________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT May 13, 2002 Vol. 2, No. 20 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  Covering education news in Vermont and beyond... Informative, provocative, unique... Published by Vermonters for Better Education  VBE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence. Libby Sternberg, executive director: MAILTO:LSternberg@aol.com STATE NEWS... RUTLAND SOUTH CHOICE PROGRAM DOES HAVE MONEY FOLLOW CHILD In last week's VER, we reported that the Rutland South Supervisory Union was considering a school choice program for its three small elementary schools. We mistakenly claimed that money does not follow the child in the program. In fact, one-third of the state block grant would follow children who are allowed to choose under the proposed program. In addition, the program is slated for a three-year pilot period as the school boards evaluate its benefits and effects.  EDUCATION SPENDING IN VERMONT: CLOSING IN ON A BILLION (Reprinted with permission from the Vermont Economy Newsletter, published by Northern Economic Consulting, Inc., on the web at www.vteconomy.com) Vermont spent $887 million to operate its K-12 public schools during school year 2000-01, according to the latest estimates published by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) in the Digest of Education Statistics 2001. It's helpful to put that figure in perspective by looking at time trends and comparisons with other states and by looking at the number of students in Vermont.  The total student enrollment in Vermont is slightly over 98,000. That's down from the peak of just over 100,000 in the mid 1990s. The only other time Vermont had more than 100,000 students was in the early 1970s, as the peak number of baby boom children were working their way through the state's schools. By the mid 1980s, at the nadir of the baby bust, only 85,000 students were enrolled in the state's schools. The U.S. DOE, in a separate publication, forecasts that Vermont will lose about five percent of its enrollment-about 5,000 students-over the next decade. Only 18 states will see growing enrollments (none in the northeast) and Vermont will lose a higher percent of its students than all but 11 states.  All of the fast growing states are in the South and West, reflecting the continuing migration into those states from elsewhere in the U.S. and also the impact of immigrants, especially from Latin America and the Far East. Vermont Spending Compared Vermont's current spending per student (this ignores capital outlays and interest costs) is about $8,800, putting us in the top 15 states in spending. States where spending exceeds $10,000 per student include New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. States spending over $9,000 are Alaska, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Most of the high-spending states are also states with higher incomes than Vermont. When we compare Vermont's K-12 spending to our ability to spend, we find that Vermont is near the top of the pack. Vermont spends over five percent of personal income on K-12 spending. Only two other states-Alaska and West Virginia-spend more than Vermont by this measure Why We Spend So Much What keeps Vermont's education costs so high? Essentially, we have what educators around the nation want: small class sizes, low student-teacher ratios, and a high level of non-teacher staffing.  Vermont's student-teacher ratio is the lowest in the nation at 12.3 students per teacher. The national average level is 16.1 students per teacher. Since salaries and benefits are the largest items in school budgets, this is a very expensive ratio to maintain. The student-teacher ratio is simply the number of students divided by the number of teachers of all types (classroom, special educators, art and music, and physical education teachers).  By contrast, the average class size is the number of students sitting in front of a teacher in a room. The average elementary school class in Vermont had 19.7 students in school year 1993-94 (the most recent data available). Only South Dakota had a smaller average elementary school class size. The national average size was 24.1 students. The average secondary school class in Vermont had 19.2 students. Only Maine and Nebraska had smaller high school classes. The national average was 23.6 students. Therefore, Vermont has teacher staffing levels that are about 20 percent to 25 percent above the national average. Part of that reflects our desire to have small classes and low student-teacher ratios, but part of that is necessitated by our desire to have elementary schools in each town.  The result is very small elementary schools. The average size of an elementary school in Vermont is 218 students, half as large as the national average of 477 students. Only rural (and very large) Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming have smaller schools than Vermont.  What to Do? Vermont has to confront a number of choices. One is structural: How do we best deliver education services in an efficient, quality manner? The second is demographic: Do we take advantage of the coming enrollment decline to free up tax resources to tackle other social problems or do we continue the trend growth in total spending and therefore increase our per student spending? NAEP: PRIVATE SCHOOLS NOW THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just released the 2001 results of U.S. history tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders across the country. The last time a NAEP history test was administered was in 1994.  