New Jersey Democrat Theresa Ruiz, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has a truly terrible idea. She wants to introduce “social impact bonds” that would pay off investors to reduce special education referrals. The assumption behind the bonds is that high-quality pre-K can reduce the need for special education.
A parent blogger was aghast and sees these bonds as an effort to end special education.
The blogger writes:
“What is Senator Ruiz attempting to achieve? Her statement, “we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on” is naive at best and potentially destructive at worst.
“High quality” Pre-K is not a magic bullet. Students with disabilities will not be magically cured by attending preschool. It sounds too good to be true because it is. New Jersey’s classification rate is about 14.5%, higher in low-income districts where this program will take place.
“Will preschool help decrease the percentage of students who need special education services in those districts? I have no doubt that it will. The research supports that presumption.
“Are you going to end the need for Early Intervention, classification, and wrap-around services? No. You aren’t. There will always be students who would have been classified no matter how much preschool they had. There will always be students who need wrap-around services because we, as country, much less as a state, are doing nothing to address the poverty that creates the need for these services.
“Big picture here is, Goldman Sachs is going to make money on students NOT being classified. RtI is going to become the framework for K-12, delaying as long as possible the identification and classification of students with disabilities. And the Special Education Ombudsman position the Senator is trying to create (because constituents have been begging for help) will work for the NJ Department of Education.”
A reader posted a comment about her own children.
“OMG! We won’t have to have early intervention because we have high quality PreK!
“I have three kids. One reg ed., one legally blind, one entered school as profoundly autistic.
“How, precisely, would the most awesome preK in the world have helped my one year old legally blind child? Who would have taught me to teach him?
“Would great preK have made my autistic kid neurally typical?
“Would NOT classifying them have led to educational success? Does Ruiz honestly believe that neither kid would need special ed if they got great preK?
$1700 a year would not have paid for OT!(and, strangely enough, legally blind kids have issues with hand eye coordination !)
“I am way to hot to write to her right now. I will gather my thoughts and write a letter.
“Thanks. I didn’t know Ruiz was so short sighted as to believe no child could possibly remain disabled when they had great preK.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ruiz sponsored the bill that for all intents and purposes ended tenure protections for New Jersey teachers. High quality prekindergarten instruction will not erase developmental differences and delays.
Correct. Ruiz hasn’t been very friendly all along. I wouldn’t paint all NJ Dems with the same brush.
If a parents wants an evaluation, all a parent has to do is write a letter to a Committee on Special Education. If the district or CSE recommend RTI or a SES program, the parent has the right to refuse. IDEA still exists and if any district would refuse to test a student, parents still have the right to a legal remedy, such as a Writ of Mandamus.
NJ is planning on using RtI in a general education setting. There is no timeframe involved to move the process along, A parent will have to be very aware of what the process is for asking for a special education evaluation…that rarely is the case. NJ districts already use Basic Skills (another gen ed classroom) to delay, sometimes for years, actual classification. I wrote about this too.
Thanks to the new ESSA law, we can expect more of these naive “solutions” pour in and extend to other groups and grade levels. This law targets certain vulnerable populations as candidates for some form of cheap, less than service, as a substitute for legitimate intervention from trained, certified teachers. This is the tip of the iceberg as we can expect a litany of hair brained schemes from those that believe pointing and clicking will solve impairments, thanks to ESSA. This is the latest “pay to play” market based idea that will make money for a few at the expense of many. The Milken brothers are probably churning out a plan to cash in on the government’s latest bad idea as you read this. As for parents and support groups of children with disabilities, plan to put your lawyer on speed dial.
Yes. Precisely.
There is a reality that SPED costs are very high. Because our society seems to refuse to properly fund these costs, what ends up happening is that academic educational opportunities are being eliminated for the non-sped students and class sizes in both “regular” and special needs classes are soaring. All in an attempt to live within reduced budgets. That’s what I am seeing in my neck of the woods. It sickens me that Goldman Sachs is now coming in to game the system and take the money, and our broken political system will allow it.
To me it seems almost as if the government has put a “bounty” on the heads of needy students, and the corporations will be the bounty hunters.
Find someone who can secure a copy of the contract.Find out the formula they will be using to calculate the return to investors, how many students are in the first “payout” cohort, how the contractors decide which students to exclude (cherry-picking), and how they set up a control group (counterfactutal) who will not participate in the program.
You can see how the “value” of preschool is likely to be calculated by economists/investors at the website below, start on page 10. This is one of the few places where you can see this the reasoning that leads, in this case, to this summary:
“We estimate that the overall benefit of high-quality preschool on poor children and families in NYC is about $50,650 per student calculated as follows:
$50,004 present discounted value of earnings benefits and education-related health benefits
+ $2,602 earnings benefits of decreased juvenile delinquency
+ $1,440 overall estimated benefit of decreased child abuse
+ $330 in QALY benefits of improved parenting
+ $700 in saved child carefees
+ $1,200 estimated increase in parental employment = $56,276, reduced by 10 percent to account for possible double-counting across benefits = $50,648, rounded to $50,650.
