When Betsy DeVos was interviewed by the Senate Committee that was about to confirm her as Secretary of Education, she seemed never to have heard of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or anything connected to special education. Now that she has been Secretary for several months, Nancy Bailey is worried that she thinks IDEA is a burden and must be cut.
Watch her like a hawk watches his or her prey, she advises, because DeVos seems to want to deregulate special education and defund it.
Her conversation centers around “piled on regulations” in special education. Instead of paying for services, she wants to deregulate, thereby allowing for funding cuts.
This would also destroy IDEA and leave children with disabilities to fend for themselves. It’s stepping backwards to the time when children with disabilities had no rights.
What DeVos Deregulations Mean to Special Education
Policymakers should look at regulations, especially having to do with the enormous amount of paperwork and high-stakes test administration facing general and special education teachers.
But this is not what Betsy is talking about.
Her deregulations will open the door to privatization.
Currently, parents lose their child’s protections under IDEA if they accept voucher money. This makes parents pause when considering a voucher. Betsy DeVos wants to lessen requirements of those protections to push her loosey goosey choice plan.
By killing regulations, Nancy fears, DeVos is setting up special education to be killed.
Be alert. Compassion and responsibility for others are not her strong suits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Illinois is already on the way to defunding special ed, which will now be based on the number of general education students a district has not the special ed population. Huh?
Wow I wonder how they calculate THAT funding formula. Looks like somewhere in the back office they’ve figured out how many SpEd kids there ‘should be’/100… Or maybe (more likely) they’ve decided on a fixed state SpEd budget, & are spreading it (equally?) across the districts. Puts a new face on one-size-fits-all.
I hope parents, teachers and institutions of higher education stand up against any plan to undermine IDEA, a law that protects students with disabilities. It would be wrong for us to accept violating students’ rights to an education. We should not accept going back to the dark ages where the disabled were exploited or ignored. The reason IDEA was created in the first place was to ensure that this vulnerable population received appropriate interventions and instruction.
Very important to protect IDEA. Also important to reform its implementation by states. These days, teachers and administrators and guidance staff waste enormous energies, time, and money on providing accommodations to kids who don’t need them. Most of this time is spent completing mandatory paperwork to cover their tushies. In the last school that I taught at, almost half the students–a general school population–had 504 or IEP plans, and many of the rest were designated as gifted, and this meant an enormous amount of time and paperwork with significant opportunity cost–like not having the time left over to give attention to those kids who actually had issues. Our guidance counselors couldn’t do any guidance counseling because they were too busy filling out paperwork and proctoring standardized tests. Insane.
OMG. Could it be (I hope) that that school was not typical?
My [anecdotal, i.e. personal] experience ’92-2010 was perhaps also atypical. Just thumbnailing it, IEP’s were bout 12-16% of student pop.
It was a moderately wealthy, highly-educated town, supporting 96% of its school budget from hi RE taxes (in NJ so most of our state aid was re-assigned to poorer districts). You definitely had to self-advocate aggressively, but my IEP kids got soup to nuts which boosted them from uncertain college matl to successful college students.
By the time my youngest graduated in 2010 they had added a “bridge” pgm in hisch for the devptlly-delayed, and two yrs later initiated an in-district autistic K/1 classroom w/plans to expand grade by grade (saving much in out-of-district placements).
When you say ‘waste enormous energies time and money on providing accommodations to kids who don’t need them’, it reminds me of my nagging thought at the time… In my ’50’s/ ’60’s public-ed, in a rural Ivy League college town w/ small schools/ classes & excellent teachers & almost-no stdzd-testing my kids would have been fine. There was no ‘norm’: eccentricity & huge learning diffs were par for the course (esp in primary) & plenty of time for 1-on-1 to support those w/learning diffs but good IQ.
My kids by contrast were in a competitive hothouse, so I had to find a way to slow things down for them, & the available way was SpEd. It was going to take (& did) until late hisch for teachers to understand their abilities & teach to them.
Other diffs I notice over the 40-yr gap between my pubsch ed & my kids’: there was a an understanding then that everyone is better in some acad areas than others, w/ that often breaking between math/sci & eng/forlang/history. There was prestige attached to lang/ speech/ articulacy/reading comp, regardless of how fast you could write an essay [& OK if you were bad at math!].
In other words, critical reasoning & the ability to understand deeper concepts & get your point across verbally were noted & credited… Judging from employers’ comments today, these skills are still highly needed & employable. [I could add that my engr husband is still in hi demand post-retirement age because he has those skills on top of the basic STEM background.]
I wasn’t exaggerating. It was crazy. If a kid didn’t know how to spell Wednesday or the difference between capital and capital, it wasn’t because he or she just hadn’t learned this, it was because of a cognitive processing disorder. Smart parents have learned that one option if their kids who don’t fit the Procrustean bed of contemporary K-12 education is to get them a 504 or and IEP and then scream that their child’s not knowing the difference resulted from the teacher’s not properly implementing the plan. It has become a means by which many parents bully teachers into giving their kids a pass, and that’s sad given the intended purpose of these plans. And teachers do this because the ONE MAJOR FACT about their work is that there isn’t enough time to do it properly. Easier to let some things slide, and parents know and exploit this.
I still get the shakes when I think about the amount of time I spent writing IEPs, not to mention the meetings… The idea that some people push for such plans for all students makes me shudder. I know there are teachers, particularly at the elementary level, who sit down with their students to help them make learning goals. That is a valuable process that becomes more difficult once the students are taught by different academic specialists where teachers might have 120+ students. I worked very hard with my special ed students to help them to learn to advocate for themselves. Teaching students to reflect on their own learning and advocate for themselves is an extremely important step for all students to embrace. If not careful, the IEP can become a process that hinders the development of the independence students need to develop as they grow older. You are right that the use of 504 plans can get out of hand though they are much less onerous than IEPs. In the more affluent communities where I taught, some parents used that process to game the system. They wanted their children to still have 504 plans when it came time for high stakes testing particularly in high school (SAT and ACT).
Of course, the real answer to this is the one that deformers don’t want to hear. We need a LOT fewer students per teacher. But the deformer mantra, of course, is that “class size doesn’t matter,” because you can sit prole children down in front of a computer and that is sufficient for them. NO UNDERSTANDING WHATSOEVER that real teaching is transactional, a relationship.
You have nailed it, and Nancy alluded to it in her post as well. There is a tremendous difference between problems with implementation of a program and the need for the program, and the desire to do away with the program because you do not like it.
People–including Congressmen and Senators–have a tendency to want to make matters simpler than they are. Leads to all kinds of horror
Then tutors who were sales clerks and let go because of downsizing can learn about canned programs like Dibels and Ortin-Gillingham (Fed approved) and foist them on those they tutor. This is a “FOR REAL” story.
Yes. This is the truth. Not just the tutors, certified teachers, too. My whole day I’m expected to read from the script of Engage NY, Stevenson, Wilson, LLI, etc. And when I’m not doing that I’m watching kids play a math game on computers where a penguin walks back and forth. All because of… “research based.” That’s why.