Vermont does not participate in the NAEP history test, but the national results are interesting because they illustrate just how false are school choice opponents' claims that public schools are the "foundation of our democracy." Private and Catholic school students outscored public schools students on the 2001 NAEP U.S. History test, just as they did in 1994. Here are the major findings for the 2001 test:  Although U.S. history scores for fourth and eighth-graders were higher in 2001 than in 1994, and the performance of twelfth-graders remained relatively stable, results of the 2001 U.S. history assessment show only 18 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders, and 11 percent of twelfth-graders performing at or above the Proficient level. In 2001, fourth-graders whose teachers reported spending more than 180 minutes on social studies instruction in a typical week had higher average scores than those whose teachers reported spending less time. A large majority of fourth-graders had teachers who reported having them read material from a textbook on a daily or weekly basis. Reading from a textbook daily was associated with higher average scores than was doing so on a weekly or monthly basis. Eighth-graders whose teachers reported using primary historical documents such as letters, diaries, or essays written by historical figures, on a weekly basis had higher average scores than those whose teachers did so less frequently. Twelfth-graders who reported never reading extra material, such as biographies or historical stories, scored lower, on average, than those who reported doing so a few times a year or more often. A strong positive association was evident between using computers for conducting research and for writing reports and performance at grades 8 and 12. Students in grades 4, 8, and 12 who reported daily general use of computers at school for social studies or history had lower average scores than those who reported less frequent general use. It should be noted that relatively few students reported using a computer for history or social studies. *    *    * ELSEWHERE... THE MYTH OF THE SPECIAL ED BURDEN by Jay P. Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. (This article originally appeared in "The Gadfly," the online newsletter of the Fordham Foundation - on the web at www.edexcellence.net)  The debate swirling around renewal of the major federal law addressing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), draws much of its energy from a widely shared but probably false premise: that schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students. Both the education establishment and IDEA reformers tend to accept this premise although they draw different conclusions from it. The establishment wants the federal government to cover the costs of special education more fully so that, as they see it, public schools will finally have the wherewithal to deliver on the promise of improving the achievement of non-disabled students. Cost-conscious reformers, on the other hand, want the costs of special education contained, figuring that money devoted to general education is likely to yield better results than money devoted to special education. But what makes everyone think the schools are being inundated by more and more children with learning problems? It's true that the proportion of children in special education has increased significantly since the mid-1970s, when IDEA began. The percentage of K-12 students identified as needing special education rose from 8.3% in 1976-7 to 11.8% in 1998-9. But an increase in the percentage of students identified asneeding special education does not necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the percentage of students with disabilities, any more than an increase in reports of domestic violence necessarily means there is more domestic violence. Trends in these statistics are sensitive to reporting biases and shifting definitions. A close examination of different categories of special education enrollments suggests that, while the identification of special education students has increased, the actual number of disabled youngsters has remained approximately steady. Almost the entire increase in special education enrollments since 1976 can be attributed to a rise in onecategory, called "specific learning disability," which has more than tripled from 1.8% of the student population in 1976-7 to 6.0% in 1998-9. All other categories of special education combined, including mental retardation, serious emotional disturbance, deafness, blindness, autism, and head injury, have actually declined from 6.5% to 5.8% of the student population during the same period. (See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/digest/dt053.html.) If a general increase were truly underway in the proportion of students with learning problems, then it should be evident in more than just one category of special education. It is highly implausible that something has caused there to be more children in one disability category without also causing more mental retardation, serious emotional disturbance, etc. It is more likely that the large increase in the category of specific learning disabilities can be attributed to a greater likelihood of diagnosing children with those problems than to a true increase in the incidence of those learning problems (and only those learning problems) in the student population. This seems especially likely when we recognize that this high-growth category, specific learning disability, consists of learning problems that are more subjective in their diagnosis and less expensive in their treatment than other categories of special education. The relative subjectivity of identifying specific learning disabilities makes it possible for changes in the number of children with that diagnosis to be caused by an increase in the propensity to assign that label. The relatively low cost of treating specific learning disabilities may further incline schools and educators