Organizers of the Paralympics were taken aback by Trump’s response to them. He said he watched for a while, but found them “tough to watch.”
“The games allow athletes with a range of disabilities to compete.”
Does he realize how many people he insulted?
His remarks may have reminded some people of the time he mocked a reporter with disabilities during the 2016 campaign.
States that establish vouchers follow a strategy of putting the camel’s-nose-under-the-tent. They usually begin by offering a voucher for students with disabilities. Then they add a voucher for children who are low-income or a voucher for students in schools with low test scores (to “save poor children from failing schools). Then another, and another, and another until everyone is eligible for a voucher to go to a private or religious school, defunding the state’s public schools since the money follows the child.
But the students with disabilities who use a voucher take a huge risk because they abandon the protection of federal law, for which disabilities groups have worked so long. The General Accountability Office issued this warning in November 2017; now that Trump and DeVos are in charge, don’t expect to see these warnings in the future.
The Education Law Center reports:
GAO REPORT: TAKE A VOUCHER AND FORFEIT SPECIAL EDUCATION RIGHTS
By Jessica Levin
Over half of the state programs providing vouchers for private schools are targeted to students with disabilities, and proposals for new or expanded voucher programs continue to be introduced in state legislatures across the country.
Given the growth of vouchers for students with disabilities, a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) about the impact of vouchers on special education rights is alarming. The report, Private School Choice: Federal Actions Needed to Ensure Parents Are Notified About Changes in Rights for Students with Disabilities, issued in November 2017, found the availability and accuracy of information provided by states to parents seriously lacking. Parents are often not informed that special education rights are drastically diminished when students with disabilities use vouchers to attend private school.
Students with disabilities enrolled in public school or placed in a private school by a local education agency have robust rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The centerpiece of the federal law is the right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) with the individualized programs and services students need to access a FAPE.
In sharp contrast, students “parentally placed” in a private school – including those using vouchers – lose their right to FAPE and to receive some or all of the special education and related services public schools are legally obligated to provide under IDEA. These children also lose the right to be educated with their nondisabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate (the “least restrictive environment” requirement) and forfeit IDEA’s procedural protections against inappropriate discipline.
In enacting voucher programs, states do little or nothing to inform parents of the legal ramifications of using vouchers. Shockingly, the GAO report concluded that “in school year 2016-17, 83 percent of students enrolled in a [voucher] program designed specifically for students with disabilities were in a program that provided either no information about changes in IDEA rights or provided information that [the U.S. Department of] Education confirmed contained inaccuracies about these changes.”
Additionally, the GAO’s review of a national sample of the websites of private schools participating in voucher programs found that no more than half even mentioned students with disabilities. Fewer than a quarter of the websites for private schools participating in voucher programs designed specifically for students with disabilities provided information on key special education issues, such as the types of disabilities served by the schools and whether teachers were trained to work with students with disabilities.
The GAO report recommends federal action. First, Congress should consider requiring states to notify parents of the changes in federal special education rights when parents place their children in a private school. The IDEA does not currently require such notice, and the U.S. Department of Education (USED) has taken the position that it has no authority to do so. Second, USED should review the information states are currently providing on changes to legal rights and protections for students in voucher programs and work with states to correct inaccuracies.
The GAO report is a stark reminder that students with disabilities forfeit many legal rights and protections when they use a voucher for private school. In highlighting the serious lack of notice about these changes, the report provides compelling support for the case against authorizing or expanding voucher programs for students with disabilities. States should not be spending scarce public dollars on voucher programs that not only fail to serve students with disabilities, but also undermine their legal rights.
Jessica Levin, Esq., is an attorney at Education Law Center. ELC is a partner in Voucher Watch with Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles.
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
This article by Gus Garcia-Roberts won a prestigious journalism award for exposing the disgraceful conditions in schools that receive McKay scholarships for special education students in Florida.
This is the voucher program that Betsy DeVos hailed as a national model when she testified at her confirmation hearings a year ago.
“While the state played the role of the blind sugar daddy, here is what went on at South Florida Prep, according to parents, students, teachers, and public records: Two hundred students were crammed into ever-changing school locations, including a dingy strip-mall space above a liquor store and down the hall from an Asian massage parlor. Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the “campus” as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks.
“The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students might consist of watching a VHS tape of a 1976 Laurence Fishburne blaxploitation flick — Cornbread, Earl and Me — and then summarizing the plot. In one class session, a middle school teacher recommended putting “mother nature” — a woman’s period — into spaghetti sauce to keep a husband under thumb. “We had no materials,” says Nicolas Norris, who taught music despite the lack of a single instrument. “There were no teacher edition books. There was no curriculum.”
