Guest opinion by Scott Pendleton: The cost of special-education mainstreaming

Earlier this month, Scott Pendleton, a long-time reader and friend of BatesLine, told me about an op-ed he had written, providing some historical perspective on the topic of special education, looking back to the passage in 1975 of the predecessor of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the growth in the proportion of students receiving special education, the growth of autism, and the implications of the legal requirement for mainstreaming of special-education students. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Pendleton's conclusions, I think you'll find his perspective thought-provoking, which is why I offered to publish it here at BatesLine. I have added links where possible to the news articles and editorials mentioned.

In the Sunday, October 15, 1989, Tulsa World, the editorial board wrote on the increasing share of education dollars spent on special education and urged separate education for special ed students.

Without passing judgment on the wisdom of the programs, Tulsans must at least recognize that schools have inherited a tremendous social and financial burden that was unheard of only a few years ago. The problem is not confined to Tulsa, of course. It is one that legislators must recognize. A sensible course would be to set up a separate system of special education so that the public school system can concentrate on its larger mission of educating ordinary children.

As this is a sensitive subject, and as I serve as a board member of Tulsa Classical Academy, I feel compelled to say that my comments above are in an individual capacity and don't represent the views of the TCA board, administration, or faculty. Mr. Pendleton is not affiliated with TCA. I am pleased to say that TCA has recently made some significant improvements in the special education department as TCA works to ensure that the special needs of all its students are addressed in full compliance with Federal and Oklahoma laws while at the same time upholding the high academic standards of the Hillsdale K-12 American classical curriculum.

Reading test scores at Tulsa Public Schools have not improved, attendees at the June 17, 2024, school board meeting were told.

Now what? Round up the usual suspects? Those would be the hypothetical "bad teachers" or the tight-fisted state legislature.

Although both teachers and legislators often blame each other, neither is willing to point to a third group, the gorilla in the room that the public does not see: students who are so brain-damaged as to be unteachable, uncontrollable, and downright dangerous.

Why the reticence? Teachers don't want to publicize the magnitude of the problem for fear of stampeding capable students and their state funding into homeschool or private schools. Politicians pretend the problem doesn't exist so that no one will demand them to address it.

Yet, thanks to the 50-year-old federal law that requires "mainstreaming" such students, public schools are fast on their way to becoming asylums for the growing percentage of students who require special education and for those who have no other education option. As overall enrollment drops, there are fewer state dollars to provide pricey special education to ever more students needing it.

Fingerpointing about test scores, teacher quality, and adequacy of funding completely obscures the real question: Why, why is the number of special education students surging? What is happening to us, and to our children?

To understand where we are today, let's back up to 1989. Thirty-five years ago, Oklahoma was faced with a public education crisis. Language, music, art, field trips, advanced math courses, and related teacher, librarian, and nurse positions were being eliminated. Classrooms had far fewer textbooks than students.

Despite a $275 million state tax increase just two years earlier, money in 1989 was of course still the issue. Teacher pay ranked 48th in the nation. A starting teacher earned $15,000, while the Oklahoma average was $23,583. In 58 of 77 counties teachers could qualify for food stamps. Per-pupil expenditures of $3,000 also ranked 48th.

In an editorial titled "Our Eroding Schools," the Tulsa World warned citizens to wake up or else schools would continue a downward "spin that might soon be irreversible." [Tulsa World, April 24, 1989, p. A-6]

Contributing to the crunch was the trend of making schools the one-stop provider of everything a student needed: clothes, shoes, medicine, meals, as well as counseling about sex, HIV, drugs, and race relations. "If you want us to be social service agencies, we can do that" but only with adequate funding, Tulsa County Superintendent Kara Gae Wilson told the Tulsa World. [October 8, 1989, p. A-1]

Meanwhile schools faced another costly trend - rising numbers of special education students. A 1975 federal law, today known by the acronym IDEA, required school districts to provide a "free appropriate public education" to all students from birth to age 21. That half-century-old bill had 29 co-sponsors in the Senate, of whom only one - Joe Biden - is still alive.

Promised federal funding to support that effort was short billions of dollars year after year, further burdening Oklahoma schools. For example, in 1969, when enrollment at Tulsa Public Schools peaked at 80,000 students, a mere two percent were enrolled in special education. By 1989 TPS enrollment had halved, while the SPED share grew to 13 percent of students and to a quarter of the district's $124 million budget.

