Learning-Disabled Enrollment Dips After Long Trend (US)

September 9, 2010

After decades of what seemed to be an inexorable upward path, thenumber of students classified as learning-disabled declined from yearto year over much o f the past decade­—a change in direction that isspurring debates among experts about the reasons why.

Thepercentage of 3- to 21-year-old students nationwide classified ashaving a “specific learning disability” dropped steadily from 6.1percent in the 2000-01 school year to 5.2 percent in 2007-08, according to the most recent data available,which comes from the U.S Department of Education’s 2009 Digest ofEducation Statistics. In numbers, that’s a drop from about 2.9 millionstudents to 2.6 million students.

A learning disability—aprocessing disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overallcognitive ability—is the largest, by far, of the 13 disabilityclassifications recognized by the main federal special education law.Forty percent of the approximately 6.6 million students covered underthe Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, fall intothat category.

The decrease in the category goes hand in hand with adecrease in special education enrollment overall, though that change isnot as large. The percentage of all students covered under the IDEAfell from a high of 13.8 percent in the 2004-05 school year to 13.4percent in 2007-08—from about 6.7 million students to about 6.6 millionstudents. Enrollment in the categories of emotional disturbance andmental retardation also went down, but students in those groups make upa far smaller slice of the IDEA pie. At the same time, though,enrollment of students classified as having an autism spectrum disorderor “other health impairment” rose.

Although the change indirection may appear to be small, experts say it is noteworthy. But aprobe into the possible reasons behind the drop in learning-disabilityclassifications suggests that the causes are less clear, and that muchis still to be learned about how to classify and tre at students withsuch disabilities.

About 80percent of children who are classified as learning-disabled get thelabel because they’re struggling to read. So, scholars say, thedropping numbers could be linked to improvements in reading instructionoverall; the adoption of “response to intervention,” which is aninstructional model intended to halt the emergence of reading problems;and a federally backed push toward early intervention with youngerstudents.

All those efforts could be serving to separatestudents with true disabilities from those who just haven’t been taughtwell in the early grades. But which program is making the mostdifference, and how long the effects should last, is difficult to teaseout, the experts add.

At the same time, other scholars say,some of the dropping numbers could be unrelated to teaching methods.The decision to label a student learning-disabled carries a sizabledollop of human judgment in a way that classifications like blindnessor deafness do not. That means it’s possible schools could be nudgingspecial education enrollment numbers down to avoidacademic-accountability sanctions or costly requirements driven byfederal mandates, some observers say.

A portion of thedecrease could also be tied in part to shifting classifications—movingstudents, for example, from learning-disabled to some other disabilitycategory.

But from the perspective of federal officials, the changesare due mostly to educational improvements. They say the national focuson RTI, and improvement in schools’ core reading curricula are workingtogether in a welcome way to decrease the numbers of studentsclassified as learning-disabled.

“When you take all of thistogether, to me, that’s what makes all the difference in the world,”said Alexa E. Posny, the assistant secretary overseeing the EducationDepartment’s office of special educati on and rehabilitative services.“I believe we overidentify children as learning-disabled. A number ofstudents have just not been taught how to read.”

As anexample, Ms. Posny offered her experiences in Kansas, where she servedas the commissioner of education before moving to her current job inWashington. After the state adopted what it called a “multi-tieredsystem of supports,” which is the state’s version of response tointervention, enrollment in the learning-disability category droppedfrom 56,328 in 2005 to 55,834 in 2008, she noted.

Theresponse-to-intervention approach was promoted by the federal ReadingFirst initiative, which came to life through the No Child Left BehindAct when it was signed into law in 2002. Aimed at improving readinginstruction among struggling readers, the reading initiative requiredschools receiving the federal grants to incorporate scientificallybased reading lessons into their curricula.

“Rather thanrushing in to identify a specific learning disability as the primarymeans of providing support to a struggling student, an RTI approachfirst considers the overall quality of the instructional program,” saidMary Beth Klotz, a nationally certified school psychologist and thecurrent chair of the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities.

Then, increasingly intensive instruction, or “interventions,” are offered to students showing early reading difficulties.

In2009, Joseph K. Torgesen, a psychology and education professor atFlorida State University, in Tallahassee, wrote an article noting adecrease in such classifications among elementary schools in Floridathat adopted Reading First: In the first year of implementation, 10.4percent of 3rd graders were identified as learning-disabled. By thethird year of implementation, the classification rate among 3rd gradersfell to 6 percent. Drops in identification rates were seen inkinder garten, 1st and 2nd grades.