“In May 2009, two vanloads of South Florida Prep kids were on the way back from a field trip to Orlando when one of the vehicles flipped along Florida’s Turnpike. A teacher and an 18-year-old senior were killed. Turns out another student, age 17 and possessing only a learner’s permit, was behind the wheel and had fallen asleep. The families of the deceased and an insurance company are suing Brown for negligence.
“Meanwhile, Brown openly used a form of corporal punishment that has been banned in Miami-Dade and Broward schools for three decades. Four former students and the music teacher Norris recall that the principal frequently paddled students for misbehaving. In a complaint filed with the DOE in April 2009, one parent rushed to the school to stop Brown from taking a paddle to her son’s behind.
“He said that maybe if we niggas would beat our kids in the first place, he wouldn’t have to,” the mother wrote of Brown. “He then proceeded to tell me that he is not governed by Florida school laws.”
“He wasn’t far off. The DOE couldn’t remove South Florida Prep from the McKay program, says agency spokesperson Deborah Higgins, “based on the school’s disciplinary policies and procedures.”
“It’s like a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don’t regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going.
“For optimal results, do this in Florida, America’s fraud capital.
“Now watch all the different ways the flimflam men scramble for the cash.
“Once a niche scholarship fund, the McKay program has boomed exponentially in the 12 years since it was introduced under Gov. Jeb Bush, with $148.6 million handed out in the past 12 months, a 38 percent increase from just more than five years ago.
“There are 1,013 schools — 65 percent of them religious — collecting McKay vouchers from 22,198 children at an average of $7,144 per year.
“The lion’s share of that pot ends up in South Florida. Miami-Dade received $31.8 million, more than any other county in the state, and Broward was second with $18.3 million. Palm Beach ranked fifth, with its schools collecting $6.9 million.
“But there’s virtually no oversight. According to one former DOE investigator, who claimed his office was stymied by trickle-down gubernatorial politics, the agency failed to uncover “even a significant fraction” of the McKay crime that was occurring.
“Administrators who have received funding include criminals convicted of cocaine dealing, kidnapping, witness tampering, and burglary.
“Even in investigations where fraud, including forgery and stealing student information to bolster enrollment, is proven, arrests are rare. The thieves are usually allowed to simply repay the stolen loot in installments — or at least promise to — and continue to accept McKay payments.
“There is no accreditation requirement for McKay schools. And without curriculum regulations, the DOE can’t yank back its money if students are discovered to be spending their days filling out workbooks, watching B-movies, or frolicking in the park. In one “business management” class, students shook cans for coins on street corners.”
This article is a must-read. Voucher proponent Jay Greene of the Walton-funded University of Arkansas belittled the story and said it was published in a worthless tabloid. But the article subsequently won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for 2012, and Garcia-Roberts went on to become an investigative journalist at Long Island’s Newsday and now the Los Angeles Times.
Since the article’s publication, Florida has done nothing to correct the abuse of children with disabilities in the McKay program.
You see, children in public schools have rights. When they leave public schools, they abandon their rights.
The New Hampshire House took a first step towards adopting vouchers, despite the absence of evidence that vouchers are good for children or education.
“The bill, which is supported by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, would provide parents with the state’s basic per-pupil grant of roughly $3,000 to be used for private school tuition or home schooling. The House voted 184-162 Wednesday to send it on to its Finance Committee.
“Opponents raised numerous objections, including arguing that public money shouldn’t go to private schools that can discriminate against children with disabilities. Supporters argued it would allow parents to send children, including those with disabilities, to schools that better meet their special needs.”
Students with disabilities are protected by federal law in public schools. They abandon their federal protection when they enroll in private schools.
Recent studies, even those funded by conservatives and the U.S. Department of Education, find that students who use vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools. After a few years, the scores are the same, but that’s because the weakest students have returned to public schools. Vouchers do not provide access to better education; the private schools that accept vouchers are not as good as public schools. The best private schools don’t accept vouchers.
In an article by veteran journalist Heather Vogell, ProPublica asks hard questions about alternative schools.
The word “alternative” implies a choice. But in an era when the freedom to pick your school is trumpeted by advocates and politicians, students don’t choose the alternative schools to which districts send them for breaking the rules: They’re sentenced to them. Of 39 state education departments that responded to a ProPublica survey last year, 29, or about three-quarters, said school districts could transfer students involuntarily to alternative programs for disciplinary reasons…
Thousands of students are involuntarily reassigned to these schools each year, often for a seemingly minor offense, and never get back on track, a ProPublica investigation has found. Alternative schools are often located in crumbling buildings or trailers, with classes taught largely by computers and little in the way of counseling services or extracurricular activities.
