-enough job with children with special needs? What if this plan only ends up having such children stocked up in these schools with no real education, and failing in a way that the school administration just cant acknowledge for fear for their reputation? When there arent enough controls in place to check if the schools are doing a good job, it could be a good while before anyone realizes that they are failing. And meanwhile, those children trapped there, would have lost a good deal of their developmental years. The thing is, dedicated special education schools are very expensive to run. Right now, New York City alone spends about $5 billion a year on running schools for children with special needs and its climbing. A lot of the time, the law gives parents the right to demand that the state spend on sending their special needs child to a private school.
School administrations claim however that they dont move children out of special needs schools and into the regular public schools to save money. They say that with all the specialized schooling, such children still find it hard to develop enough to pass standardized tests only one out of four actually gets a regular diploma. They say that they are just trying to find a way to improve on that graduation rate. In these mixed batch classrooms, teaching is to go on as before, except for the fact that there is to be an extra teacher to help with the special needs students; they call this collaborative team teaching. Sometimes the special needs students have their own classes with no more than 10 students in the room; and in other places, special students receive special training like speech therapy, that other students would not need.
But often, the special needs students just slip through the cracks. The teachers dont really expect too much performance from them, and they just vegetate in class. If could take a decade or so of experience with this new model before anyone really knows how it plays out.