What’s Missing from Sarah Palin’s Special Education Speech? Early Education

Today Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President, gave her first major policy address, offering a set of policy proposals to improve the education of children with special needs. As Palin noted in her speech, quality early education programs are particularly important for children with special needs. So federal policy proposals to change or improve special education are relevant to early education.

Palin offered three proposals: Change federal regulations to allow/encourage more states to adopt special education vouchers modeled off of Florida’s McKay Scholarship voucher program for students with disabilities; fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA); and reform special education programs.

Providing vouchers with students who have disabilities, to enable their parents of children with special needs to move to another school when the current public school fails to provide the services they need, sounds like a good idea. But, as Andrew Rotherham and I have written elsewhere, there are a number of problems with such proposals: First, it’s simply not true that vouchers are the only way for children with disabilities to access private school services if they need them. Children with disabilities already have a right to a “Free Appropriate Public Education” (or FAPE)–including publicly funded education at a private school that can provide FAPE if the public schools are unable to do so. And thousands of children with special needs currently attend private schools at public expense. Second, by offering vouchers only to students with special needs, programs like the McKay scholarship create an incentive for parents to seek out disability diagnoses for their children–something that demographic data from the McKay program suggests may be happening. When parents seek out a diagnosis for learning disabilities, or ADHD, or other health impairments for children who don’t actually need the additional services, in order to get a voucher, that places a label on the child, increases the public costs of special education, and reduces resources available for children with more substantial needs. Finally, we have very little information on outcomes for students participating in these programs, so there’s no evidence that they “work” in terms of improving achievement for students with disabilities. Parental choice is important for all children, but particularly so for children with disabilities, and that’s why IDEA gives parents a critical role in the IEP process. Expanding choice for chidlren with disabilities is a valid goal, but in the long run policies like expanding access to charter schools, and building the capacity of charter schools to serve students with special needs, will have a greater impact on increasing meaningful choices for these students.

Palin also suggests that McKay-like proposals would help more children with special needs gain access to appropriate early education services, something we agree is termendously important. But she’s wrong. Under Florida law, children cannot obtain a McKay voucher unless they’ve been enrolled in a Florida public school for at least a year. In contrast, children who have been identified with disabilities and have Individual Family Service Plans under IDEA could enroll directly in a private program if that’s what’s needed to provide them FAPE and what their families want for them.

In contrast to the voucher proposals, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Palin’s proposal to fully fund IDEA. It’s just terribly expensive. IDEA “full funding” is determined by a formula that multiplies the number of children with special needs, by the average per pupil expenditure in the United States, by 40 percent. For fiscal year 2008, fully funding IDEA would cost more than $25 billion dollars–more than double the roughly $11 billion the federal government spent on IDEA Part B grants this year. “Fully funding” IDEA next year would require roughly $15 billion in additional federal education spending–hardly consistent with Sen. McCain’s proposals to freeze domestic spending, and nearly as much as the $18 billion cost of Sen. Barack Obama’s entire early education and K-12 school reform proposals.

We have the most questions, though about Palin’s proposals to reform IDEA. Palin states that “Just as the federal government expects proven results in the progress of other students, we must require results as well in the achievements of students with disabilities.” But NCLB already requires school districts to include students with disabilities in assessments, to report separately on their performance, and to meet performance goals for the achievement of students with disabilities. For children with severe disabilities who can’t take the regular state standards assessment, the law requires alternative or modified assessments.

Palin also mentions that IDEA needs to do more to support children with special needs before school age. We couldn’t agree more. But the federal government already spends $436 million on IDEA programs for infants and toddlers, and another $380 million on IDEA pre-kindergarten programs for children with special needs. These programs are among the major sources of publicly funded pre-k in many states. Do we need to do more to improve the quality of special education programs for children birth through 5? Probably, and that’s one of the reasons we need to rethink what it means to fully fund special education. It’s also one reason why both the federal government and the states should invest more in early education programs for all children–not just those with special eneds.

There are many children, like Trig Palin, who are born with special needs and to whom we have an obligation to provide high-quality special education services that will help them achieve their full potential. But we also know that the majority of children identified with disabilities have less intense needs, such as learning disabilities or ADHD. And in many cases, these children are in special education simply because they did not benefit from high-quality reading instruction, or appropriate support for social-emotional development and self-regulation, in the preschool and early elementary years. High-quality pre-k programs have been demonstrated to reduce rates of special education placement–and in doing so to produce substantial savings for the public education system. Similarly, programs that support scientifically-based reading instructional and appropriate interventions for struggling readers in the early grades, can reduce the need for special education later. Increasing federal investment in high-quality pre-k–not just for children with disabilities, but for all children at risk for poor school performance–must be an important part of any strategy to improve special education, along with implementation of effective reading programs in the early grades.