Is Special Education Worth the Cost?

Is Special Education Worth the Cost?

Or as the saying goes, is the juice worth the squeeze?  Recently a talk show host suggested that the taxpayers were being taken to the cleaners with the high cost of special education and that the results were not worth the investment.  She used as her example of special education costs the per pupil costs for a special education center in Baltimore City.  She then compared their 4-year graduation rate with the graduation rate of other schools, including a high school for which students qualify by exam and grades.

Not sure whether to attack her logic first or her values.   Both are seriously flawed.

Let’s start with logic.   The very fact that these students are in a special school indicates that whatever their disabilities are, they are sufficiently severe that they cannot be accommodated in a general ed school.   This situation is all the more meaningful in an era of least restrictive environment where administrators do whatever they can to educate children with disabilities in a general education environment with plain kids.   When a system places a child in a public separate day school, that child has significant challenges.   Additionally, that school will also offer more robust staffing for related services such as speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and clinical services.   Parent counseling may also be an option.   These services cost money!  This talk show host was clearly logically challenged.   One of her statements was, “I don’t know but I am sure that most of this money is being spent on administration.”.   If she acknowledges that she doesn’t know, how can she be sure!   It is also confusing to me why the magical number of graduating in four years is so important.  Isn’t the goal of a high school education to prepare a student for employment, post-secondary education or both?   So if it takes a year longer to do that isn’t the time spent well worth the investment?  The woman compared apples and grapes and came up with lemons.

Now onto the values issue.   Children with disabilities have the right to a free and appropriate education at public expense.   They have had this right since 1975.   If you disagree with this right, would you send these kids home with nothing but day care like facilities or worse hidden in their homes or into the warehouses that stored them.   Providing children with disabilities an appropriate education is good for the kids and good for our society.   From the point of view of the students, an appropriate education enhances their abilities and helps them to have a self-actualizing life, something we want for ourselves.   From the point of view of society, an appropriate education for people with disabilities can give us tax payers rather than tax users.    The Harbour School’s follow-up graduate survey shows that our students have gone on to good paying jobs with salaries that are taxable as well as providing benefits that would otherwise have to be paid by the taxpayer.   As to the higher cost of an education for a child with disabilities, that is a paper tiger. It costs more to educate a kid in high school than it does to educate a student in elementary school.   It costs more to educate a physician than it does an accountant.  No one is suggesting we make those costs equal, either by increasing one or decreasing the other.

So the question of whether special ed is worth the cost is kind of irrelevant.   The US Congress settled that issue a long time ago and President Gerald Ford agreed.