“We’re actually doing aslightly better job in teaching kids to read in kindergarten, 1st, 2nd,3rd, and so on,” Mr. Torgesen said. He suggests that general educationteachers are more attuned to offering differentiated instruction totheir students. In turn, those teachers are choosing not to referstudents for special education evaluation.

But Mr.Torgesen, and some other experts, also said that it’s not yet clear ifthe trend marks a “cure” for those students or just a delay in theirclassification.

“We don’t have enough knowledge in how they hold their gains,” he said.

DouglasFuchs, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University, inNashville, Tenn., cautions that any decrease in enrollment must becompared with academic-achievement data.

“Where are the datato indicate these numbers are going down because of the effectivenessof instruction?” Mr. Fuchs said. “It’s very important to becritical—not negative, but critical—of what these prevalence numbersreally mean.”

Some evidence of the role that early-intervention services might be playing in the enrollment trends came in a report earlier this yearfrom the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences,thefirst part of what will be a multi-report evaluation of specialeducation. In it, the authors noted increases in the numbers of infantsthrough 5-year-olds served in special education.

For example,in 1997, 564,270 preschool children ages 3 to 5 were identified forservices under the IDEA. By 2006, that number had risen to 706,242.That’s good news for supporters of early intervention, whose mantra iscatching learning problems early before they become entrenched.

The2004 reauthorization of the I DEA allows districts the option of using15 percent of their federal allocations for special education onearly-intervention services. When a district is found to havesignificantly overidentified minorities for certain special educationcategories, the Education Department requires those early-interventionservices to take place.

Margaret J. McLaughlin, a professorin the University of Maryland College Park’s department of specialeducation, pointed to early intervention as an important factor inexplaining falling learning-disability enrollment.

“There’s anumber of forces that kind of converge and come together,” Ms.McLaughlin said. But while early services “may prevent the big bulge[in classification] at the 4th grade,” she said, “there still may be abig bump at middle school. We don’t really know anything about the kidswho get ‘declassified.’ ”

Donald D. Deshler, a professor ofspecial education at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, said thatprograms for early learners are widely supported, and “who can argueagainst it? It’s like arguing against motherhood.”

But eventhe best early-intervention programs cannot catch all children, andsome energy must be saved for older students, he believes. “We arealways going to have, in certain places, kids falling between thecracks,” Mr. Deshler said. “You’ve got to have some investment inwhat’s happening with older kids.”

However,a number of the reasons offered for the decline in learning-disabilityclassifications have little do with teaching, and more to do with thestructures of school and federal policy. But the effects of thosefactors are hard to prove, much less quantify.

A 2003 report from the federally funded Special Education Expenditure Projectestimated that, nationwide, d istricts spent an average of 1.6 timesmore on a student with learning disabilities than they did on a generaleducation student. Mr. Torgesen, of Florida State University, said thatcostly voter-approved mandates on matters like class-size reduction maybe prompting cash-strapped Florida schools to not identify students.Administrators “do a lot of negotiation around the issue ofclassification,” Mr. Torgesen said, because they have to use money tokeep class sizes low rather than pay for extra assistance for students.

Stephen E. Brock, a professor of special education andschool psychology at California State University, Sacramento, wrote apaper in 2006 saying there is evidence that the growth in low-incidencecategories such as autism spectrum disorder and “other healthimpairments,” or OHI—a catch-all category that includes attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder—correlates with a drop in thelearning-disabilities category.

In addition, Candace Cortiella, the author of “The State of Learning Disabilities 2009,”a report she wrote on behalf of the New York City-based National Centerfor Learning Disabilities, believes that it is suspicious that the dropin special education numbers corresponds so closely to a shift infederal policy, under the No Child Left Behind law, that requiresschools to highlight the performance of their special educationstudents, among other population groups, for accountability purposes.

Schoolsand districts may choose not to count subgroups for accountabilitypurposes if the subgroups are so small they are statisticallyunreliable. Ms. Cortiella suggested that the risk of sanctions mayprompt some schools to keep their enrollment in the special educationsubgroup low.

“There’s too much correlation between the implementation of No Child Left Behind and the drop in the numbers,” she said.

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Ms.Posny of the Education Department said that school districts actuallyhave an incentive to place students in special education because theyreceive some federal money to educate them. “Yet, I believe that statesare stepping up to the plate and saying, we may not need to identifythese kids,” she said.

Labelsare less important than results, Ms. Posny added. Special educationdoes confer on students certain protections, such as the right to afree, appropriate public education in the least restrictiveenvironment, and those are all protections Ms. Posny said she supportsstrongly.

But a specific classification isn’t needed forthose protections, Ms. Posny said. “When it comes to what we need toknow to provide that child’s needs,” she said, “the label doesn’t helpus with that.”