“From its inception [the largest disability category, Specific Learning Disability] has served as a sociological sponge that attempts to wipe up general education’s spills and cleanse its ills.”
—G. Reid Lyon, Jack M. Fletcher, Sally E. Shaywitz and other reading experts1
The Big Lie about students with disabilities is that the great majority of them legally qualify for special education. They don’t. Most don’t even come close.
For one thing, it is simply not true that most students with disabilities are disabled in any true sense of medical or clinical definitions of disability.
For another, even if struggling learners met some indicators of a true disability, most still would not qualify for special education. That is because IDEA requires that struggling learners should not be found eligible for special education unless they received adequate prior instruction in general education. As stated by leading experts, “No person can be defined as learning disabled in the absence of evidence of a lack of adequate response to instruction that is effective with most students. . . .”2
The Big Truth is that a large majority of all students in special education would not need special education if they were taught well in general education. But they aren’t taught well. They don’t receive the extra assistance they need. As a result, general education teachers wind up overwhelmed by too many students in their classes who are too far behind their peers. As a last resort, these students are placed or, more bluntly, “dumped” into special education.
Expediency prevails over the letter and spirit of the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law governing special education. Researchers estimate that between 50 and 75 percent of struggling learners end up unnecessarily (and therefore illegally) in special education.3
And that’s only the beginning of the educational abuse. In special education, their deficiencies get worse not better. So-called “special” education for these students is false advertising that would make the Federal Trade Commission cringe. Students in special education do not get the “specially designed instruction” and other services that the law mandates. They fall deeper in the academic hole, and are more likely to be worse off than if they remained in general education.4 The data, summarized in Chapter 3, shows their rock-bottom academic performance.
Moreover, their academic ruin is compounded by the stigma and segregation that they experience in special education. It’s bad enough to feel like a “dummy” in general education. But the stigma is much worse when labeled “special education.” Sometimes other kids overtly taunt. Most times, other kids convey that they think Kenny and Marcus must be really really dumb to need special education.
The stigma is reinforced by the segregation. Most students in special education are not in classes with only special education students. But even when they are included with general education students, educational apartheid is obvious.
School systems try to hide the stigma and segregation beneath the lofty special education principles of “least restrictive environment (LRE)” and “inclusion.” These principles hold that students in special education should be included as much as possible in classroom settings with their non-special education peers. Students in special education are to be placed in separate settings “only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes . . . cannot be achieved satisfactorily.”5
Who can be against such inclusion or mainstreaming, as it is sometimes called? No one should be—unless it fails to deliver what it promises, which is what usually happens. The high-flying purpose of inclusion often crashes on the rocks of classroom realities. There are many models of inclusion, including co-teaching by general education and special education teachers. But the teachers are simply too overloaded with too many students and lack the specialized training to pull it off effectively. That’s why there is so little solid evidence of the effectiveness of inclusion. To the contrary, there is extensive research that inclusion falls far short of its principled goals.6
This chapter details how school systems get away with so many untruths, causing so many struggling learners to be mislabeled as disabled, dumped into special education, and educationally abused.
You could say that the Big Lie began with a medium fib. The first federal law that guaranteed the right of students with disabilities to a “free and appropriate” education was the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHC). Its paramount purpose was unmistakable. At the time of enactment, “more than one million children with disabilities were excluded entirely from the educational system, and more than 50% of all students with disabilities were given only limited access to public schools.”7 These students were predominately students with severe cognitive or physical limitations who, under EAHC, were, for the first time, guaranteed a “free and appropriate education.”
EAHC was a whole new ballgame. Prior to its passage, there was no mandate or entitlement that all children who legally qualified as disabled would be served. Since so little funding was available, little attention was paid to who was technically eligible and who wasn’t.
