The Associated Press has an article entitled More children in special education.
Special education enrollment grew by more than one-third over the decade ending with the 2003-04 school year and at a rate more than eight times that of overall public school enrollment, an annual survey of children’s well being in Indiana reveals. . . . More than a third of those students, 63,093, had learning disabilities, an increase of more than 25 percent over the decade that began in 1994-95; the number of those with communication disorders rose 16 percent to 48,868; students with mental disabilities rose 8 percent to nearly 23,000; and the number of those with autism increased more than fivefold to 5,427.
The article suggests that this increase is because we’re better at detecting kids’ special education needs. I’m no expert, but I have concerns that our schools “over-diagnose” kids and give them special education labels accordingly. I am also concerned that this has implications for how we fund schools. Special needs children, whether diagnosed or not, are more expensive to educate than the average student. Our current system effectively has average students “subsidizing” special needs children. The more we move to a “dollars-follow-the-child” funding system, the more we are undermining that subsidy and are short-changing the schools with harder to educate children.
I’m not necessarily convinced that the subsidy approach is or is not the best policy choice, but if our policy makers decide to implement a dollars-follow-the-child approach, they need to address the subsidy issue.
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