These calculations become part of the “pitch” that can be made to officials that government/taxpayers will save bundles of money by allowing private investors to front the money for expanding preschool. These figures are all “backed” by citations of research which are useful in marketing the SIBS, even if some of the research is dated. QALY is a measure of “quality of life,” now widely used in making decisions about end-of-life care.
This report has “special education” benefits throughout. Most of these begin on page 51. They are used to make the case that poor and minority children who are adopted fare better then those who are in and out of foster care, and that preschool contributes to their life outcomes…which are always reduced to a monetary value.
Click to access Robin%20Hood%20Metrics%20Equations_BETA_Sept-2014.pdf
You can view the full SIB contract for the Chicago preschool here. https://chicago.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=1939527&GUID=3BEE6740-99AE-4E59-A6A5-B7A447D99617&Options=Advanced&Search=
Thank you. I will look through these. There is no contract in NJ yet.
The fundamental question which needs to be asked is this: Is it morally and ethically right to bet on, and profit from, our neediest children’s access to education?
No. No, it’s not. But it seems that privatization of education, and profiting from it, is the way things are increasingly going.
😦
Suggest that while question is relevant to teachers; the question is irrelevant
to investment bankers.
What I object to is the seeming necessity to look at these programs. We have spent about thirty five years (some would reasonably argue longer) in a trickle down model of funding the “greater good.” I remember reading (here?) that Reagan only made one picture a year, so he wouldn’t be taxed at a higher marginal rate. Little people have a right to scream at costs because they are proportionally shouldering more of the burden. When the most financially successful people are allowed to sequester their wealth and manipulate policy decisions by buying politicians with campaign donations and job promises, then it is passed time to recognize that our poor and/or disabled neighbors are not the cause of our tax burden.
2old2teach—Yes, just watch the documentary:
Park Avenue: Money Power and the American Dream
The Pay for Success is actually written as a Loan Advance. The students in the ‘cohorts’ will be tracked through high school. They are to be measured using PARRC and those who score at 25% and higher are labeled a success each year. They exclude the severe disabilities which they specifically list in the contract.
But I still smell something fishy. Why are these people essentially betting on our students? They aren’t putting money into the system out of the goodness of their heart. They are out to make the big buck and looking at the payment schedule which is specifically listed for each year of cohorts, this will bankrupt not only CPS, but the City of Chicago as well.
And Rahm signed off on it.
YesYesYes
Reagan lives. And lives. And lives.
Including in the hearts and minds of right-wing Democrats, who think that “liberals are f*cking retarted,” as Rahm Emanuel said when he was Obama’s Whitehouse Chief of Staff, and while misusing the “progressive” nomenclature to describe policies that actually amount to greedy, self-serving profiteering.
RTI is a farce that only serves to force a child who needs help to go without aid. Their failure after in class “interventions” must be documented before they can be tested for disabilities. I find it morally reprehensible that we can’t just test and aid those that are in need. As a child changes schools or administration changes, the RTI process also starts over. A set of interventions is attempted and documented for 8 weeks, then another set of interventions is attempted, until virtually the end of the year. Several tests can identify learning disabilities quickly. Also, the interventions, many of them one on one, can not be done in a regular classroom of 25 to 30 young students. My administration’s solution? Pull them out of P.E. and Art for RTI class. This just thrills the students to death. This leaves children that need special education services without help. Don’t forget, parents have no rights until their child is found to be eligible for services…This is all about money and greed. The system is run by Scrooges.
Way back in the “old days,” when the original Education For All Handicapped Children Act was passed, those of us already in Special Education (yes, I’m that old) greeted this with joy. And, indeed, although there were glitches and difficulties, the possibilities and realities of serving more special education students, with appropriate supports, did come about. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a whole lot better than it used to be.
We are going backward now.
Yes! So the system will be preschool with aim to not classify, followed by elementary school with RtI in place and the added pressure to not classify because Wall St. has to make its money back. This is so ugly.
What happens to students with diagnosed “disabilities” tells the story of how all children suffer in “reformed” public schools. Only for these children, and their parents and teachers, long-standing problems become even worse.
Some say the special education system is broken. Sadly, I believe it never has worked for so many of our children. Without the combination of parents who feel empowered to fight for their children (and there are some) and teachers who also feel empowered to fight the system on behalf of the children who need services (and there are many who risk their jobs, and their own mental/lhysical health to take this on), so many students fall through the ever-widening cracks.
I was first inspired to become a teacher by watching a courageous sister fight and fight some more for the supports her children needed (and for the most part never got) decades ago. From the inside, I now work alongside tireless, caring teachers who have to fight for the children whom “the system” leaves out. This can be exhausting and discouraging in today’s “school reform” world, but it is part of the core of teaching. Please know, there are many like us out there. We can not give up.
Thank you, Diane, for your spotlight, and your support.