Gifts Special Needs and Issues - Special Ed: What's Going On?

In the 20-year period between 1980 and 2000, children with disabilities increased at a rate more than five times faster than the population of children aged 0 to 19. The graphic shows major types of disabilities (in thousands) while the table shows the growth rates. In gross numbers, 4.1 million children were enrolled in federally-supported special education programs in the 1980-81 school year, 6.2 million in the 1999-00 school year, an increase of nearly 50%, growing at a rate of 2.1% a year. The leading category is "Specific learning disabilities," which grew at a rate 10 times as fast as school age children. We shall devote a special panel to that subject. Here the aim will be to start sorting out this phenomenon and see what's going on. Is something wrong with our children? With our educational

	Overall Growth Rate -%	Annual Growth Rate -%	Number of Years Measured
Total population of children 0 to 19	9.1	0.4	20
All disabilities of children 0 to 21	49.5	2.1	20
Specific learning disabilities	93.8	3.5	20
Speech or language impairments	-7.5	-0.4	20
Mental retardation	-27.7	-1.7	20
Serious emotional disturbance	35.2	1.6	20
Hearing impairments	-10.1	-0.6	20
Orthopedic impairments	22.4	1.1	20
Other health impairments	158.2	5.1	20
Visual impairments	-16.1	-0.9	20
Multiple disabilities	63.2	2.6	20
Deaf-blindness	-33.3	-2.1	20
Autism and traumatic brain injury	1416.3	40.5	9
Developmental delay	375.0	117.9	3

system? Are we better at diagnosing? Or are these results some combination of multiple factors? That's the usual explanation.

Focus on this issue at the national level began with the passage of the All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, since 1990 called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The act itself appears to have been a response to satisfy, on the one hand, civil rights advocates fighting to end the segregation and exclusion of children with disabilities and, on the other, parents who argued that children's problems in achieving academic standards were caused by "learning disabilities"; these came to be defined in medical terms requiring special interventions. The federal role was justified using both civil rights and education goals. Since 1975, special education has thus become federalized, with partial federal funding.

Specific learning disabilities initially ranked third among the top five categories. They reached top rank five years into the act, and commanded nearly 46% of the cases by the 1999-2000 school year, as shown in the table above. This one cluster of disabilities largely accounts for the significant growth in cases in the history of this phenomenon.

What are these specific learning disabilities? There are seven. A child is judged to have normal intelligence but fails to achieve at the expected level in speaking, listening, writing, reading, reading comprehension, mathematical calculation, and mathematical reasoning. The definition thus is very broad. Classifying children as "learning disabled" is therefore relatively subjective. We shall discuss LD in more detail in the next panel.

Notice on the first table, one page back, that growth rates in disabilities that are most subject to direct measurement have had negative or low growth rates — speech impairment, mental retardation, hearing impairments, orthopedic impairments, visual impairments, and deafness/blindness. These seemingly reflect the efficacy of interventions. Disabilities more difficult to measure have grown: specific learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, other health impairments, multiple disabilities, and, in recent years, rather astronomical increases in autism and "developmental delay."

We continue this discussion, under the specific rubric of learning disabilities on the next panel.

	Number of students (000)			Percent of students
	76-77	80-81	99-00	76-77	80-81	99-00
Specific learning disabilities	796	1,462	2,834	21.6	35.3	45.7
Speech/language impairment	1,302	1,168	1,080	35.3	28.2	17.4
Mental retardation	959	830	600	26.0	20.0	9.7
Serious emotional disturbance	283	347	469	7.7	8.4	7.6
Sources: National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education. Digest of Education Statistics, 1992 and U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, various years, and unpublished tabulations; and National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data survey. April 2001. Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, Chester E. Finn, Andrew J. Rotterham, and Charles R. Hokanson, editors, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, May 2001.