Trouble for Special Ed in Puerto Rico

n The Politics of Autism, I write about special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

At Bloomberg, John O'Neil  and Michael Elsen-Rooney report that Hurricane Maria worsened an already-bad situation for special education in Puerto Rico.  Many people are leaving the island, and schools are closing.

Puerto Rico has been operating under a court order to improve special education for 37 years. As of last year, 33.4 percent of public school students in the commonwealth are enrolled in such programs, compared with a national average of 13 percent in 2015, the last year for which there are figures. But while more numerous, Puerto Rico’s special education students fare far worse. Some 93 percent of them scored below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test—nationally, that figure was 51 percent.

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[Puerto Rico's education secretary Julia] Keleher said Puerto Rico’s special education program produces “terrible” results. Almost four decades ago, a judge made a similar observation in a ruling that the commonwealth had failed to meet its constitutional obligations to disabled students.

When the lawsuit was filed in 1980, only 3.9 percent of Puerto Rico’s students were classified as eligible for special education, compared with a national average of around 10 percent at the time. Keleher credits the lawsuit, begun just five years after she was born, with having forced the department to identify more students with disabilities. But she added that the current percentage of students designated as needing special education, more than eight times that of 1980, is “off the rails.”

Pressure from the lawsuit may have led educators to over-enroll, she said. Students were classified as being suitable for special education without sufficient screening. It was an impulse to err “on the side of, ‘Let me just help you, because we don’t want to be accused of not helping,’ ” Keleher said.

 There are other theories. Joyce Davila, the founder of Puerto Rico’s Autism Alliance, thinks the current 33 percent figure may be accurate—reflecting the high level of disability that stems from the island’s poverty. Susan Therriault, a managing researcher with the American Institutes of Research who has worked in Puerto Rico, said the high percentage may reflect the large number of students enrolled in private schools, some of which she claimed have a reputation for being reluctant to admit students with disabilities. As a result, an artificially large contingent of kids with special needs are left in public schools.

Special Education In Puerto Rico

In The Politics of Autism, I write about special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Kyra Gurney reports at The Miami Herald:

It was the second day of the new school year in Puerto Rico, but 7-year-old Angel Torres wasn’t in class. He was at a physical therapy session, struggling once again to stand on his own, when the boy’s therapist asked his mom how school was going.

“Bad. Terrible,” Brenda López said, frustration spilling out. “The classroom isn’t suitable for him.”

A year after Hurricane Maria changed almost everything on the island, hundreds of parents like López were left struggling to find classrooms, teachers and therapists for their children with autism, Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. What had been a daunting task before the storm — finding a place where their special needs children could thrive — had become vastly harder afterward, as the government shuttered more than 250 schools and the education department scrambled to relocate students and staff. The Department of Education said in late August that it still needed to fill 132 vacancies for special education teachers. And that meant some kids like Angel, who has cerebral palsy and cannot walk on his own or talk, were left in limbo.

Due Process

The Government Accountability Office has a new report, "Special Education: Improved Performance Measures Could Enhance Oversight of Dispute Resolution." The executive summary:

From 2004 through 2012, the number of due process hearings—a formal dispute resolution method and a key indicator of serious disputes between parents and school districts under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)— substantially decreased nationwide as a result of steep declines in New York, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. Officials in these locations largely attributed these declines to greater use of mediation and resolution meetings—methods that IDEA requires states to implement. Despite the declines, officials in these locations said that higher rates of hearings persisted because of disputes over private school placements or special education services. GAO did not find noteworthy trends in the use of other IDEA dispute resolution methods, including state complaints, mediation, and resolution meetings. States and territories reported on GAO’s survey that they used mediation, resolution meetings, and other methods they voluntarily implemented to facilitate early resolution of disputes and to avoid potentially adversarial due process hearings.

States, territories, and other stakeholders generally reported on GAO’s survey or in interviews that alternative methods are important to resolving disputes earlier. Some stakeholders cited the potential of these methods to improve communication and trust between parents and educators. Some state officials said that a lack of public awareness about the methods they have voluntarily implemented was a challenge to expanding their use, but they were addressing this with various kinds of outreach, such as disseminating information through parent organizations.

The Department of Education (Education) uses several measures to assess states’ performance on dispute resolution but lacks complete information on timeliness and comparable data on parental involvement. Education requires all states to report the number of due process hearing decisions that were made within 45 days or were extended; however, it does not direct states to report the total amount of time that extensions add to due process hearing decisions. Similarly, Education collects data from states on parental involvement—a key to dispute prevention—but does not require consistent collection and reporting, so the data are not comparable nationwide. Leading performance measurement practices state that successful performance measures should be clearly stated and provide unambiguous information. Without more transparent timeliness data and comparable parental involvement data, Education cannot effectively target its oversight of states’ dispute resolution activities.

A previous post noted that the Bloomberg administration beefed up its special-education legal team to defeat parents seeking private placements for their kids.  Perhaps the decline in New York reflects hardball legal tactics that discourage parents from going to due process.