Special Education Funding Increasing, but Districts Still Struggling
SPECIAL ED FUNDING
The Keene Sentinel
Lauren Katims
Boston University Washington News Service
12-14-06
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 —Even though Congress has more than doubled federal funding for special education and has altered funding allocation formulas over the last six years, local school districts are still struggling to find adequate money.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed three decades ago and reauthorized in 2004, requires states to fully fund the education of all children with mental and physical disabilities. Because the legislation added additional costs to the school systems, the federal government pledged to cover up to 40 percent of those costs.
However, federal funding has never reached beyond 18 percent. Currently, the federal government pays 17 percent of total costs, creating a $10.6 billion shortfall for states and local school districts.
At issue is not only the ongoing task of closing the unfunded mandate but also deciding how to properly spend the money.
For Congress to keep increasing funds, it had to change the formula of how it determines the amount of dollars allocated to each state, according to a report released last year by the American Institutes for Research, a non-profit, non-partisan behavioral and social science research group.
Under the old formula, every new student enrolled in special education generated more money for that state. In the new formula, funds are allocated based on poverty and total enrollment of all students (not just special education) —two factors, according to the report, that are not directly related to special-education enrollment.
With these changes, which took effect in fiscal year 2000, states receive increasingly different amounts of money, based 70 percent on total enrollment and 30 percent on poverty level, said Thomas Parrish, co-author of the report and director of the Center for Special Education Finance at the Institutes. Total funding for special education has increased from a little more than $5 billion in 2000 to around $11 billion today, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
As funds continue to rise, there will be more disparity between states, which could leave those with higher enrollment of severe special-education cases starving for more funds, said Parrish, who added that there is no way to tell which states will have more severe cases.
If Congress reaches full funding, which Parrish said is possible but unlikely, it would then have to reevaluate the way funds are allocated.
But for now, experts agree that the change in formula was a good thing.
“You don’t want to create an incentive to identify kids with special needs,” said Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, an independent non-profit national education policy think tank.
That would encourage over-enrollment with students who may just have slight learning disabilities and don’t need to be placed in a special-education program, Rotherham said, and puts a formula in school districts’ mind: “identify more kids, and you get more money,” he said.
Plus, communities with high poverty are more likely to have more special-education kids, he said. And the higher the total enrollment in school, the higher the chances are of having more special-education students, he added.
The number of students enrolled in special-educations programs in the United States has doubled since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed, to an estimated 6.9 million, or about 11 percent of all students nationwide.
New Hampshire has very low enrollment rates, said Ralph Tilton, program specialist for the Bureau of Special Education in the New Hampshire Department of Education. From 2004 to 2005, the number of special education students went up only 107, from 31,675 to 31,782, making up 15 percent of total students enrolled in public education.
But Tilton said that even though the state has low enrollment, the costs are still high because of inflation: skyrocketing costs of the special education programs, hiring good-quality teachers and the already-high price of education is going up.
The federal funding contribution for New Hampshire for 2007 is about $48 million, a 0.8 percent increase from 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
This year, the state Department of Special Education dispersed $41 million to local districts for special education. But most of the responsibility for funding special education programs falls on the local school districts, said Mary Heath, deputy commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education.
The local districts raise the majority of funding from property taxes, and then make their own budget with that money. But because there are so many districts, there is no overall figure for special education spending in the Granite State.
“Local school districts are spending enormous amounts of their budget on special education,” said Heath.
And the money being spent is only growing, she said. Hence the perceived need for increased federal funding.
“If we had more resources in our state, more federal dollars, we could do more programs,” said Santina Thibedeau, director of special education for the New Hampshire Department of Education.
Outgoing Congressman Charles Bass (R-N.H.) was a long-time advocate for special-education spending and last year he made a failed attempt to make increases in federal special-education money mandatory.
“If we don’t continue to increase funding, the percent that the federal government gives will go down,” he said.
Complicating the issue further, students with disabilities cost more to put through school than do regular students.
According to the National Education Association, the average public school student costs $7,552 per year. A child with disabilities costs $16,921—an extra $9,369. That number has increased about 30 percent over the last 30 years.
Chad Colby, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said that people cannot look at special education funding as a lone issue. They need to look at education and the federal budget as a whole. “There is a finite amount of money, and competing interests,” Colby said.
Some of those competing interests are rising college tuition costs and a large achievement gap between minority students and their peers, he said.
Opponents of increasing special education funds argue that special education expenses are absorbing an excessive portion of the public’s investment in education, and that the money should be spent on other areas of education, like gifted programs.
Critics also said it is not fair for regular and special education students to be in the same classes because then no one gets the attention he or she needs.
Whether special education dollars are taking money away from gifted and regular programs is a hot topic in Tilton’s school board meetings, he said. He would not say which side he thought was correct.
Parrish, from the Center for Special Education Finance, said a change in congressional leadership might just be what special education needs.
During the late 1990s, Republicans were in the forefront of increasing special education funds. Almost every time President Clinton proposed an education initiative, like smaller class sizes and improving after-school programs, Republicans responded by demanding full Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding as the top priority, wrote Rotherham from the Education Sector, in a 2002 report called The Politics of IDEA Funding.
Rotherham also managed education policy activities at the White House and advised Clinton on a wide range of education issues.
He continued, however, writing that “some Republicans were probably motivated less by the policy problems of IDEA finance than a desire to champion some education spending plan as an alternative to the Clinton agenda.”
But he does not put the blame directly on either party.
“There’s places for bipartisan credit, and there’s places for bipartisan blame,” Rotherham said.
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House the Education and the Workforce Committee, wrote in an e-mail that the Republican-controlled Congress has “woefully underfunded” the Individuals with Disabilities Act.
“We will begin to undo the damage done by this past Congress by securing more funding for IDEA and will create a dialogue with special education students, parents and educators,” he wrote.
Steve Forde, spokesman for the Republicans on the committee, said that all congressmen—Democrats and Republicans—have a strong presence of special education teachers, parents and students in their districts.
“It’s one of those issues that straddles both sides,” Forde said. “It’s not even political; all members deal with it equally.”
While Rotherham agreed that the “basic fault lines of special education are not really partisan,” he warned, “it will become political, everything does.”
And just like they did during the Clinton administration, “it’s not unreasonable to think the Republicans will again start to look to special education as a palpable place to put money and say they are for education spending, and as a way to counter what’s going to…be on the Democratic wish list of spending priorities,” Rotherham said.
But he added that there are problems with special education that can’t be fixed by money.
For example, there is a lack of high-quality assessment of students that is adding to the skyrocketing enrollment numbers around the country, he said. Students who cannot read are being placed in special education programs, when all they need is better reading lessons, he said.
But Congress has had a hard time looking beyond dollar signs.
“In the federal government, it’s more of a money matter,” said Catherine Reeves, director of special education in the Keene school district. “It’s not about special education… it’s not about a philosophical issue, it’s about money.”
Rep.-elect Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) said he is a strong advocate of increased special education funds and will continue to fight for more money, but he is not sure how he will tackle the issue yet.
Getting a better understanding of the law is the first thing the Democrats need to do, Rotherham said.
“It’s a very complicated law,” he said, and suggests starting with “getting a handle of what’s happening around the country, and starting to think about what changes are needed the second time around [for the next reauthorization].”
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