K-12 Will Always Fail Special Education Students

The problem is not your kid. The problem is the system has exactly one solution to "fix" her, and that solution comes with enormous opportunity cost.

To all my subscribers, I apologize for the long delay between posts. Our family moved out of state at the end of the school year, we keep getting financially suckerpunched, and I struggled with the weight of this topic in particular since it is absolutely fraught in public K12. I hope I’ve done it justice, but I’m sure it will spark some anger. K12 silos teachers — we’re never sure our experience is widespread — so I may be off here, and I expect criticism. I’ll do my best to respond thoughtfully to any and all comments.

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I listened to a young colleague bare her heart just before the end of the school year. She was training to become a Special Education teacher. For now, she’s working as a paraprofessional — a support for a SpEd teacher. She’s one of the better ones I’ve worked with. She told me she now plans to leave the profession.

One of our two Ed Specialists, teachers specially trained to meet the needs of Special Education students, resigned mid-year.

There are many, many children at our school who have special needs. In the 6th grade, over 1/3 of the class of 60 has an IEP (individual education plan) while over 1/5th has a 504 plan. State regulations require us to mainstream all students; there are no special classes and precious little pull-out time for SpEd students.

This paraprofessional works closely with multiple kids. She is disturbed by the protocols she’s required to use to support them. When a student begins a violent outburst, no one is allowed to restrain her. You would think she would be removed from the room. Nope; California-lawyer-world means the other 30 kids are removed — and their lesson suspended — until she stops acting out and she has willingly left the room and the adults have put the room back together.

This para has seen other aides “help” students on tests. She’s watched aides look up SparkNotes on books they haven’t read to help kids answer questions about books the kids haven’t opened.

She sees her Special Ed students fall further and further behind because of extended deadlines for homework and multiple retakes on tests. She sees the frustration of kids doing old work as the rest of the class progresses and the new work piles up. She’s seen students be given the same test, or a version of the same test, over and over again and fail it repeatedly, even with all accommodations applied: the test read to them, color-coded multiple choice options, minimum number of test questions, etc. Meanwhile, her students are stuck working on old material which prevents them from practicing new material — if they’re not already prevented by shortened assignments or time limits on homework prescribed by the IEP.

The problem is as old as humanity: the scarcity of time. There are only so many hours in a day. As all parents and teachers are quick to point out and claim to accept, everyone learns at a different pace. Ideally, a teacher could speed up or slow down instruction for each student based on their skill and knowledge.

But that’s not what public school is set up to do. We have 180 days to get through material paced for students who read at grade level and have enough self-control and focus to sit through class and pay attention for 15-minute bursts then work independently for 15-minutes then switch to another topic and do it again. That’s in elementary school.

Once you get into the middle grades where a student has 5-6 academic courses, most in-class work time disappears — and that’s further reduced by teachers who can’t control classroom behavior. Given the fact that most public school administrators are now unwilling to enforce consequences for poor classroom behavior, even old hands struggle to maintain an effective learning environment.

Even if classrooms were orderly, the more important classroom variable is the teacher. And the teacher — not your kid — is where any failure cascades and affects the whole class.

This same Para saw what happens to teachers in mixed-ability classrooms. She saw teachers devolve from energetic, high-expectations instructors to stressed, flustered tutors flitting from one high-need kid to the next, cutting back assignments, giving out answers, and telling the kids who don’t have IEPs or 504s she’ll get to them when she can.

You see, dear reader, when the teacher maintains high expectations for everyone, any time she has to circulate the room (if she, in fact, does) is spent with the highest need kids. If she neglects them, she’ll hear from both parents and administrators because the IEP has the force of law and admin is terrified of it. Parents in the know wield it like a sword in hopes that it will ensure their child gets the most out of their schooling. Who wouldn’t?

At first, a teacher will spend hours modifying lessons in her off-time, writing out notes for students whose IEP dictates they be provided those notes in advance of lecture, truncating and/or simplifying readings, leveling assignments 4 or 5 different ways to “meet students where they are”, etc.

