Kate Taylor reports in the New York Times on a report released by the New York City Department of Education, showing that thousands of students were denied the special education services to which they were entitled.
The bad news is that kids have been maltreated. The good news is that the DOE is issuing a report that acknowledges its failures. After a dozen years of slick PR in which every initiative was a great success on day one, candor is refreshing.
Taylor writes:
“As many as 40 percent of students in New York City recommended for special-education services may not be getting them, the Education Department said in a report released on Monday.
“But even more striking, the department said that its data systems were so unreliable that it was not exactly sure what percentage of students were not receiving the services.
“The report, released to comply with a law passed by the City Council last year, said that “major deficiencies” in the design of the Special Education Student Information System, which is supposed to track students receiving special education, “continue to affect the D.O.E.’s ability to reliably report specific compliance metrics.”
“That for us is one of the biggest takeaways,” said Maggie Moroff, the special-education policy coordinator at Advocates for Children, which helps at-risk students. The lack of reliable data is “hugely important,” she said, “because you need the data to figure out where the holes in the service delivery are.”
“Based on the available data, the report found that at the end of last school year, 5 percent of the students who were recommended for services, or nearly 9,000 students, were not receiving them at all. Thirty-five percent, or more than 60,000 students, were receiving only some of the services recommended for them.
“The department said, however, that inconsistencies in course labels in a second data system could lead to overstating the number of students receiving no services or incomplete services.
“The report also found that 30 percent of students whose parents or teachers requested initial evaluations for them, to see whether they needed special-education services, were not evaluated within 60 days, as mandated by state law….
“Last month, the city’s public advocate, Letitia James, sued the Education Department, saying that the flaws in the computer system for disability services led to students’ being deprived of services and the city’s missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements….
“The system was created by the Bloomberg administration for $130 million and implemented in 2011.
“In the last school year, 187,672 students had what are known as individualized education plans, which entitle students to certain special education or related services.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Same crap in NJ. I have to ask, what are the consequences here? The kids have suffered miserably, irreparably. You can’t even get those years back. Now what? OCR doesn’t do its job. Our state OSEP offices don’t do their job. There is no enforcement. Frustrating, to say the very least.
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…and they aren’t getting them because they have been mainstreamed into inclusive classrooms? …because the services have been defunded? ….because they attended charter schools? And what of the Goldman Sach’s funded plan to stop special ed altogether, and give bonuses to the investors for every child denied such services? We live in a messed up world.
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The only ones held accountable for unmet and often unreachable “performance outcomes” demanded by USDOE, NYSED, and NYCDOE are victimized children with their useless IEP’s, and their much maligned teachers. No one cares about equity of resources, appropriate class sizes, or whether teachers are well trained and committed to the profession. These are the Hunger Games- survival of the fittest and wealthiest. It is an outrage that while cherry-picking, parasitic charters proliferate, our public schools’ neediest children are left in defunded, crowded buildings without their federal IDEA right to an individualized free, appropriate, public education. Parents and teachers screaming for help have been ignored and demeaned by a bipartisan corporate/political money-machine that funnels precious public dollars into private profits. Enough is enough!
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I’ve had to work with SESIS, it’s awful, and slow. There was a union settlement a few years ago – because it was so slow and unreliable, teachers and service providers spent a lot of time after hours entering data. They wound up paying us for a certain amount of time of after hours work. And promised improvements going forwRd, which did not appear.
I think there’s also pressure on principals to reduce the amount of services – I’ve had and been present for some heated discussions at IEP meetings. I’ve also heard of principals changing service mandates in the process of finalizing an IEP – after the team has met and agreed. And this is happening in District 75, where every student is in special education. I imagine it’s much worse with students outside of the district.
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And this is before the Success Bonds have taken off?
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The kids that need us the most are the first to suffer. Not to mention those on the fringes who don’t fit neatly into the tiny box full of word games and math riddles called the standardized test.
It’s time to realize that kids aren’t robots. They learn in different ways and at different rates. Those whose genius blossoms later or in a different way ARE NOT STUPID! Every child is different and it’s time to accept that and build a system of education that serves all kids.
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This denial of service for special education is not just a technical/bookkeeping problem in NYC.
Think tanks and researchers have supported claims that certain racial and ethnic groups are overrepresented in special education.
In the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, Congress required that school districts take actions to address the problem of “overrepresentation” of certain racial and ethnic groups in special education. If this problem of “significant disproportionality” existed, it was due to Congressional failure, in NCLB, to include standardized procedures for identifying students for special education s well as the eagerness of some states to avoid the costs of providing services.
On June 13, 2013 the Government Accounting Office (GAO) recommended that USDE set standards for reporting on IDEA identifications and specifically about disproportionality based on race and ethnicity in the identification, placement, and discipline of children with disabilities.
On June 19, 2014, the Department of Education published a request for public comment on USDE proposed actions to address “significant disproportionality.” Education did not provide GAO with an update for FY15. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-137
Then on Jan 8, 2016, the GAO issued a report on showing that foot-dragging on reporting IDEA information was common and that paperwork-data entry requirements were huge, but also necessary as “protection against potential litigation.” http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-25
In 2015, seven researchers offered some compelling evidence of “disproportional under-representation” of minority students in five categories of eligibility for special education, K-8. These categories were learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, intellectual disabilities, health impairments, and emotional disturbances. Language minority children were less likely to be identified as having learning disabilities or speech/language impairments than White, English-speaking children. This longitudinal study also suggests that White, English-speaking children may be over-identified for special education. Morgan, P. L., Farkas, G., Hillemeier, M. M., Mattison, R., Maczuga, S., Li, H., & Cook, M. (2015). Minorities are disproportionately underrepresented in special education longitudinal evidence across five disability conditions. Educational Researcher, 44(5), 278-292.