That changed under EAHC, and not just for students with severe cognitive or physical conditions. Services were guaranteed for students who met a wide variety of disability classifications. And in one major instance—Specific Learning Disability—the definition was politically compromised, vague, and troublesome from the start. Fears of mission creep and exploding costs were voiced. When President Gerald R. Ford signed the EAHC, he predicted that “Unfortunately, this bill promises more than the Federal Government can deliver.”8
That prediction proved accurate, and the worst fears were realized. Twenty-five years later, the co-authors of a 2001 article, “Time to Make Special Education ‘Special’ Again,” captured this phenomenon:
IDEA [the successor to EAHC] has been largely successful in opening up educational opportunities for children with disabilities. Unfortunately, the IDEA also has had some unintended negative consequences. These include the creation of incentives to define an ever-increasing percentage of school-aged children as having disabilities, an enormous redirection of financial resources from regular education to special education, and, perhaps most importantly, the application of an accommodation philosophy to populations better served by prevention or interventions.9
The “prevention or interventions” didn’t materialize. Rather, as shown in the short history that follows, special education, instead of affording truly specialized services to a small number of severely disabled students, became a dysfunctional repository (a/k/a dumping ground) for struggling learners.
It wasn’t that the framers of EAHC and then IDEA didn’t realize what was happening. Over the past 40 years, Congress and school systems nationwide have been locked in a battle over how to limit eligibility for special education. Congress, the cat, has been trying to restrict eligibility to students with severe disabilities that have clear medical and clinical markers. School systems, the mice, have resisted. They are desperate to protect their ability to exploit special education as a lifeline for general education teachers who are drowning because they have too many struggling learners in their classes.
From the 1970s through most of the 1990s, Congress’s attempts to curtail mission creep largely flopped. Just as experts had warned, special education rolls and costs grew exponentially. During those years, the number of students in special education grew a little over 30 percent, while the number of students classified as having a Specific Learning Disability rose over 300 percent.10 State and local school systems—afraid that general education teachers would lose their lifeline—paid no attention to the requirement that struggling learners should only be referred to special education if they received adequate prior instruction in general education.
In the late 1990s, Congress went back to the drawing board. A starting point was recognition that students in special education were capable of doing much better academically than educators thought. A principal purpose of the 1997 amendments to IDEA was to overcome “low expectations” for student achievement and to change the focus of implementation from procedural compliance to improved instruction and student outcomes.11
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, was even more explicit in mandating that students in special education be held to the same high academic standards as their peers, and be given full opportunity to meet the standards. Except for students with severe limitations, they were to take the same state tests as their peers; their test scores were to be separately reported; they were supposed to meet the same “annual yearly progress” targets as all other students; and their instruction was supposed to be based on “scientifically based research.”12
An executive order by President George W. Bush in 2001 summarized the new, higher expectations under NCLB: “It is imperative that special education operate as an integral part of a system that expects high achievement of all children, rather than as a means of avoiding accountability for children who are more challenging to educate or who have fallen behind.”13 (The successor legislation to NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2016, does not alter this basic intent.)
This Congressional action was headed in the right direction, but didn’t go nearly far enough. The changes only focused on research-based instruction for students after they were mislabeled as disabled and placed in special education. Neglected altogether was the desperate need for research-based interventions for struggling learners before they were placed in special education, as Congress had intended all along.
In 2004 Congress finally confronted the problem head on. Amendments that year to IDEA and subsequent regulations significantly changed the way students suspected of having a Specific Learning Disability, the largest category of students in special education, are identified and found eligible for special education. The regulations provided that eligibility should not be determined unless the student has been “provided with learning experiences and instruction appropriate for the child’s age or State-approved grade-level standards” in reading, math and writing. Further, “To ensure that underachievement of a child suspected of having a specific learning disability is not due to lack of appropriate instruction,” the IEP Team must consider “Data that demonstrate that prior to, or as part of, the referral process, the child was provided appropriate instruction in regular education settings, delivered by qualified personnel.”14
Despite this clunky legalese, the meaning was clear: No adequate prior instruction in general education, no Specific Learning Disability eligibility for special education.
The requirement for “appropriate instruction in regular education settings, delivered by qualified personnel” was a prescription for the instructional framework commonly known as “Response to Intervention” (RTI). There was no secret or dispute about what RTI entailed: RTI is the process through which the difficulties of struggling learners should be diagnosed as early as possible, and treated through progressively intense research-based interventions in general education.
Chapter 4 describes RTI in detail and its central role in ending the educational abuse of struggling learners. True, RTI is easier said than done, or else there would be far fewer struggling learners and students mislabeled as disabled. But it can be done, as explained in later chapters. Suffice to say at this point that RTI embodies what Congress intended, and what common sense tells us: if students do not receive adequate instruction in general education, how does anyone know whether they require special education?