The para noticed that teachers will make such efforts for a while but eventually give up because the workload is unsustainable. Remember: middle and high school teachers often see upwards of 150 students every day. Often, they teach multiple subjects. Planning lessons entails enormous labor before even thinking about IEP accommodations — not all of which can be universally applied. Yes, there are accommodations that should be universal, but last year I had multiple students with upward of 5 accommodations; one had 14. I am legally required to implement all of these in every lesson, but here’s the crucial, unspoken truth: none of my work will be questioned if the student has an A or B in my class.

This para noticed that at some point, mysteriously, something shifted. Special Education students’ grades would rise. Homework disappeared. Studying became optional. Kids would pass reading quizzes even when she knew they hadn’t read. Study guides that used to be generic topic lists or broad questions (e.g., “Be able to explain how photosynthesis works”) began to mimic the actual test (Photosynthesis is the process of turning ____ into energy). Teachers would give the students — ALL students — the answers to the study guide the day before the test as part of a “review”. In more than a few classes, the study guide could be used during the test.

What was bothering this young para was a patently obvious question she naively asked me: are we actually helping any of these kids learn?

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I know I’m about to wade into a hornet’s nest here, but I’m tired of all the fog of war that exists around Special Education. It’s one of the reasons I’ve found myself at odds with my administrators and Ed Specialists (except the one I mentioned above who quit, who was 100% focused on student learning rather than grades).

I’ll start by conceding that modifications and accommodations are appropriate supports. The problem is they do not scale. Nothing in education does. Schooling might scale, but only when the adults in the system hold students consistently accountable for following academic and behavioral norms — and stop trying to mollify parents who believe their child has no future without straight As.

In a society that can’t even agree on what a girl is, old school explicit instruction is pooh-poohed in favor of supporting students to find “their truth”; nevermind that they can’t read at grade level. Yet, when I switched away from all the “discovery learning” training Ed.D.s were shoving down our throats, I found all my students became more successful, especially the kids with IEPs — and among that group, subgroups of students with ASD and ADHD experienced spectacular growth.

But they didn’t all get As. In fact, they often got Ds. For me, the important takeaway was that their knowledge grew, and as that happened, their rate of rate of growth increased; in other words, learning became easier for them.

This all boils down to time. Most students with IEPs have a problem that may prevent them from processing information in a way that allows them to retain it at the same rate as students who don’t have a diagnosed learning disability though this varies student by student as learning ALWAYS does.

Unfortunately, far too many parents have been led to believe that success in school means an A or B, and that if their students isn’t “successful” there is a failure on the part of the school that an amendment to the IEP can fix.

Here’s the reality:

No amendment is going to fix a damn thing because the kid is succeeding, he’s just not doing it at the same rate as the bulk of the other kids may appear to be succeeding.

And that condition, that “may” in my previous sentence, is where things go terribly awry. Parents don’t know how all the other kids in the class are doing. They don’t see those kids’ struggles. They don’t know the kids who do every stitch of homework and all the readings and ask questions in class (at the risk of looking dumb) and make appointments to come in for extra help at lunch. They also don’t see the GenEd kids who fail spectacularly on tests because they don’t study or check out or have divorced parents or any number of things that can go wrong in adolescence that impact a student’s ability to focus/work.

Parents’ perception that their student with an IEP isn’t getting everything they need to succeed — usually narrowly measured by a cursory glance at an online grade portal — leads to teacher contact. If their child continues to struggle, it can escalate to administrative contact. Administrators are rightly terrified of lawsuits for failure to provide a Free, Appropriate Public Education to all students — especially in poorly-funded charter schools.

The ambiguity of the term “Appropriate” (as well as the word “education”, in my opinion) gives parents huge leverage. They can call frequent, interminable after-school meetings, demand modified assignments, request accommodations that take the teacher disproportionate time to implement, and ultimately, bring lawsuits.

This ambiguity creates unbelievable collateral damage because all the pressure falls on the teacher of record.

And here’s where I really start to piss people off. Buckle up.