The forced placements have persisted even though the Obama administration in 2014 told schools they should suspend, expel or transfer students to alternative schools only as a last resort — and warned them that they risked a federal civil rights investigation if their disciplinary actions reflected discrimination based on race. Federal data shows that black and Hispanic students are often punished more than white students for similar violations.
Moreover, despite legal protections afforded students with disabilities, a disproportionate number of those exiled in some districts have special education plans…
Now, the Trump administration is being pressed to view such removals more favorably. In November, a group of teachers and conservative education advocates met with aides to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to express concerns about the 2014 guidance. The group said the Obama-era approach made schools less safe, allowing disruptive students to hijack classrooms.
That meeting has raised fears among civil rights advocates that the Trump administration will rescind the guidance, prompting schools to increase the number of children excluded from regular classrooms. “We’re deeply concerned this administration is not committed to protecting the civil rights of students,” says Elizabeth Olsson, senior policy associate for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She cited reports that DeVos may scrap a rule aimed at preventing schools from unnecessarily placing minority students in special education.
A federal education spokesman on Nov. 29 declined to comment on the issue.
To be sure, many students are sent to alternative schools for major offenses involving drugs, alcohol, weapons or violence. But others are forced to go for reasons that include rudeness, using their cellphones at inappropriate times, or — in about half of the states ProPublica surveyed — nondisciplinary problems such as bad grades. In states like Florida, students who fall academically have been pushed to transfer to alternative schools as a way to game the state’s accountability system. Pennsylvania law lets school officials relegate students to that state’s Alternative Education for Disruptive Youth program for showing “disregard for school authority.” In Aiken, about 40 percent of transfers in 2014-2015, the year Logan was reassigned, were for lesser offenses, including 13 for using profanity, 27 for truancy, 28 for not following an adult’s instructions and 18 for showing disrespect.
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a blistering report about the charter industry in Arizona, claiming that charters choose their students, instead of the other way around.
The title of the report is Schools Choosing Students: How Arizona Charter Schools Engage in Illegal and Exclusionary Student Enrollment Practices and How It Should Be Fixed
The 26-page report begins:
In the 1990s, Arizona became one of the nation’s rst adopters of charter schools. The vision was to give parents more academic choices for their children and to provide learning environments more tailored to students’ individual needs. In many cases, however, Arizona’s charter school program has had the opposite result: Charter schools are choosing students who fit their mold.
Indeed, more than two decades after charter schools emerged in Arizona, admission policies and procedures at many of the state’s charter schools unlawfully exclude some students or create barriers to their enrollment. Many schools have been able to get away with exclusionary practices for years without accountability.
Though charter schools operate independently, they are part of Arizona’s
public education system and use taxpayer funds. As such, they are required to “enroll
all eligible pupils who submit a timely application.”1 If more students apply than
can be accommodated, schools can randomly select students through a lottery system.2
Arizona charter schools are also forbidden from discriminating against students on the basis of “ethnicity, national origin, gender, income level, disabling condition, proficiency in the English language or athletic ability.”3
But an analysis of Arizona charter schools’ enrollment materials shows many schools have policies and procedures that are clearly illegal or exclusionary. Speci cally, out of the 471 Arizona charter schools that were analyzed,
at least 262, or 56 percent, have policies that are clear violations of the law or that may discourage the enrollment of certain students.
Do you think that Betsy DeVos cares? Will the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take action to reduce and eliminate illegal discrimination?
This comes from NYSAPE (New York State Allies for Public Education):
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 15, 2017
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
Bonnie Buckley (631) 513-8976 bonnief.buckley@gmail.com
NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE)
Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All (MPDA)
Parents Around the State Applaud the Board of Regents’ Precedent-Setting Diploma Expansion
On Monday, the NYS Board of Regents voted to create an additional alternate pathway to graduation for students who receive special education services. In doing so, the Board of Regents broke through the decades-old policy that tied all New York State high school diplomas to high-stakes exit exams. If the measure is formally adopted, these students who struggle with academic exams will be able to earn a diploma as long as they have completed the required amount of Regents-level coursework and earned the Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS) Commencement credential. Furthermore, students who should have graduated in 2015, 2016, or 2017 and have already exited high school will now have the option to re-enroll to meet the new requirements and earn a local diploma.