Also suffice to say, in the current absence of RTI and other school reforms, the school system mice are still roaring. School systems are about as culpable as ever at mislabeling struggling learners as disabled. This comes into clearest view as we zoom in further on the eligibility of students classified as having a Specific Learning Disability (LD).
Approximately 35 percent of all students in special education are classified as LD.15 LD’s dominance of special education is even more powerful because it is often inter-related with other large disability categories such as ADHD, language impairments and emotional disability. LD thus serves as the best lens through which we can examine how and why so many students wind up wrongfully in special education.
As we proceed, keep in mind that virtually without exception, students labeled as LD have the cognitive potential to meet the same academic standards as peers. Their learning problems are not substantially different from those of huge numbers of other struggling learners who are not channeled into special education.
Yet, those who wind up as mislabeled as disabled and educationally abused are caught in the web of three main interconnected strands: (1) teacher desperation; (2) racial and economic class biases that blame the victims; and (3) loopholes in the law. All can be seen in the case of Devon, another child I represented.
Devon is not all that different from Marcus who we met in Chapter 1, except in some ways the facts are even more appalling. Devon, when I met him, was in the fourth grade and living with his siblings and single Mom who was on welfare. The family is African-American, housed (barely) in one of the ravaged inner city neighborhoods in Baltimore.
Starting in pre-kindergarten, Devon fell rapidly behind. Yet, although he received little to no research-based interventions in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade, he was referred and found eligible for special education in the second grade. At that point, he was reading and writing at kindergarten level. He was classified with LD. Eligibility was based on a “discrepancy gap” (a construct we’ll look at in much detail later) between his being in the second grade and his kindergarten performance level.
Though in special education, he still failed to receive research-based “specially designed instruction,” as IDEA requires, and he fell further behind. In fourth grade, he was still reading and writing at kindergarten level. And no surprise, his behavior was going downhill along with his literacy deficiencies.
The school’s evaluations indicated that Devon had a low-average IQ and some indicators of ADHD. Still, the school got one thing right: it properly acknowledged that his cognitive capacity was sufficient to enable him to achieve much more progress if . . . If what? If who had done what differently? That question was at the center of many contentious meetings with the school-based team charged with developing his special education IEP.
I took the position that Devon would not be in such dire straits if he had received better instruction first in general education and then in special education. In response, school staff on the IEP team were incensed at what they considered an accusation that they hadn’t done their jobs as well as they could have. They were professional caring teachers, they said, who had done the best they could. And they offered an alternative explanation for Devon’s plight. It boiled down to lack of school effort by Devon and by Mom. It was their own fault.
In the words of members of the IEP team, especially a special education teacher and the school’s assistant principal, “what can you expect when Devon won’t try in class, doesn’t show up for coach class and is always causing trouble?” I countered that his lack of motivation and misconduct was explainable. Can you imagine what it’s like for a young child to come to school from pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, all the while falling steadily behind other kids, and increasingly doubting his own ability and self-worth?
Abundant literature ties students lack of motivation and poor behavior to “fear of failure” or “learned helplessness” caused by lack of academic success. As summarized, “Much research has been done over the years on motivating children with LD or ADHD. It tells us that the main reasons these children withdraw mentally from school is fear of failure, frustration with inconsistent performance . . . lack of understanding the schoolwork, emotional problems, anger or desire for attention—even negative attention.”16 Another author observes, “struggling readers may begin to internalize their lack of reading ability and develop learned helplessness . . . They may become unmotivated as learners and fall into what [a preeminent reading expert] calls a ‘devastating downward spiral.’”17
The IEP team was also insistent that Devon’s mother was as much if not more to blame than Devon. Mom, they said, didn’t push Devon or back up his teachers. “Without his family helping out more, what can we do?” “What can you expect when Mom doesn’t get him to school on time, when he doesn’t turn in homework, when she doesn’t keep in touch with his teachers?” And so on.
Of course, Devon would have done better in school if his Mom had done all these things and more to provide support at home and at school. Yet, he would have done much, much better—despite the family situation—if he had received timely, quality instruction and other school assistance from kindergarten on up.