to assign that label, especially if the additional funds produced by identifying a child with a specific learning disability exceed the marginal cost of providing that student with relatively minimal services. Whether or not schools make a "profit" off these children, they may face other incentives to identify students in this way. They may be more willing to diagnose students with specific learning disabilities so as to exempt them from accountability testing, to reduce expectations about their academic performance, to solve behavior problems in "regular" classrooms, to get additional help to a child who is struggling academically (whether disabled or not), or in response to parental requests for special treatment. And, of course, one cannot rule out the possibility that schools have increased their rate of diagnosing specific learning disabilities because they have become better informed about such disorders and are more adept at recognizing them. The malleability of the "specific learning disability" diagnosis is underscored by the odd way in which those disorders are identified. To be diagnosed as having a specific learning disability, students must perform significantly worse in a subject area, like math or reading, than is indicated by their cognitive potential, as typically measured by an IQ score.  But this mismatch between potential and achievement is not always caused by a "disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language," as the official definition of the disorder requires. It could also result from exposure to ineffective teaching methods. Schools may not be receiving more students with learning problems; in an era of results-based accountability, they may simply be more likely to identify students who have been the victims of educational malpractice. Whatever the causes of the increase in children diagnosed with specific learning disabilities, it is extremely unlikely that non-school factors are producing more children afflicted with such disabilities while producing no increase in all other categories of disability combined. But this is not how defenders of the education status quo see it. They persist in arguing that schools are being drowned by a tidal wave of children with learning problems caused by forces outside the school system. MEDICAL ADVANCEMENTS AS THE PROBLEM? Consider the arguments advanced by Sheldon Berman, Perry Davis, Ann Koufman-Frederick, and David Urion in their chapter in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, a volume on special education released a year ago by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute (full reference below or go to http://www.edexcellence.net/library/special_ed/index.html). The authors are convinced that "the increases [in special education that] schools have been experiencing have not been caused by school district policy and practice." Instead, they insist, "these cost increases have been primarily due to the increased numbers of children with more significant special needs who require more costly services." In particular, they identify three non-school phenomena that, they say, have increased the numbers of children with learning problems: improvements in medical technology, de-institutionalization of children with serious difficulties, and increases in childhood poverty. All these putative causes have an air of plausibility to them but all also turn out to be inconsistent with the broader facts. It's true that improvements in medical technology have saved the lives of more low birth-weight babies and others with health problems, leading to an increase in children who manifest learning problems later in life. But improvements in medical technology and other improvements in public health, such as reductions in lead paint and safer car seats, have also helped prevent some children from developing disabilities at all, or have reduced the severity of those problems. Improvements in medical care and public health would thus lead to a net reduction in the number of children with learning difficulties. Berman et al. contend that increasing numbers of surviving low-birth-weight babies resulted in an estimated increase in children expected to have mental retardation from 4,550 between 1980 and 1985 to 12,375 between 1995 and the present. However, the overall number of mentally retarded children in schools actually declined from 961,000 in 1976-7 to 597,000 in 1998-9. Obviously, low birth-weight babies contribute only a small amount to the total number of children with mental retardation. But it appears that the increase in mental retardation attributable to medical technology saving low birth-weight babies has been more than offset by a significant reduction in the number of mentally retarded children, a reduction attributable to other improvements in medical care and public health. Berman and colleagues' claims about de-institutionalization and childhood poverty are no less misleading. While they provide no numbers, they contend that the de-institutionalization of mentally retarded children in particular has placed a growing burden on school systems. Yet, as we have already seen, the total number of mentally retarded children served by schools under IDEA has steeply declined. Children with specific problems in math or reading were never institutionalized, so de-institutionalization cannot explain the rise in the one category of special education that has grown. Nor is childhood poverty a plausible explanation for the increase in specific learning disabilities. First, the federal government's definition of specific learning disabilities explicitly excludes learning problems that result from economic disadvantage: "The term does not include children who have learning problems