“As a New York State resident and parent, I am confident that these students will now be recognized as having ‘earned’ their high school diploma and be viewed as the assets to our State that they are,” commented Betty Pilnik, Long Island public school parent and co-founder of Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All. “These students have worked twice as hard as some of their peers and now will be able to join the workforce or the military or to further their education–options that were unavailable to them before the Board of Regents and NYSED acknowledged that these students deserve the opportunity to be contributing, productive members of society.”
Suzanne Coyle, Rockland County public school parent and an employment specialist concurred, “This is a significant and validating decision by the Board of Regents. Students who have exited high school with a CDOS, but no diploma, have faced a world of challenges and severe limitations with regard to their employment opportunities, higher education, entrance into any branch of the US military, and funding for further vocational training. They’ve been denied, but this will be transformative.”
Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 45,000 students with disabilities did not graduate despite multiple attempts to pass multiple Regents exams. The Board of Regents had implemented various waivers and safety nets, including 2016’s “Superintendent’s Determination,” to aid some of those students, but according to Christine Zirkelbach, Founder of NY Stop Grad High Stakes Testing, “Only 417 students of those 45,000 students were able to graduate with a Superintendent’s Determination as it was originally established. With this revision, NYSED has held to students taking and passing Regents-level curriculum, a full 22 credits, and has added the vigorous work required to earn a CDOS as a pathway to a meaningful diploma for students with an IEP. This is not lowering standards; this is substituting a hands-on practical assessment for a written exam.”
New York is one of only a few states that still requires high school exit exams, even when students have passed all their courses. While parents see the Board of Regents vote as a major step forward, we and our organizations will continue to advocate for the complete elimination of exit exams.
“It is a tragedy that so many students with disabilities have spent their entire high school career focused on passing these exams, many to no avail,” remarked Bianca Tanis, Ulster County public school parent, educator and founding member of NYSAPE. This change is an important first step in recognizing that high-stakes exit exams have never been shown to improve postsecondary outcomes for ANY students and that to the contrary, these costly exams exacerbate inequalities and diminish opportunity.”
“The opt out movement has never just been about grades 3-8 high-stakes testing. It is about empowering parents to advocate on behalf of their children. This change reflects that advocacy effort and a research-based, common sense response by our Board of Regents. Child-first policy shifts like these will continue to move New York in the right direction,” echoed Jeanette Deutermann, NYSAPE co-founder and Long Island Opt Out founder.
Lisa Rudley, Westchester County public school parent and another co-founder of NYSAPE, also applauded the vote, but added a note of caution, “We thank the Board of Regents for removing some of the barriers for students who deserve to have a meaningful diploma. This is an important step forward, however the fact that the granting of the diploma ultimately rests with the superintendent means that parents need to be diligent advocates for their children. District-level waivers tend to favor students in districts whose parents are most active; as such it’s important to keep in mind that they can be inequitably applied.”
The public will have 45 days (December 27 through February 12) to comment on the proposed regulations and the state education department can make revisions as necessary after the public comment period has ended.
Bonnie Buckley, Long Island public school parent and co-founder of Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All, knows the value of that civic engagement. “Two and a half years ago this inequity came to my attention when I learned my daughter wouldn’t be able to graduate without Regents exams. With several other parents, we started a grassroots movement and the Facebook page, Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All, to address this inequity. I am profoundly grateful to Chancellor Rosa, the Board of Regents and NYSED for making it possible for children all around the state to move on with their lives. This is a door opening, and we are pleased with this change and are hopeful it is an indication of other changes.”
We will continue to advocate for the removal of high-stakes standardized tests as requirements for earning a New York State high school diploma.
NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition of over 50 parent and educator groups across the state.
Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All is a grassroots parent organization with nearly 6,000 members.
Link: http://www.nysape.org/nysape-mpda-pr-diploma-expansion.html
Rebecca Klein, education editor of Huffington Post, writes here about parents who must struggle to persuade school districts to let their children with disabilities remain with their peers—or move to another district that will include them.
“Just a few decades ago, students with disabilities faced high rates of institutionalization and were rarely included in typical classroom settings. In 1975, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act ― originally called the Education for All Handicapped Children’s Act ― enshrined into law these students’ right to an appropriate public education.
“Part of IDEA’s framework requires parents to advocate hard to get what they see as their children’s needs met. Often, school districts have different ideas about what would best serve a child. Decades later, this is still the case.
“Sometimes teachers lack the best training for dealing with a student’s specific disability. Other times, administrators have low expectations for what these students can achieve.
“While IDEA says students with disabilities should learn in the least restrictive environment ― meaning with non-disabled peers ― parents still often find themselves fighting hard, expensive battles for their child to be included.”