Devon is hardly alone. His case illustrates the tragic experience of so many struggling learners who are mislabeled as LD. I noted earlier three main reasons why schools victimized them: teacher desperation, blaming the victims, and loopholes in the law. We examine each of these in more detail, beginning with the predicament of beleaguered general education teachers.
When students fall behind as early as prekindergarten, kindergarten or first grade, and don’t receive adequate, evidence-based instructional assistance, the lag can be lethal to them, especially in learning to read, which is the foundation of all learning. It also is very harmful to teachers. Struggling learners—when the class is overloaded with them—bring about struggling teachers.
There are few uncontroversial facts about K-12 public education but “the Matthew effect” on learning to read is one of them. “Rich” readers—those who meet age-appropriate reading standards early—get richer; they grow in reading ability. “Poor” readers—those who don’t get off to a good start–almost invariably get poorer. Deficits deepen as the years go by. The psychologist Keith Stanovich explained the impact of “the Matthew effect:”
Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. . . . The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior.18
Or put more simply and sadly, students who fall behind early rarely catch up. More frequently they suffer a kind of academic and behavioral free fall.
When this occurs, when students are stuck in general education classrooms even though they can’t do the work and are holding back the whole class, what are their teachers supposed to do? The teachers are stuck too. Options are few. It’s futile for the teacher to ask the school principal for more help. The school doesn’t have the funds to reduce class size, or provide supplemental instruction such as tutoring. Nor is the principal likely to be able to beg or finagle more money from the district. Struggling learners, who are disproportionately poor and minority, are concentrated in school districts that are fiscally strapped.
Since the struggling students can’t earn legitimate passing grades, they must be either retained in grade or “socially promoted.” Social promotion means that they pass from grade to grade even though they don’t earn valid passing grades, and even though they fall farther behind their peers each time this happens.
However, the alternative of retention (which means holding the student back in grade) usually doesn’t work either. Typically, the retained students are taught the second time around pretty much as they were the first time—without the intense evidence-based interventions that would enable their learning gaps to be narrowed or closed. And, needless to say, such overage students create unmanageable classroom management problems. A teacher told me that she had a third-grade boy in her class who was 11 years old and needed a shave.
It’s at this point that teachers see referrals to special education as their only practical way out. Teachers may or may not be aware that such referrals violate IDEA since the students never received adequate pre-referral instruction. They may even realize that special education in their school may be a disaster area. Still, they think they have no choice. Illegal referrals to special education are the lesser of the evils that confront them.
To further understand why so many struggling learners are mislabeled as disabled, recall how the school team in Devon’s case attributed his very poor academic performance and behavior to his and his Mom’s lack of effort. In doing so, the school team fell prey, as it was famously phrased by President George W. Bush, to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”19 Because our nation as a whole is infected with the poison of discrimination against poor and minority families and children, it’s no wonder that discriminatory attitudes and practices seep into our schools. Consequently, too many educators (and policymakers and the public) tend to blame the victims—the child and family—more than school systems for student failure.
The evidence of this is startling. A survey conducted by the National Center on Learning Disabilities found:
These findings expose widespread unawareness about the real instructional causes of learning difficulties. Yes, family factors count. But make no mistake: the “home environment” and “laziness” that were cited by the survey respondents are code words for exculpating schools and blaming the victims who are disproportionately poor and minority.
Another study is even more revealing and astonishing. As briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, Galen Alessi, a professor of psychology, surveyed 50 school psychologists who evaluated about 120 students during the year covered by the study to determine whether they qualified for special education. Asked how many times their evaluations concluded that the child’s learning problems were mainly due to curriculum, the psychologists’ answers were summarized as “usually none.” Asked in how many evaluations the student’s problems were due primarily to inappropriate teaching practices, “The answer also was none.”
So what was causing the students’ problems? Alessi asked the school psychologists how many of their evaluations “concluded that child factors were primarily responsible for the referred problem. The answer was 100%.” The surveyed psychologists stated “that informal school policy (or ‘school culture’) dictates that conclusions be limited to child and family factors.”21
It is hard to imagine evidence that more clearly proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, how school systems internalize economic and racial stereotypes that blame the victims. Alessi satirically summarized: “These 5,000 positive findings uncovered the true weak link in the educational process in these districts: the children themselves. If only these districts had better functioning children with a few more supportive parents, there would be no educational difficulties.”22
Readers may find this study hard to believe. Its findings are so extreme. It contradicts all that we know about the ability and dedication of school psychologists. Still, there is reason to believe that some psychologists, like teachers and other members of IEP teams, are victims themselves of such institutional attitudes.