which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage." (See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/digest98/appendix-3.html#h under "Handicapped.") Second, poverty among children under age 6 is actually about the same now (16.9% in 2000) as it was when IDEA began (17.7% in 1976). (See http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov20.html.) It's true that, during the intervening years, including recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s, childhood poverty percentages were sometimes higher, but this particular measure of poverty can be misleading because it excludes non-cash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps. Those governmental programs act as a cushion (albeit an imperfect one) to reduce basic material deprivation for children during economic slowdowns. Poverty comparisons over time are also complicated by the shifting goal post of the poverty line. The larger reality is that, as our GDP grows over time, America is becoming a wealthier society, and this is true for those at the lower end of the income scale as well as (if not as dramatically as) those at the upper end. In 1976, the average family in the lowest quintile of income earned $12,696 (in 2000 dollars) compared to $14,232 for the average bottom-quintile family in 2000. (See http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f03.html.) Economic deprivation is simply not a plausible explanation for a tripling in the percentage of children with specific learning disabilities-and only children in that category-especially when the definition of the disorder explicitly excludes economic causes. If I am correct that there has been no large secular increase in the true incidence of learning problems since the mid-1970s, but rather an increase in the identification of students with those problems, several important policy conclusions follow. SAME STUDENTS, MORE MONEY? First, money devoted to special education should not be viewed as money taken away from the general education of students. Schools have simply shifted more students who previously would have been in general education into special education. Whether schools were previously under-diagnosing or are currently over-diagnosing, the basic fact is that schools have been given additional money over time to educate a population of students with the same spectrum of learning problems that they used to have. If non-school factors have not stuck schools with more disabled students, then we would expect schools to have produced better outcomes with the additional resources. They have not. Over the last four decades, per pupil spending in real dollars has increased from $2,360 to $7,086. Yet student outcomes, as measured by the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress and high school graduation rates, have been relatively flat. (See endnote 27 in http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm.) Whatever the causes for this productivity crisis in education (spending more without improving outcomes), it is not reasonable to blame special education for consuming extra dollars or burdening schools with more difficult to educate students. Schools have more money to educate the same distribution of students that they used to have. Shifting students and money into the special education category does not alter this basic fact. Second, if the federal government were more fully to compensate schools for the costs of the IDEA mandates, we should expect a further increase in the shifting of students into the special education category. The additional outside funds that learning disabled students bring to a school may already play a role in the tripling of students with that diagnosis. As with Medicare and Medicaid, policymakers need to balance the desire to cover necessary costs with the need to prevent abuse of the special-education program. Improvements in the diagnosis system could take several forms. Washington might institute a system of spot-check auditing of diagnoses. Perhaps diagnostic patterns in schools can be compared against demographic profiles to identify schools that appear to be over or under-diagnosing specific disorders. These might be subject to closer review. But the most powerful reform would "voucherize" all students who receive a special-education diagnosis. This is actually happening in Florida under the McKay Scholarship program, whereby disabled youngsters may take the money allocated for their education to private schools if they wish. Making all special education students eligible for vouchers not only expands the options available to them and their families, it also provides a disincentive to public schools to over-diagnose students, since public schools will not want to lose these students to private schools. (Any resulting problem of under-diagnosis could be handled through a state-level appeal system or, as today, through the legal system.) Much is wrong with American special education today. But one thing is not wrong: schools are not suffering under the burden of a growing population of children with special needs. The evidence suggests that schools have the same distribution of students with learning difficulties that they used to have. Any reforms considered as part of IDEA renewal should take this fact into account. -  -  -  -  - Endnote: "The Rising Costs of Special Education in Massachusetts," by Sheldon Berman, Perry Davis, Ann Koufman-Frederick and David Urion, from Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, May 2001, http://www.edexcellence.net/library/special_ed/special_ed_ch9.pdf.  To read other chapters in the volume, see http://www.edexcellence.net/library/special_ed/index.html.  *    *    * The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact LSternberg@aol.com for more information.

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