Steven Singer is steamed. He read a “Commentary” by Betsy DeVos in Education Week in which she pretends to be a champion of children with disabilities. You don’t have to have a long memory to remember that she testified at her Senate hearing last year that she was unsure what IDEA is or whether the voucher schools she promotes would be bound by federal law.
Steven remembers. He can’t understand why Education Week allowed her to burnish her image, while ignoring the 72 federal regulations she eliminated that protected students with disabilities.
He begins:
“Meet Betsy DeVos, Champion of Students With Special Needs.
“At least that’s who she’s pretending to be this week.
“The wealthy Republican mega-donor who bought her position as Secretary of Education published an article in the current issue of Education Week called “Commentary: Tolerating Low Expectations for Students With Disabilities Must End.”
“It was almost like she expected us all to forget who she actually is and her own sordid history with these kinds of children.
“Up until now, the billionaire heiress and public school saboteur always put the needs of profitizers and privateers ahead of special needs children.
“During her confirmation hearing, she refused to say whether she would hold private, parochial and charter schools receiving tax dollars to the same standard as public schools in regard to how they treat special education students. Once on the job, she rescinded 72 federal guidelines that had protected special education students.
“But now she’s coming off like a special education advocate!
“What a turnaround!
“It’s almost like David Duke coming out in favor of civil rights! Or Roy Moore coming out in favor of protecting young girls from pedophiles! Or Donald Trump coming out in favor of protecting women from crotch grabbing!”
This article was published a year ago. It remains timely. It tells the story of the charter schools (one in particular) that bankrupted one of Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts.
While the public schools have been bankrupted and taken over by a receiver, the owner of the biggest charter became very rich selling goods and services to his charter corporation. He is active in Republican politics. He was on Governor Tom Corbett’s transition team for education. Governor Wolf has approached him with care. His charter has fattened on special education payments, which were $40,000 per student, even for those with the mildest speech disabilities, leaving the most disabled students to the bankrupt public schools.
Governor Wolf was able to negotiate a lowering of the special education payment to $27,000.
To put some noteworthy flaws of Pennsylvania’s charter law in stark relief, one need look no further than the Chester-Upland School District, a desperately poor enclave in generally well-off Delaware County.
As the state’s most distressed district, it is so unable to meet its students’ needs that it is under the control of a receiver.
Nearly half of the students in Chester Upland attend charter schools, and 46 percent of its budget goes to charter payments. Most charter students there are enrolled in the Chester Community Charter School (CCCS). The K-8 school has 2,900 students, nearly as many as the 3,300 K-12 students in the district. The state’s largest brick-and-mortar charter by far, CCCS was founded and is operated for profit by a company owned by businessman Vahan Gureghian, a major supporter of former Gov. Tom Corbett and other Republican candidates and causes.
CCCS and its management company, Charter School Management Inc., have built a reputation for taking maximum advantage of the financial opportunities built into the charter school law, while strenuously resisting any public scrutiny about where that money goes.
Until court-sanctioned action that lowered payments this year, the state’s special-education funding formula required Chester-Upland to send its charters more than $40,000 for every special education student. How much of that actually went to student services is not known, in part because the charter law does not require CCCS or any other charter to make that information public.
What is known, however, is that CCCS spends a healthy chunk of its budget on fees paid to Gureghian’s management company. Gureghian won’t open his books, but about 10 years ago, the school spent an estimated 40 percent of its revenue on management, as opposed to the state average for charters of about 16 percent.
What is also known is that the Chester Upland district’s payments to CCCS for special education have a profound effect on the district’s budget. “Unfair and excessive special education payments are bankrupting the District,” wrote Chester Upland officials in their recent recovery plan. Last summer, Gov. Wolf asked a judge to intervene and bring special education payments more in line with special education expenses.
A hallmark of the CCCS approach is that the school identifies large numbers of students as needing special education, usually in relatively low-cost categories.
For instance, in the 2014-15 school year, more than 27 percent of the special education students were classified as having a “speech and language impairment,” the least expensive classification of disability, which generally requires speech therapy once or twice a week. That is close to twice the state rate of 15.4 percent and more than 11 times the Chester Upland district rate of 2.4 percent for that category.
When the state tried to adjust the formula for special education reimbursements to reflect the level of student needs, charter lobbyists descended to fight it. And nothing changed.
By the way, the owner of the Chester Community Charter School has his mansion in Palm Beach for sale. He dropped the price last May by $5 million. You can pick it up for a mere $64.9 million. Quite the steal, never lived in.
For some reason, the Chester Community Charter School has a high rate of “safety incidents” and suspensions, more than any other school in Delaware County.
Diane Ravitch's blog 