Estimates of what educating a SPED student should cost ranged from $13,000 annually up to $33,000, depending on the severity of the disability. TPS was spending $6,500, of which the federal government provided just $266, and the state $3,000.

Browsing the news coverage from 1989, a reader is struck by the unflinching reporting and frank conversations. Words like "handicapped" and "retarded" and "vagrant" had not yet been outlawed by advocacy groups self-deputized as vocabulary police.

A particularly blunt editorial in the Tulsa Tribune railed against the US Supreme Court. In the fall of 1989, the high court ruled that a New Hampshire school must continue special education services for a child who was so disabled that school officials deemed the services a wasted effort. Deriding the ruling as "compassion gone wild," the editorial said, "What the court seems to have lost sight of is the difference between a school and a hospital." [November 29, 1989, p. A-14]

The editorial could just as easily have been talking about Wes Franklin, an eight-year-old TPS student who could not walk, talk, see, nor control his bowel movements. He was fed through a tube in his stomach. Doctors had told his family that his rare, inherited condition would worsen until death in a matter of months.

Nonetheless, Wes's parents insisted that he attend school. All through 1989 they fought TPS for services they believed were his right under IDEA. He was receiving a half-hour of physical therapy once a week. They wanted Wes to receive it daily, as well as up to an hour daily of occupational therapy, and the attention of a full-time aide. "I think everything points to the school dragging its feet," his mother said to reporters, "in hopes that Wes will die and it won't have to spend money on him."

"The school district is providing an appropriate program," was the TPS lawyer's response. "The parents will always want more." The Franklins lost the case in 1990; Wes passed away the next year. Today Wes's sister, Elizabeth Franklin, is a family therapist in Broken Arrow. "My parents always felt very proud of how fiercely they advocated for Wes with Tulsa Public Schools," she recalls.

[Wes Franklin's story and his family's formal complaint against TPS were covered by Tulsa Tribune reporters Diana Nelson Jones and Cece Todd and photographer David Crenshaw in the May 25, December 15, December 16, and December 22, 1989, and March 23 and May 30, 1990, editions.]

As the 1989 education crisis dragged on, sometimes resentment was voiced against special education as detracting from educating non-SPED students. "We know who's paying for [special education] and it's the regular child in Oklahoma," a teachers union official complained to Task Force 2000, a committee appointed to present education and funding reform ideas to the Legislature after a special session in the summer adjourned without results. [Tulsa World, September 24, 1989, p. A1]

To some, special education wasn't just underfunded, it was utterly unforeseen. "When many of those parents went to school, no one ever had heard of a learning disability," a SPED coordinator told the Tulsa Tribune. [May 29, 1989, p. 8A]

Let that sink in for a moment: As recently as 1989, there existed parents who had never heard of a learning disability. These days it seems like there's at least one such child in every family.

Public awareness changed thanks to Rain Man, which had debuted in movie theatres the previous December.

"No gigantic public education or PR effort could have produced the sensational awareness [of autism] that Rain Man brought to the national and international radar screen," according to the late Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist who was a consultant on the Academy Award-winning film.

The prevalence of autism was around one in 10,000 in 1980, but had been on the rise nationally. By 1989 prevalence was estimated as high as one in 276 eight-year-olds. Oklahoma was just starting to deal with the needs of such students. "We had a workshop last summer, and that was our biggest effort to date," a special education official with the Oklahoma Department of Education acknowledged to the Tulsa World.

Since then, the rate of autism has soared while the cause remains vigorously disputed. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in 36 eight-year-olds is autistic. Oklahoma has experienced that dramatic increase. Between 2002 and 2019, according to OSDE data, the number of all students rose 12 percent; SPED students, 34 percent; autistic students, 788 percent. Sixty-two percent of school districts had no autistic students in 2002; by 2019, only 15 percent had none.

On the road to today, a teacher walkout in 1990 forced a tax increase out of the Oklahoma Legislature. The resulting public displeasure resulted in ballot initiatives that created term limits for Legislators and a required vote of 75 percent in each house to raise taxes. Continued challenges for teachers led to another walkout in 2018, followed by a rare successful supermajority vote to raise taxes again.

