The Myth of the Special Education Burden

That schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students is a widely shared but probably false premise.

By Jay P. Greene

The debate already swirling around the upcoming renewal of the major federal law addressing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, draws much of its energy from a widely shared but probably false premise: that schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students. Both the education establishment and IDEA reformers tend to accept this premise, although they draw different conclusions from it. The establishment wants the federal government to cover the costs of special education more fully so that, as these groups see it, public schools will finally have the wherewithal to deliver on the promise of improving the achievement of nondisabled students. Cost-conscious reformers, on the other hand, want the costs of special education contained, figuring that money devoted to general education is likely to yield better results than money devoted to special education.

But what makes everyone think the schools are being inundated by more and more children with learning problems? It's true that the proportion of children in special education has increased significantly since the mid-1970s, when the IDEA began.The percentage of K-12 students identified as needing special education rose from 8.3 percent in 1976-77 to 11.8 percent in 1998-99. But an increase in the percentage of students identified as needing special education does not necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the percentage of students with disabilities, any more than an increase in reports of domestic violence necessarily means there is more domestic violence.Trends in these statistics are sensitive to reporting biases and shifting definitions.

A close examination of different categories of special education enrollments suggests that, while the identification of special education students has increased, the actual number of disabled youngsters has remained approximately steady. Almost the entire increase in special education enrollments since 1976 can be attributed to a rise in one category, called "specific learning disability," which has more than tripled, from 1.8 percent of the student population in 1976-77 to 6 percent in 1998-99. All other categories of special education combined, including mental retardation, serious emotional disturbance, deafness, blindness, autism, and head injury, have actually declined from 6.5 percent to 5.8 percent of the student population...