School staff are particularly susceptible to prejudicial finger-pointing because they are denied proper training on the instructional causes of learning difficulties. They receive little to no professional supervision or coaching on the job. They are denied the resources that would enable them to experience and appreciate the effectiveness of evidence-based additional instruction. All the while, they live professionally and socially in a society in which prejudicial stereotypes are pervasive.
Here’s more proof. I have studied the hidden biases that cause poor and minority children to be systematically ignored in determinations of dyslexia. My study, published in 2003, The Invisible Dyslexics: How Public School Systems in Baltimore and Elsewhere Discriminate Against Poor Children in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Early Reading Difficulties, reported that at least 20 percent of the children in Baltimore City public schools and other large urban districts can be called “invisible dyslexics.”23 “Invisible dyslexics” are children whose academic futures are doomed because their problems in learning to read are either diagnosed too late and treated too little, or not diagnosed or treated at all.
And why does this happen with much greater frequency to students who are from poor and minority families? It is because dyslexia is associated in the public mind with children from high-income families who can afford to have dyslexia diagnosed at private expense, often followed by expensive private schooling. Invisible dyslexics are also slighted when their IQs are low-average; yet, IQ scores are considered by many experts to be influenced by cultural biases that disadvantage poor and minority children.
Certainly, economic and educational background and IQ matter. For example, researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley revealed the “thirty million word gap.”24 By the time of school enrollment, children from high-income families were exposed to 30 million more words than children from families on welfare—a developmental chasm that closely predicted later reading difficulties. In innumerable ways, kids in middle and up income families have home field advantages over underprivileged kids.
But all is not doom and gloom for Devon and countless other struggling learners from low-income and minority families. They can achieve much greater academic success notwithstanding their learning difficulties and socio-economic circumstances if they receive timely, adequate additional instruction. Schools, as emphasized throughout this book, should not be let off the hook.
The three factors under discussion that underlie why struggling learners are mislabeled as disabled and educationally abused are interdependent. Each—teacher desperation, biases that blame the victim, and now legal loopholes—is cause and effect with the others, and I could have written about legal loopholes first, not third. But if another truth be told, the analyses of statutory and regulatory loopholes in IDEA that follow are technical and heavy going. Still, there is value in understanding them, particularly for professionals who may challenge my indictment of the system. But I hope parents and other general readers will hang in there too.
From the outset, the definition of LD under federal law has been vulnerable to manipulation. It has allowed educators and policymakers to avoid making difficult policy choices. Four decades later, experts still “disagree about the definition and classification of LD; [and] the diagnostic criteria and assessment practices used in the identification process.”25
As a result, practice nationwide is murky, chaotic and inconsistent. Recall the quip of two leading scholars that the eligibility process is “barely more accurate than a flip of the coin.”26 The only thing that can be said with certainty is that, as practice has evolved, most students found eligible as LD do not legally qualify.
The legal standard in the first version of IDEA enacted in 1975 specified that “‘children with specific learning disabilities’ requires a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written. . . .” It includes but is not limited to certain conditions such as dyslexia.27
However, the “disorder” in the definition and the conditions including “dyslexia” were not further defined. Regulations, finalized in 1977, were meant to clarify the criteria and prevent mission creep. They required a finding by the school that “a child has a severe discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability. . . .”28
The criterion of an IQ-achievement discrepancy—commonly known as the “discrepancy gap”—was supposed to diagnose a learning disorder that reflected difficulty in processing information. But from the start, the discrepancy gap was ill-conceived and ill-used. In practice, it opened the floodgates to the mislabeling and mistreatment of millions of struggling learners.
Across the country, it became the almost exclusive eligibility test for LD. The number of LD students skyrocketed, increasing more than 300 percent between 1976 and 2000, though it has since plateaued.29 All the while, educators either didn’t notice or ignored the fact that the evidence base for the discrepancy gap was always “weak to non-existent.”30
The discrepancy gap has been so discredited that it is derisively called by some the “discrepancy crap.” Scientific findings refute the view that a disability can be determined based on a cut-off statistical measure of discrepancy between aptitude (IQ) and achievement.
