January 28, 2009

Classified Information Obama Won’t Get

Yessiree! Special education is getting some attention from President Obama, right up there with climate change and the economy. He proposes $13 billion for state grants under the IDEA, or more than all of the $10.9 billion appropriated in fiscal 2008, ending on September 30th (“Stimulus Plan Aids Education”, Alyson Klein, Education Week, 1/21/09). Oh, Barack, honey, be very careful. State grants are where it all began to go wrong in 1980. The very people who will write state grants and hire from them are those who have wasted much of what they already had, however meager. The system of special education is rotten, bottom to top and top to bottom. There is no structure in place that will get this money and use it for the people and the children who need it. Just because you are President does not mean that the politics and patronage within each state stops. Here is your litmus test. If I applied for a grant through New Jersey for parent training or teacher training, do you think I’d get it? I rest my case.

During the late 80s, I submitted a grant under IDEA to train parents through the Parent Information Center of New Jersey. People already funded by IDEA money and combinations of mixes and matches from other federal grants, also applied. They wanted to keep their jobs and hire like-minded friends into SPAN, Protection and Advocacy, and sub-contractors from a variety of advocacy and legal organizations, including the New Jersey Bar Association. The State had to agree to sign off on the grant and forward it to the federal government. Reluctantly, it signed off on mine, making clear it was not happy with its submission. It was a good grant. We did not get it. So under the Freedom of Information Act I asked to see the other New Jersey grants that had also been submitted. Each grant had to contain letters of recommendation from a variety of constituents. If you did not know the politics of the state, you could not appreciate who supported which grant. (No new information here.) The same people who had always been funded were funded again. Their letters of recommendation came from those who financially benefited from the recommendation, and a few lied outright about what the applicants had done and would do. Some of the biggest offenders were officials of state government. In New Jersey, the biggest fear was funding somebody who “knows where the bodies are buried”, who knows too much and who cannot be controlled. Well, that was certainly me. And it was a legitimate fear because I fully intended to dig up those bodies any way I could. A fictional parent training network was invented and presented to the feds as reality as early as 1980, while absolutely everybody knew it was all smoke and mirrors. Nothing existed or had been created from all of the grant money poured into the state’s special education. My organization had provided virtually all of the services for free while others got paid to play nice, attend official conferences on parent training and advocacy, and hold out their hands for a weekly check. The federally funded system of advocacy and parent training still exists and is more corrupt than ever.

Beware, Barack. That is the system you have inherited. I still train parents and still do it for free. I have a paid advocate from a funded organization in that program. Nice lady. And she is coming to me for training she can’t get through the funded organization. In order to effectively fix special education you need to know how its money is spent. Throwing more money at a broken system may accidentally land where it is needed. But at least in New Jersey, the more money it gets, the more eager are the growing number of thieves ready to grab it. Given what I hear from Texas and Ohio, Delaware and New York, it is pretty much the same every where.

Special education has never been fully funded at the 40% promised in 1975 when the legislation was enacted. So an entire structure of government and agencies and specially designed not for profits (actually run by state governments) grew around the basic structure of P.L. 94-142 at the state and regional level in order to survive on the minimal available funding. States now get about 18% of their special education costs from the federal government. Every single school district is to have a parent advisory council that gives input as to what the town needs to serve its special needs population. That council is to reflect the demographics of the town. None of them do and most don’t even know that the only reason they are invited to attend certain meetings is so the school board can check the box on the yearly IDEA grant application, indicating that a parent advisory council had given input for its contents. All political layers continue to be in place, threadbare in the economic catastrophe every town and state now experiences. But they are there, as is the desire to binge on the money about to be available through Obama’s stimulus package. State organizations have been on a diet for quite a while, especially those calling themselves advocacy and parent training centers. What happens when you go off your diet? (Dear Lord, do I know the answer to this one!) You eat everything in site, especially the chocolate Oreos. Well, get ready for one huge cookie party unless somebody sucks those black and whites up from the stores before the discretionary grants are announced. Will school districts really expand programs for kids, for parents? Will they really retrain staff to think and act out-of-the box? Will science finally merge with education? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how many trials I’ve done just on the science of reading programs alone? Will there finally be programs for dyslexic kids in public schools? And what about the school board attorneys? Will they have the final say on how this money is spent, much in the way they do now? Absolutely! How about the reality of sensory integration and getting enough O.T.s and speech pathologists for each school district and building? Will Hackensack Hospital and others like it change its position that nobody knows what sensory integration is and that it really doesn’t exist? Will schools stop labeling kids as autistic who aren’t because staff doesn’t know what else to call them? We need this money so desperately. So many children need services. And schools won’t even evaluate them for special education eligibility. Maybe the stimulus money can improve the tests selected for kids and upgrade the skills of evaluators to get more accurate and more complete information on student needs.

Mr. President. Put some infrastructure on the special education highway, before you distribute this money. Tear down rotten buildings and networks of all kinds that suck away our energy. We’re volunteering and taking responsibility, just as you asked. Now you do your homework and make this thing right.