Education Specialists, AKA SpEd teachers are some of the most overworked, under-resourced people on the planet. The rafts of paperwork they have to do to meet legal requirements as well as the supports they are supposed to provide to caseloads of 24 on a 1-to-1 basis in a 6-7 period day are near impossible to schedule. Their hearts are usually in the one-on-one work with students but there is little time in the typical middle or high school day to meet with all the kids, let alone assess and remediate areas of weakness. It also assumes that Ed Specialists can remediate in every academic subject; they often lack the training and they certainly don’t have the time to check in with every teacher every day to get it.

So we go the backdoor route to save the Ed Specialist’s sanity: shrink student workloads. Make the work so easy the kid can do it without any support in the same amount of time as a typical student with no learning challenges. Cut tests way back. Allow unlimited retakes. If that doesn’t work, well, let me just say I — like my para friend — have seen a lot of cheating, from aides being tasked with looking up answers on homework assignments, pointing out answers on tests, or doing the heavy lifting on essays and projects.

That’s what happens all too often in the Resource (Special Ed) classroom.

The damage is amplified in classrooms where Special Education students are mainstreamed. The people with the most to lose (students) are. often immeasurably harmed by the person who has the power to control her workload: the teacher.

A teacher has two ways to cope: she can either meet all the accommodations or make the accommodations unnecessary by making her class easier. This binary decision-making upset my para colleague the most. She saw how, over time, the students with the most concerned parents controlled the pace of the class. She saw teachers slow learning for everyone to minimize uncomfortable interactions with parents and the administrators those parents were quick to contact when their child’s overall grade dipped.

This is a powerful change for the teacher with strong reinforcement. The thing is when a teacher slows the class down or lowers her standards for work quality, the kids who are at grade level or above it get even better grades. Their parents never complain. Admin sings the teacher’s praises. It looks like everybody wins.

That is, unless you count the opportunity cost.

If the teacher makes the work easier for the class, which skills do the students at-level miss out on? What about the gifted kids?

If your child receives a grade he knows he didn’t earn, what does he learn?

If the teacher gives the students the answers to the test the day before the test, what does your child learn about studying? How will he learn the most effective ways to study? Will he ever get good at studying?

If the teacher allows retakes of tests, how will your child allocate his time? What will he learn about the scarcity of time? When will he finally learn that lesson?

If the teacher slows the class down and runs out of time to cover the required subject matter, what knowledge will your child never acquire?

If the class progresses to another level the next year that depends largely upon the work done this year, as it does in math, what happens to all the kids that were in a class run along the path of least resistance for the teacher?

What do children learn when their world bends for them? What happens to the kids for whom the world used to bend when they enter a world that no longer will?

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There is nothing wrong with your child.

There is nothing wrong with him because he is an individual. By definition he is unique, different. He is slower in some areas and faster in others. He is more engaged in this subject and less engaged in that one. He needs twenty minutes of one-on-one support to finish this assignment, but this other one was a cakewalk for him.

K-12 presents artificial limits on the time a student has to learn something. There are multiple units in each course of study and only 180 days in the school year. In my experience teaching in California, even gifted students have a tough time really knowing it all by the end of the year. If a teacher slows way down or cuts the curriculum so that everyone can “feel successful”, then entire classes are getting ripped off.

And with that editing of the curriculum, we give all students a false sense of confidence in their abilities. Students knew school was too easy or, at least, that it was easy to game. And, importantly, when they were in that rare on-level, rigorous course taught by an old-school hard-ass with deep content expertise, they respected the teacher more, the class ran more smoothly, and at the end of the year, if they’d fought through it, kids were proud of their work and their progress — at whatever rate it occurred. Most importantly, they were eager to learn more.

When well-meaning (or conflict-avoidant or short-sighted, take your pick) teachers drop grade level expectations or prune curriculum or inflate grades to keep parents, admin, and lawyers at bay, they build a self-reinforcing spiral of lies that leaves ALL students unmoored, ignorant of their history, ignorant of the literature that shines a light on human behavior and their culture, and innumerate. Such knowledge is the foundation of discernment, and discernment is necessary to human survival and flourishing.