Rather, as set out in a famous report by the national Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, there is a “dimensional approach” to the problems of struggling readers. Reading difficulties—which account for 80 to 90 percent of LD eligibility determinations—should be seen as the lower end of a normal distribution of reading ability among all children. The Committee found that “deciding on the precise point on the [distribution] at which to distinguish normal reading from reading disability is quite arbitrary. . . . For instance, children who do not quite meet the arbitrary cutoff score [for the discrepancy gap] have very similar abilities and needs as those of children whose reading levels are just on the other side of the cut-point.”31
This applies to the diagnosis of dyslexia, the most well-known reading problem. A discrepancy gap is not how to do it. The prominent neuroscientist and best-selling author Sally Shaywitz points out, “there’s been a revolution in what we’ve learned about reading and dyslexia.”32 We’ve learned, she writes:
Another expert Joseph K. Torgesen cites studies that have “led to the discovery that the early word reading difficulties of children with relatively low general intelligence and verbal ability are associated with the same factors (weaknesses in phonological processing) that interfere with early reading growth in children who have general intelligence in the normal range.”33
In other words, children with average and low-average IQs generally encounter early reading difficulties for the same basic reasons as children with high IQs. A group of prominent researchers concluded: “the actual comparison of academic achievement scores with IQ scores to derive a discrepancy value is fraught with psychometric, statistical, and conceptual problems that render many comparisons useless.”34
That doesn’t mean that IQ (like the family’s educational and economic background) cannot be a factor in why students struggle to learn. Students who are lower in cognitive ability may need more instructional help to master reading skills. But low-income students with low-average IQs can learn to read and succeed in school if they get timely and adequate instructional assistance.
A final point about the discrepancy gap: it usually involves a disastrous “wait to fail” approach. The lower the IQ, the longer it takes for a sufficient discrepancy to accumulate and for students to receive needed extra assistance (chalk up another unfair advantage for children with higher IQs, since their gap shows and grows more quickly).
So why, against all this evidence, is the discrepancy gap still alive and making kids educationally unwell? My prior account of teacher desperation goes a long way in explaining why. The discrepancy gap eligibility test for special education is a survival toolkit for general education teachers. Two authorities put it bluntly: Under the guise of the discrepancy gap, educators “have colluded to relieve regular teachers of responsibilities for teaching children functioning at the bottom of their class . . . there is, in effect, a ‘deal’ between special and general education.”35
The best that can be said in defense of educators who cling to the otherwise defenseless discrepancy gap is that it is hard to come up with alternatives. The pure statutory definition of LD, as earlier noted, is “a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes” involved in learning to read, write and compute. But if the discrepancy gap is the wrong way to determine the existence of the disorder, what is the right way? The search has taken educators and scientists down two main paths, one neuroscience, the other “strengths and weaknesses” in psychological processing.
There is wide agreement among scientists that “a true learning disability is neurological and therefore organic to the individual and, presumably, a lifelong disorder.”36 “The field of LD was founded on the assumption that neurobiological factors are the basis of [it].”37
Dyslexia is again illuminating. Pure dyslexia, as it is sometimes called, can be located through magnetic and other imaging techniques in the language processing areas of the brain. In Science magazine, MIT professor John Gabrieli summarized, “Functional neuroimaging studies have revealed differences in brain function and connectivity that are characteristic of dyslexia.”38
The imaging can be prescriptive as well as diagnostic. Gabrieli observes, “There is good evidence that dyslexia can be predicted and prevented in many children.”39 Or if not prevented, it can be treated with instructional interventions aligned with specific processing images. In the future, brain research may also lead to medication to treat dyslexia.
This is all to the good. Yet, teachers and other school personnel, including psychologists, have no present means to put the neuroscience to practical use. Maybe it’s not complete science fiction to foresee the day when school teams will be able to readily access brain scans, but that day is not near. In the here and now, schools are still stuck trying to find another way to determine LD based on functional measurements of psychological processes.
