Special education confidential: how schools use the "learning disability" label to cover up their failures.

• Author: Snell, Lisa
• Position: Industry Overview

THE HANDMADE FLASHCARDS were not helping my nephew Clayton. My sister Linda confided: "He's not reading. We practice, but he can't remember the words the next time. He gets frustrated."

Although it seemed overwhelming, Clayton's problem was fairly simple. "If Clayton is reading the word cat," Linda explained, "he just says the letters c, a, t. He doesn't recognize the word." Clayton wasn't connecting the letters to the sounds they represent. Children often are taught the names of letters first, which can make it hard to learn how they're pronounced. For these kids, the letter c has no relationship to the sound k in cat.

Compounding the problem, Clayton's kindergarten teacher was giving him word lists to memorize, failing to recognize that he didn't know the basic letter sounds. She kept sending home new lists even though he hadn't learned the words on the previous ones. It's not surprising that Linda and Clayton were frustrated.

I was worried for Clayton because I know what happens to kids when they don't learn to read. Comprehensive research by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development shows that children who cannot identify word sounds in kindergarten often cannot read by third grade. If Clayton failed to learn the relationship between letters and sounds in kindergarten, chances are he would be assigned to special education by fourth grade, which would spell his doom in the public school system. He probably would never become a proficient reader. Despite attending a solidly middle-class school, rated 7 out of 10 by the state of California, Clayton could easily end up as yet another child labeled "learning disabled" because his school failed to teach him how to read.

This winter Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA),which dispenses $6o billion a year to school districts around the country. While there's no question that IDEA has provided legal protections and services for students with handicaps, it has also created perverse incentives that encourage schools to call kids disabled as a way of attracting more funding and masking instructional failures. Instead of restructuring the program to mitigate these unintended consequences, Congress is set to simply throw more money at the problem.

Disability As an Excuse

Nearly 12 percent of American students in kindergarten through 12th grade are assigned to the special education system. Children with severe disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism, blindness, and deafness, account for only a tenth of these students. The remaining 90 percent are described as suffering from conditions that are less obvious and harder to verify objectively, such as specific learning disability (SLD), speech and language delays, mild mental retardation, and emotional disorders. SLD is the most common label, accounting for more than half of all students covered by IDEA. SLD diagnoses, which have risen by 34 percent since 1991, are the main...