In addition, by cheating kids out of the work of learning, the system reinforces the very free-public-school idea that learning is hoop-jumping compliance. The more hoops you make it through, the better your odds are of signing up for $200,000 in student loan debt for a college degree that might get you a job that pays enough to allow you to access more debt so you can buy an overpriced house and spend 15 years waffling about whether or not you can afford to reproduce! Yay!

The school system has been hopelessly corrupted from its original purpose: supporting American children in learning. It does the most damage to the most vulnerable students. Students know how much effort they have to put in. They also know what other kids are expected to do. They also know when they’ve been let off the hook for a quiz, test, or project. They are very, very sensitive to disparate standards and resent the hell out of them, even while taking advantage of them. Many students suffer from learned helplessness that significantly delays adult achievements.

Meanwhile, our culture promotes the idea that everyone should be successful all the time in school because if they don’t feel successful, then they won’t be happy and if they aren’t happy all the time they can’t learn and blah blah blah blah blah. This is an impossible goal and antithetical to human growth, which generally comes with pain.

Then there are the families who have figured out that an IEP or 504 — and the subsidized grading attendant to both due to the incentives in place in public K12 schools — can be purchased through the medical industry. For every kid with a legitimate learning disability, there are two whose parents want a 504 or an IEP because they believe it gives them an edge in college. You can deny this all you want, but I’ve seen the meteoric rise of this practice across multiple campuses in my 20-year career and the co-occurring drop in academic standards tacitly encouraged by administrators to prevent FAPE lawsuits.

And before you go screaming into the internet void that this more or less irrelevant ex-public school teacher is a filthy ableist, understand this: nobody can effectively accommodate 10 or more students when the standard is that everybody should be able to get whatever grade they want in every class. The reason for this isn’t that your kid has a problem. Your kid doesn’t have a problem unless you think being human is a problem. The problem is that we are taking 30-40 different humans, cramming them into one room with poorly qualified leadership, expecting them to learn the same things at the same time with the same level of success in the same 180 hours. It’s not going to happen.

What I’m suggesting, and what I’ll go into more depth on in my next post, is the humane alternative: individually educating your child, i.e., homeschooling. Recognize that an education is as individual as DNA so the people best able to facilitate an education — not schooling, NOT indoctrination — are the people who know (and love) the student best: his family.

Time is the relevant variable for every human. No classroom teacher can pace a class appropriately for each student, probably not even for a majority of students. Instead, they pick a subset of kids, teach them, and pray for the rest, triaging whenever they’re capable. Parents who are knowledgeable about FAPE frequently forget that their child isn’t the only child who may be struggling in the classroom, that the teacher has to cover a lot of curriculum in a year, that many kids in American public schools are way behind in foundational skills, and overwhelmed SpEd departments all too often concede high-teacher-labor accommodations to demanding parents.

Frankly, a public school teacher unwilling to work 80 hour weeks can’t manage this. But you can. You know your kid. You understand her struggles. You can see where she’s struggling. If you can’t see it, you can ask her what’s wrong; she’s way more likely to tell you than me. Together you can pinpoint areas of friction and find a resource that will help her individually and specifically. Sometimes I can manage this, but more often than not, it doesn’t happen in the traditional classroom. We teachers are left with some universal strategies that help all kids. The best teachers implement them consistently, but far too many teachers don’t and, even when they do, they’re often not enough to satisfy parents and keep the heat off admin. In effect, a teacher’s choice is binary: either push kids to figure out how to overcome their difficulties, creating conflict, or lower the bar so nobody struggles, the easier road.

I’ve quit two different schools now for their propensity to lie to kids and their parents and leave teachers holding the bag for their dishonesty. Maybe that makes me “unserious”. All I know is that this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The incentives at play make the easy road the one most traveled because even when there is a lawsuit, teachers and admin experience few to no consequences. That means your kid will always, always get the short end of the stick.

Don’t waste 13 years of your child’s life fighting with a school that doesn’t really care about him. Don’t waste 13 years of your life fighting a system that sees you as an ant screaming up at the tank treads about to crush him.

Just get your family out.

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If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the “Like” button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse schools have become since they graduated. The public school system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.