A recent court decision in Connecticut, which ruled that the state’s property-tax based system of funding was inequitable and unconstitutional. The decision was hailed by the New York Times and others as a wonderful breakthrough for a “broken” school system. In some respect, that claim was right: a property-tax system is inherently inequitable, assuring that affluent districts are far better funded than poor ones.
But as Jonathan Pelto was first to point out, the decision contains a shocking dismissal of the rights of children with disabilities. Buried in the opinion is the judge’s belief that too much money is spent on such children.
The judge wrote:
““Yet school officials never consider the possibility that the education appropriate for some students may be extremely limited because they are too profoundly disabled to get any benefit from an elementary or secondary school education….It is about whether schools can decide in an education plan for a covered child that the child has a minimal or no chance for education, and therefore the school should not make expensive, extensive, and ultimately proforma efforts.”
In this article in the HECHINGER Report, it is clear that the Connecticut decision threatens millions of children with special needs and challenges federal law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This decision is certainly reprehensible. Yet the irony is that, thanks to the ignorantly and callously misguided education policy coming from the federal DoE, that ALL children should be held to the same high [flawed] standards, and ALL children, except those very few with the most extreme handicapping conditions [as judged by ignorant and callous non-experts] must be judged by the same [flawed] “rigorous” tests, what is the point of spending exorbitant amounts of money “educating” those with no hope of achieving proficiency on said tests? Well, the point is that ALL children, including those living with any of the many and varied handicapping conditions, are precious human beings who need and deserve the education that is planned for them by professionals in the many and various fields of special education, who have been trained and are experienced in assessing their unique strengths and needs (and interests), and in planning educational experiences that meet those needs. Standardization/high stakes testing and “personalization” and high expectations for ALL have been the Trojan horses ushering in the demise of truly individualized educational interventions for students with diagnosable handicapping conditions.This judge’s ignorant and callous decision must not be allowed to turn back the clock on the strides made for special needs students since 1975.
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some parents are relishing the tests: example: “Your child with cerebral palsy makes my child look good on those tests. ” encouraging the department of ed to continue the pursuit of their PARRC tests to find the 1% and fail the others (with tests that are not valid or reliable; then leveling schools based on garbage). The department of ed is purposely pitting parent against parent in this current charter school debate. The other comment I get when I go door to door is (this one from a retired policeman) : “why do the cities want that money? they will just give it to the immigrants”. (this is an actual statement from Sept 27 on Forest St ) If retired police men voice this , how many of the current police officers hold this view about minorities? On a cable tv discussion of roads, bridges and tunnels the woman featured on the 1/2 hour show said “we wouldn’t have infrastructure problems if there weren’t so many immigrants”. I copied her statement and sent it to the Civil Engineers who are studying the infrastructure issues in my state.
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This is a comment by Jon at the Tufts U. newsletter. “When a High Severity disabled student wins a charter lottery seat, the charter school will reconvene the IEP meeting within 2 days, with all stakeholders including the sending school district. The charter school recommends a “private placement” which would come out of the sending district’s budget. The sending district doesn’t want to pay for private placement, so they say “No” we offer that program.” If the meeting is on Wednesday, the kid will find themselves back in BPS by Friday! DESE allows charter schools to do this!
What I’ve come to realize is that many people outside the school system do
not understand what is going on in urban schools. Many suburban schools and towns send their high severity disabled students outside to private placements or collaboratives. That students’ test scores don’t effect [sic] the sending school or district’s test scores. In Boston, and other large urban cities, we educate students with moderate and high severity disabilities in programs, in-house, in traditional school buildings. These are students who will never pass MCAS!
If a high severity program is assigned to a school, that schools PPI level will drop before a student walks in the door, and the districts PPI level is determined by the lowest performing school in the district. This is why you will see urban SWD programs moving around to various city schools, sometimes every year, under parent protest that their child needs continuity. It is not that the district is trying to accommodate or decrease the student’s transportation time or that the program is moving closer to where these students live. These programs are being strategically moved into traditional schools that can stand the hit! This is all a sham and at this point I’ve come to believe it is intentional!
Don’t Be Hoodwinked! Vote NO on 2! KEEP THE CAP!
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We have replaced democracy with cynicism and elitism. Someone once said, “You can judge a society by how it treats its frailest members.” We clearly put money at the top of the list, not individual rights. The worthy few are entitled to our resources. Everyone else can be ignored, unless, of course, we can find a way to make money off them.
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As I have said more than once, test scores are the weapon of choice in the effort to make schools, teachers, and students scapegoats for a host of problems. The moral posturing about wanting to help all students succeed is not backed by policies, practices, and now judicial decisions that favor this end. Nor is it backed by the support one my hope from citizens who are unconcerned about other peoples children, or if concerned, most often as the cause of problems. To make matters worse, the definition of “success” is passing muster on standardized tests, the definition of effective teaching is having students “exceed expectations” on those tests. Of course, the tests are designed with scores reported in the manner of a bell curve. Under these circumstances, there is not much hope for a win-win for special education students.
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If this judge’s thinking stands, who then become judge, jury and decider of children to be “too profoundly disabled to get any benefit from an elementary or secondary school education”? In Texas, for example, that decision might legalize the eight percent cap on special ed students.
If I was a school age child of five or more in this judge’s world, I might have ended up on that list of children judged to be profoundly disabled, because when I was seven back in the early 1950s, my mother was told by alleged experts in K-12 administration in the district where I was enrolled that I was too retarded to learn to read and write.
My mother refused to accept that verdict by those alleged experts and turned to my classroom teacher for advice and followed that advice with a few painful adjustment for the child me. If my mother had listened to the alleged experts who judged me to be too profoundly disabled to get any benefit from a K-12 education, I’d be illiterate today and wouldn’t be writing this comment.
My brother was 12 years older than me and he’d had the same verdict when he was in the early grades, but my mother did nothing for him. She accepted that verdict from the jury of alleged education experts, and my brother grew up illiterate, lived in poverty all of his life, spent 15 years of his life in prison, and died illiterate, a broken man, at 64, with seven children who are today mostly just like their father. My brother is the perfect example, a victim, of the conservative, GOP, Trumped up version of the programed, poverty to prison pipeline.
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