This is to say that the problems in NY City with the 2011 data system created by the Bloomberg administration may not be all that is wrong with the process of identifying and providing services to students and families. This carefully crafted study will not please civil rights groups who have claimed that minority students are over-represented in special education. In the meantime the investors in preschool pay-for-success contracts (also called social impact bonds) are clearly counting on earning money by reducing the “need” for special education services.
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How convenient that their data system is not working “properly”.
or maybe that depends how one defines the word.
If the goal is to reduce spending on special ed, a reliably unreliable data system actually works quite well.
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Laura,
The systems for data collection can be devised to detect, or not detect, depending on the objective. It sounds to me that this system was “set up” to frame intended results. It also sets up the chess board to demand MORE in depth and individualized data on each child. Money, money, money. Power, power, power, Control, control, control!!
Which Bilderberg Billionaire will get to move the knight next? They software will not be created to work correctly, not now and not ever. We’ve arrived in the EXACT corner where the powers that be intended.
Blaming human error of data entry and data systems – Yippe! Their solution: Parents will be asked to directly input all their information into non-FERPA compliant third party systems with the promise that the DIY method will ensure accuracy and better outcomes.
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How ironic that a bureaucracy that touts, practically on a daily basis, the importance of data in planning instruction cannot get its own house of data in order. SESIS (the Special Education Student Information System mentioned at the top of this post) is a mess and always has been. Another data system, ARIS (the meaning of this acronym now eludes me) was also a mess, and after investing eighty million bucks in it, the city finally abandoned it.
All of the valuable information above notwithstanding, there is something else going on in special education in New York City that bears emphasis: the drive to do away with small, self-contained classrooms for our most struggling learners. A close friend and colleague of mine in the Bronx has worked a number of Saturdays this school year revising IEPs (Individual Education Plans, the documents that guarantee students rights to equal access to an education, whatever their learning challenges may be) in order to move students into integrated co-teaching (ICT) classes. The unhappy denouement to this story is that once these students were moved into ICT classes, they were subject to grading by a general education teacher. Not understanding these students’ abilities and needs, this teacher failed them.
By any standard of good pedagogical practice for struggling learners that I can recognize and appreciate, this is grim indeed.
Now the scuttlebutt in the school in which I presently serve is that the superintendent for our district is pressuring the administration to eliminate self-contained classes. Again, it’s difficult to see this as a good idea.
I thank Advocates for Children for the good work they do; I’ve referred parents to them in the past, and I have no doubt I will have occasion in the future to do so again. In my not terribly humble estimation, part of the reason the Department of Education can get away with this nonsense is that the parents of struggling learners often struggle themselves–with poverty, citizenship issues, and general scarcity in every area of their lives. I imagine the idea of litigating with a huge, well-funded and defensive bureaucracy is not at the top of many parents’ list of desires.
In order to qualify my remarks, I’ll note simply that this is my thirteenth year as a special education teacher in New York City, and I’ve spent eight of those years at my present posting. Over the course of my tenure with the New York City Department of Education, I have watched both immaterial concern and material support for our neediest students erode dramatically.
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As a special education teacher, specifically a resource specialist, I find this demoralizing. Many special education teachers in my district are over the legal caseload limit. It can often be physically impossible to provide all of the service minutes a child is entitled to, but higher ups will just tell you to “do your best,” “look at your groupings,” and that’s it. All they care about is if the paperwork is filed on time.
I’d like to add-
*When an assessment goes past the 60 day time line it is often because the day that was most convenient for the parent to meet was *62 days* after they signed the assessment plan, or the psychologist is only at your site one day a week, or a million other reasons. None of the reasons matter. You are out of compliance.
* I work in a large, underfunded urban district, and I am sure we have students who qualify for services who are not receiving them, in part because we cannot get enough teachers willing to come here. There are schools that do not have a resource specialist because the district was not able to hire one. This leads to people being split between two or more schools, which leads to what I will delicately refer to as “compliance challenges.” Even when teachers are split between sites, we still do not have enough of them.
When we have the resources we need, we will be able to serve students appropriately. We are a long way from that right now.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Its the same in Rochester, New York. Students are not getting services. The District eliminated co-teaching classrooms and made the majority of classes with the consultant teachers model. It is a disaster and they refuse to remedy the problem. The teachers’ caseloads are beyond ridiculous and they can’t meet all the students needs. It is educational malpractice.
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I am fed up with the whole racial-profiling “over identification” complaint. We are dealing with individuals. The identification process is fairly rigid. Many children raised in violent neighborhoods and/or families may lack the “grit” to overcome what they experience. We know that lacking good food resources in one generation results in problems in future generations. It only stands to reason that learning problems will show up. There are huge areas of grey. Given the rigidity of the federal guidelines, only middle-class and mostly white children would be culled for IEPs. Checking the boxes claiming that the child’s issues have less impact on their condition than the results of the psych tests means we are lying. Just another way to say that America’s history has no impact. Frankly, we might be under identifying.
Ironically, parents who avoid the lable of LD seem happy to take the Smarter Balance to see if their child is achieving.
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