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BARACK - LISTEN TO KRUGMAN ... PUHLEEZ!
Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, wrote a perfectly brilliant Op-Ed piece for the NY Times on 12/25/08, and we hope he doesn’t have to wait another 30 years for the prize for this one. Read the beautifully written column at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/opinion/26krugman.html?scp=3&sq=krugman&st=cse.
Krugman asks “How did F.D.R. manage to make big government so clean?”- and goes on to give this sage advice re administration of the coming economic recovery plan:
“... [E]nforcement is crucial: inspectors general have to be strong and independent, and whistle-blowers have to be rewarded, not punished as they were in the Bush years.”
Bravo, Krugman! Now, to modify that advice ever-so-slightly to fit the sp-education industry and its wildly captive regulatory agency, the United States Department of Education:
Give the US DOE’s Inspector General more authority, more staff and a lot more budget. Stop politically holding up and sanitizing the US DOE OIG’s audits before they’re published and stop going back and bowdlerizing published ones that give SEAs agita. Let the IG do what its sotto voce audit findings, strewn here and there, have thundered about by implication for years:
Audit SEA, IEA and LEA financial and student data reports to insure that they’re ... simply reporting the truth. Enough GIGO! [Garbage In: Garbage Out.] GIGO graduation and dropout rates. GIGO about how funds are spent. GIGO about what SEAs, IEAs and LEAs actually do with their federal money - and what they really do to, and for, their students. And ... what they should, but don’t.
Where the OIG finds that SEAs, IEAs and LEAs have misused federal money - take it back! Make sure it’s spent right. Where they’ve flagrantly misreported student data - test scores, percent of kids not tested, graduation and dropout numbers - make them go and get the honest numbers, under the strictest OIG supervision and scrutiny, and then publish the truth so that parents, taxpayers, citizens and policy makers have accurate bases for intelligent decisions. Reclaim US DOE funds SEAs, IEAs and LEAs secured by reporting ghost students in phantom classes.
You can tell a lot about a country by how it treats its most powerless citizens, Mr. President-Elect. The Sp-Education Industry’s most powerless citizens are children with disabilities. That’s why US DOE and its client SEAs, IEAs and LEAs publish such obviously GIGO numbers - re money; re scores; re graduation and dropout figures. They rely on the fact that when these kids say that someone didn’t do what they were supposed to do, nobody will believe them. They rely on the fact that nobody will believe their parents, either. They rely on the excuse that nobody can insist on accountability for these kids’ outcomes ... “because they’re disabled, what do you expect?” - when they’re spending (or claiming they’re spending) huge amounts of extra money on special education precisely so that these kids’ objective outcomes will be significantly improved. What they’re really spending the money on is ... uh ... trust me. Nobody knows. Nobody audits. Nobody counts bodies in classrooms, adult or child. Nobody, at least nobody at US DOE and most of the SEAs, seems to care.
In fact, the body of US DOE's published speducation data isn’t just wildly inaccurate: it’s totally fictitious, and intentionally so. Unless you really believe that over 30% of all high school-age kids with disabilities move to somewhere outside of their home school districts every year - a figure only about 10 times higher than the parallel Census data. Unless there’s a new disability we need to add to the speducation lexicon - “Move-itis, a disability defined by an irresistible urge to get the hell out of town. So widespread that it’s reached Black Plague proportions. Oh ... the US DOE OIG audited; then recommended ending the "moved, known to continue" and "moved, not known to continue [but not dropped out] spec. ed. exiting categories and counting these kids as dropouts ... after investigating and finding that most of the kids reported in these 2 categories had actually dropped out. US DOE wanted to ignore both recommendations: wound up ignoring one. And so the SEAs, IEAs and LEAs just reported most of their sped. dropouts in the one remaining column. GIGO numbers and US DOE knows it.
We think the only black plague kids with disabilities are subject to is the plague of official “we-don’t-see-it-ness” over at US DOE, and particularly at OSERS, OSEP and OCR. As in “we don’t see that charging sped. budgets for the cost of every single district official's new car” is just not right. As in “we pretend that studies SEAs commission, which show that they’re massively over-reporting funds they claim they’ve spent on special education are written in invisible ink.”
And most of all, as in “we don’t see that when the NYS Education Department formally passes an “aversive behavioral intervention” regulation which specifically authorizes speducators’ “strangling” and “hurling” disabled school children, age 3-21, who exhibit unwanted or irritating behaviors, that might just kill the kid and thus deny the child the free, appropriate public education to which all kids with disabilities are statutorily entitled. As in “well, we signed on to an amicus brief the boys over at US DOJ wrote for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals saying that the federal laws protecting kids and adults with disabilities from abuse apply to schools, but it didn’t really mean that was our position, and we really think that only states have the responsibility to stop the widespread and profound abuse of school children with disabilities in programs funded with US DOE’s special education (IDEA) funds.”
F.D.R. didn’t set up a new deal for the powerful, leaving the unemployed, the homeless, the hopeless and economically-disabled to fend for themselves while well-paid federal, state and local industry officials spent economic recovery funds on caviar for their brunch. He made federal officials insure that funds went where they were supposed to go, for the real programs that were supposed to be funded, to really benefit the folks who needed them the most.
Let’s have a New Deal for the Sp-Education Industry. Let’s make sure it’s run for the kids, and only the kids. Let’s make sure that IDEA funds only go for legitimate special education purposes. Let’s make sure that federal monies aren’t used to perpetuate aversive behavioral interventions which harm, and sometimes kill, the children, while the adults who perpetrate them just keep on getting their salaries and insisting that the abuse they carry out is called by some other, totally fictitious name.