IDEA regulations say that a learning disorder based on functional impairment in psychological processes can be found if a child “exhibits a pattern of strengths and weaknesses.”40 This means differences that can be revealed “across a battery of cognitive or neuropsychological tests,” according to the prominent co-authors of an authoritative book, “Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention.” They observe, “The person with LD is one with strengths in many areas but weaknesses in some core cognitive processes that lead to underachievement.”41
Unfortunately, pinpointing strengths and weaknesses through cognitive or neuropsychological tests is easier said than done. How reliable are they? How well can teachers and school-based psychologists administer the tests and interpret them? Evaluations by school teams, including psychologists, usually rely on basic standardized cognitive and educational measures, without administration of sub-tests that could detect an actual psychological processing disorder. This often includes the failure to detect phonological deficits that are regarded as the most significant and consistent cognitive marker of dyslexia.
As a result, many experts, including the co-authors mentioned above, give a thumbs down to the “strengths and weaknesses” method. Sharon Vaughan and Sylvia Linan-Thompson find, “Although it may be accurate that many students with LD have underlying neurological and/or processing disorders, researchers and educators have been singularly unsuccessful at reliably identifying these difficulties and designing specific treatments to remediate them. . . .”42 Daniel J. Reschly concludes that “The history of processing constructs and LD over the last 40 years is an excellent example of faith triumphing over reality.”43
These criticisms may be overstated. It seems likely that state of the art tests and sub-tests, if utilized, can provide school teams with more diagnostic information than they now get. But this information will be more useful in informing adequate instruction in general education than in justifying referral to special education.
So, by process of elimination—by exposing the flaws in the discrepancy gap and “strengths and weaknesses” methods for trying to determine LD—we have arrived at the definitive verdict pronounced by the co-authors of “Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention:” “No person can be defined as learning disabled in the absence of evidence of a lack of adequate response to instruction that is effective with most students. . . .” (italics in the original!)44
We have thus wound our way back to the all-important necessity for effective, early interventions—that is, RTI. As fully detailed in Chapter 4, it’s the only known way to prevent struggling learners from being mislabeled as LD or otherwise mislabeled and educationally abused. And, as we’ll see, it’s do-able.
There is one more nail to be hammered in the coffin of the Big Lie. It’s not just the special education classification of LD that is misleading or downright bogus. Though the legal requirement for other disabilities is not as explicitly worded, the same intent is plain: no prior adequate instruction in general education, no referral to special education.
Federal law specifies that children should not be found eligible for certain other disabilities—including Other Health Impairment (typically Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder), Speech or Language Impairments, Emotional Disability and sometimes Autism—unless the suspected disability “adversely affects the child’s educational performance.”45 The phrase “adversely affects the child’s educational performance” is not defined, and literature on point is scant.46 However, it appears to require RTI-like prior instruction before students can be found eligible under these disability classifications, the same as for LD.
This makes perfect sense.47 How can a school know if a student who is struggling academically really needs special education services unless the student has gotten appropriate RTI-like instruction in general education?
Some states explicitly or implicitly extend the RTI process to a range of other disabilities.48 For example, the Maryland manual on RTI states that while IDEA only includes the RTI process in the determination of LD, “data from the RTI process can be used to document student performance and the provision of appropriate instruction as part of the identification of other educational disabilities within a comprehensive evaluation.”49
The equivalency between the pre-referral RTI requirement for LD and the “adverse affect” requirement for other disabilities is particularly persuasive because there is extensive overlap—co-morbidity—between LD and other disabilities. This occurs especially among students suspected of LD, ADHD and language impairments.50 Researchers conclude that LD is “related to disorders of attention or to social and emotional difficulties—areas of development that are clearly problematic for students with LDs.”51 The National Center on Learning Disabilities reports that “as many as one-third of those with LD also have ADHD.”52
. . . . . . . . .
We have come to the end of the exposure of the Big Lie. Unless struggling learners receive timely, adequate RTI instruction, they will be become academic failures whether they are stuck in the purgatory of general education or the hell of special education. Thankfully, this fate can be avoided. Part II of the book tells how, and it will be a relief to turn to some uplifting news.
Still, we have one more essential count in the indictment to unveil in this Part I. The next chapter documents the number of struggling learners (millions) and the depth of their underachievement. It also lays bare the scandalous ways in which school systems try to cover up the abuse.