Last year's federal statistics for the 50 states rank Oklahoma 28th in population, 26th in K-12 students, 21st in SPED K-12 students, and 10th in percentage of K-12 students who are in special education. Almost one in five Oklahoma students now receives special education services.

Yes, it does sound harsh and cruel to talk as if hapless SPED students are villains. They are not. They deserve compassion for a condition that is not their fault. But have you ever considered the psychological impact on a healthy child when an autistic child erupts in class and turns over all the desks? If you don't know, the teacher is only allowed to lead all the other students out ("clear the room") till the episode passes. And then pick up the shattered pieces of the classroom, to say nothing of the other students' shattered nerves.

No wonder kind, caring, inspiring teachers are giving up and quitting in droves. They have an impossible job.

Back to the big question: What is happening to us? What did this to us? (Since I first wrote this, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his cabinet with a mission to "make America healthy again.")

Here's what a Tulsa doctor told me and others over lunch when asked what he thought of "the vaccine-autism controversy." Without a heartbeat's hesitation, the doctor said, "I had three or four young patients go autistic immediately after I gave them the MMR vaccine. And I knew that was the reason. So, I stopped giving that vaccine."

I was dumbfounded. When a medical professional is so sure of something based on his training and repeated observation that he permanently alters his practice of medicine, that's pretty compelling.

I e-mailed that to the Tulsa World the next day, urging them to interview the doctor. I thought I was handing our local newspaper a Pulitzer Prize on a platter. "Just his opinion," they scoffed. And later, the Tulsa World told me, "We don't publish anything that contradicts public health authorities so as not to confuse the public."

Can you imagine any other medical topic about which mere journalists would presume to know more than a doctor who was a repeated eye-witness? Well, thanks to Covid we all have a better idea of just how far "public health authorities" and their shills in the media ought to be trusted.

By the way, the doctor whom the Tulsa World declined to interview was Tom Coburn, who as a US Senator had earned nationwide respect for his integrity. Sadly, Dr. Coburn is no longer with us, but Tulsa has other doctors who assert that vaccines made their own child autistic.

The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, likes to cite "the Danish study" as proving that vaccines do not cause autism. In fact, that's not what was studied. Only the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine was considered. The most that can be concluded from the study is that a child was no more likely to get autism from the MMR vaccine than from some other cause - such as one of the many other vaccines given to toddlers? Meanwhile, more than a hundred other studies have suggested a link between vaccines and autism.

Post-Covid, are we ready yet to consider that the hotly debated crisis of public education is but a manifestation of the discussion-suppressed crisis of child health, and that vaccines just might be doing far more harm than good?

Are we ready to hit the brakes on "mainstreaming" so that those who can learn will not be traumatized by seeing their classrooms destroyed and their teachers attacked and harmed by students with neurological damage?

Are there any legislators in Oklahoma willing to spend a few days observing classrooms and talking to teachers - most especially to those who've left the profession - to grasp the absurdity of mainstreaming brain-damaged, diaper-wearing teenage students with normal students? And to grasp just how much more money the Legislature must provide so that special education students get the services they need?

HISTORICAL NOTES: I have added links to Newspapers.com and to NewsBank. NewsBank is an online service, available to Tulsa Library cardholders, which has text of Tulsa World articles from 1989 to the present and Tulsa Tribune articles from 1989 to the paper's demise on September 30, 1992. 1989 was when Newspaper Publishing Corp., which handled printing, circulation, and classifieds for the World and Tribune under their Joint Operating Agreement, began computerizing content. When the World refused to negotiate an extension to the JOA, the Tribune was sold to the World and was shut down. Consequently, the two papers' stories are mixed together in the same database, and all Tribune stories in the NewsBank database are labeled as Tulsa World. Using NewsBank and newspapers.com in combination, I was able to determine which stories mentioned by Scott Pendleton were in which newspaper. Unfortunately, there is still a 25-year gap in online access to the Tribune archive: Newspapers.com's Tribune holdings end in April 1964, and NewsBank's begin in January 1989.

The court case mentioned above was Timothy W. v. Rochester. The US Supreme Court denied certiorari to the Rochester, N. H., school district's appeal of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the case.