Guest Viewpoint: Bill would change definition of learning disability

6/3/03 -- At a time of budgetary shortfalls rather than surpluses, the cost of special education inevitably is a major concern. The expense of educating a child with a disability is estimated to average twice that of a nondisabled youngster.

Congress appropriates less than 20 percent of the excess cost. Although the watchword going into the current reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was "full funding," which ironically means 40 percent of the excess cost, that priority has all but disappeared -- at least in terms of appropriations, as compared to authorizations.

In its stead, various congressional leaders are pushing for a cap on the proportion of children in each state subject to IDEA funds.

The proportion of all children aged 6 to 17 that school districts have classified as eligible for IDEA has slowly but steadily increased to approximately 12 percent of all students nationally. If the rate continues, the proportion will reach 16 percent within a decade.

The largest classification by far is specific learning disability (SLD), which has increased at a higher rate than the overall percentage. Originally, children classified under this category made up one-fourth of all children in special education. Now, the SLD category amounts to one half of the total.

Moreover, unlike some classifications, such as mental retardation, minority students tend to have a lower representation, in terms of their percentage in the population, in the SLD category.

And unlike the other IDEA disability classifications -- except for speech and language impairment -- SLD eligibility may be premised on a subset of learning. But unlike speech and language impairment, SLD has seven alternative subsets, such as written expression, reading comprehension, and math calculation.

The particular qualifying criteria for SLD include a severe discrepancy between ability and achievement in at least one of these seven subsets, or areas, of learning.

The first big step in the reauthorization of IDEA, the passage of H.R. 1350 provides two changes for the determination of whether children are eligible under the SLD category:

(1) removal of the "severe discrepancy" requirement, and

(2) permissibility of "a process which determines if a child responds to scientific, research-based intervention."

The House-passed revisions are more likely to aggravate than mitigate the problems of overidentification of SLD in general and the underidentification of SLD among racial and linguistic minorities.

Although neither IDEA nor the special education profession provides a uniform definition of "severe discrepancy," this criterion is the major operational limitation on the classification of children as SLD.

More important, by replacing this mandatory criterion with a permissive process, the variances in the classification procedures will be compounded and confounded.

In opposing these two proposed revisions, the Council for Exceptional Children has properly pointed out that the response-to-intervention process thus far lacks a sufficient scientific research base.

Instead, the council has appropriately recommended that Congress put a priority on "sufficient funds . . . to validate psychometric, nonpsychometric, and 'response-to-treatment' methods of identification." It calls for special attention on "the fidelity of the response-to-treatment method on a large scale and its impact on the disproportional representation of children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds."

In IDEA's legalized system of awarding special educational services to children on the basis of compartmentalized criteria, the pressures for SLD eligibility are bound to continue to expand at this time of dwindling resources.

The advantage goes to those children whose parents have the wealth and the penchant for using private evaluators, specialized attorneys, and IDEA's dispute mechanisms to obtain the SLD label.

Removing the severe-discrepancy requirements and authorizing -- not even substituting -- the response-to-treatment method are not the way to improve the allocation of limited resources to children, including those who are racial and linguistic minorities, who truly have a learning disability.

Although the proposed measures have the potential of identifying more false negatives as SLD, their unaffordable price will be to increase, not decrease, the identification of false positives into this further fuzzy classification.

Rather, we need to put "teeth" in the current criteria, such as providing a rigorous definition of severe discrepancy and nondiscriminatory measures of ability and achievement, while validating alternative criteria for the purpose of more accurate and strict SLD identification for both the general population and the underrepresented groups.

The alternative is to limit special education to more severe classifications, while redistributing resources for more differentiated and scientifically based methods and materials for all "other" children.

Perry Zirkel is a university professor of education and law, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa.