By Paul Moreno 

December 18 -- A reaction against the growth of special education is growing in Massachusetts. 

Massachusetts has over 150,000 students in special education programs, or nearly seventeen percent of the student population (and twenty-two percent in Boston).  This compares to eleven percent nationwide and is the highest rate in the nation. 

The state's effort to reform public education often conflicts with what Governor Cellucci has called the special education “time bomb.”  Although the state has provided vast increases in education funding, much of that increase has been absorbed by special education. 

An increasing number of people believe that the state’s special education law has gone awry, draining resources from regular education budgets and failing to educate the disabled.  Others criticize sloppy diagnosis of disabilities and the prescription of drugs to treat those disabilities.  A small number of people have attacked the concept that the disabilities treated by special education programs are disorders at all. 

If the expansion of the special education law is the cause of the rise of disability diagnoses and the overuse of drugs, and perhaps the stifling of independence and genius, then its curtailment is necessary. This would improve education for everyone and perhaps foster the creativity and individualism of American children that are often seen as our country’s greatest assets. 

The Law and Its Critics 
The sweeping 1974 law (Chapter 766) providing for special education in public schools was a national model.  Many people saw it as a remedy to an unjust state policy that provided public education only to “educable” children.  The law represented the extension of civil rights principles to the disabled, who were often stigmatized and kept out of sight. 

But many today think that the state’s large and expensive special education system is draining resources from the public school system as well as failing to educate the disabled.  According to a recent feature in the Worcester Telegram, some districts have cut regular education budgets by six percent since 1992, while overall education spending was increasing rapidly. 

Massachusetts' law requires “maximum possible development” of students with disabilities rather than the more modest “free and appropriate” education called for by the federal government and most states.  This standard turns special education in Massachusetts into an almost limitless entitlement. 

Proposition 2½'s cap on town property tax levies has squeezed local education budgets, and special education is mainly the responsibility of local school districts.  So as towns have cut back on regular education spending to increase special education spending, many parents have tried to get enhanced school services for their children by placing them in special education programs.  Special education programs that are supposed to serve students with disabilities are frequently used to serve “underachieving” students, according to Boston School Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant.  Special education advocates have called upon the state to increase its share of education spending to relieve this incentive. 

Eligibility standards for entry into special education programs are also loose, critics say, raising the proportion of students who enter these programs.  “Attention Deficit Disorder,” for example, is an increasingly common diagnosis that has caused great controversy. 

Governor Cellucci has called on the state legislature to reform Massachusetts’ special education law by dropping the “maximum possible development” standard and adopting the “free and appropriate” one.  The House of Representatives agreed with the governor on a reform bill last year, but the Senate did not. 

The spiraling costs of special education are diluting the effect of the 1993 Education Reform Act, the governor says, since the Act did not anticipate them. 

The Federation for Children with Special Needs says that adopting the federal standard will harm disabled students by lowering expectations of what they can achieve.  But the governor sees the change as a step toward applying “the same high standards for all of our kids.” 

Parents of children with disabilities are also unhappy with the system, particularly in its tendency to place their children in separate classrooms.  Seventeen percent of the state’s special education students are in separate classes, compared to twenty-three percent nationwide (the figure is almost fifty percent in Boston). 

The US Department of Education told the state that it was failing to monitor its special education programs in 1995.  In a follow-up review last month, parents complained that children have graduated from high school without knowing how to read or fill out a job application and that they have had to fight expensive legal battles to get their children placed in regular classes. 

Good Intentions Gone Awry 
Many of these problems were outlined in a book-length 1993 Pioneer Institute report, Special Education:  Good Intentions Gone Awry, by Dr. Edmund Moscovitch.  He concluded that the 1974 special education law had produced results that were the exact opposite of those it was enacted to accomplish.  More students were being placed in separate educational settings and they were being assigned on the basis of clinical diagnoses rather than according to individual needs. 

His study was especially hostile to the separation of disabled students.  Despite the wishes of parents and the intent of the law, he said, special education professionals “take it as a matter of faith that only separate classes can succeed.”  Moscovitch argues that all the empirical evidence shows that separation does not help, and probably harms, the children. 

Moscovitch confirmed the fear that, “The size and growth of special education in Massachusetts is eating away at the foundations of the state’s public education system and… not providing special needs children with the kind of education they deserve….” 

The basic problem, Dr. Moscovitch argues, is that special education is treated as a civil rights rather than as an educational issue, with all the legal rules and adversarial processes that mark contemporary civil rights enforcement. 

Moscovitch also explained how clinical psychologists have opened the door to expansion.  “The ambiguity in the definition of ‘special needs’ helps explain the increase in Massachusetts’ special education enrollment….  Studies have found that more than eighty percent of the student population would conceivably be classified as learning disabled under definitions currently in use….” 

The "Attention Deficit Disorder" Controversy 
Very few – perhaps one-sixth – of students in special education programs have the sort of severe physical disabilities, such as blindness, deafness or severe mental retardation, that used to render them “uneducable.”  Most have some sort of learning disability like dyslexia or attention deficit disorder (ADD). 

ADD, the most common and fastest-growing disability category, has caused the most controversy. About five million children in the US have been diagnosed with what is technically known as “attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder."  Dr. Russell Barkely, director of a clinic at the University of Massachusetts medical center in Worcester, describes ADD as “a developmental disorder of self-control.”  Children afflicted with it have short attention spans, are easily distracted and sometimes aggressive.  They have short time-horizons that make it difficult for them to consider long-term goals and consequences. 

The physiological basis of the disorder is uncertain, but some neurologists claim that people with ADD have smaller frontal lobes on the right sides of their brains, the area associated with executive or management functions.  And the disorder seems to respond to the administration of the drug Ritalin, a dopamine enhancer that regulates the chemical flow of the nervous system. 

Although many critics argue that ADD is too freely diagnosed as an excuse to get students into special programs, Dr. Barkley is among those who believe ADD is underdiagnosed. 

Educators like James Shillinglaw, the special education director for Barnstable, blames the liberal special education law for pushing kids into ADD diagnoses and medication.  The entire educational system suffers from these perverse incentives, he says.  “We’ve done so much accommodation, we’ve dumbed down the curriculum,” Shillinglaw told the Cape Cod Times, in its series of reports on ADD. 

Ritalin:  Cure for a Nation of Victims? 
The alleged overuse of Ritalin to control the behavior of youngsters draws the most criticism.  Many observers see hyperactivity disorders as the hallmark of “generation X,” and regard the increase of ADD cases as a cultural rather than a medical phenomenon. “About two million American school children and zooming numbers of adults (there are from six to ten million adults with ADD) are taking the cocaine-like medication to control their thoughts,” says Scripps Howard reporter John Long. 

“The ADD-type personality fits right into life in the high-tech, high-stim, fast-food, instant-gratification, short-attention-span, information-overloaded, overworked, media-saturated lifestyle that is America in the 1990s,” says Evan Schwartz in Wired magazine. 

“Ritalin may be indeed too effective,” Schwartz reports.  “Some psychiatrists are now beginning to worry that ADD is becoming somewhat of a fad, sort of how ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ became the yuppie flu a few years back.  They also worry that Ritalin is fast becoming another personality pill – like Prozac.” 

A California school psychologist says ADD is “one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the educational system, on parents, on their children.” A Florida child psychiatrist, Dennis Donovan, says, “ADD is a bogus diagnosis.  Parents and teachers are rushing like lemmings to identify a pathology.  The US is the world’s biggest consumer of nostrums, often for nonexistent problems.  Our current pathologizing of behavior leads to massive swelling of the ranks of the diseased, the dysfunctional, the disordered and the disabled.” 

This is the view that Charles Sykes outlined in A Nation of Victims (1992), where the psychological profession expands demand for its services by inventing diseases and the “helping professions” end up creating problems instead of solving them.  All human personality traits can, by some definition, be labeled “disorders.”  Workers now claim to be afflicted with “occupation-related stress disorder” which is, Sykes says, “little more than a restatement of the normal vagaries and strains of adult life.” 

“Only a psychiatrist pushes a patient off a cliff and says, ‘Aha, see how damaged he is?’” says Donovan. 

Adding to the suspicion that ADD is a cultural rather than a medical problem is the fact that it is a distinctly American phenomenon.  “The idea that children who don’t attend or don’t sit still in school have a mental disorder is not entertained by most British clinicians,” the Medical Post reported last year. 

The Individualist View:  ADD-as-Genius 
Some critics have concluded that ADD is not a disorder at all.  These people believe that ADD is actually a sign of genius and a mark of a free spirited drive-to-explore that benefits society.  Thomas Hartman, for example, presents ADD as a “hunter” trait that does not fit into a “farmer-dominated” world in his book, Hunting for Reasons in the Past and Present. 

Proponents of this theory argue that Einstein, Beethoven, Mozart, Da Vinci, Churchill as well as Cher, Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg all had ADD. 

They regard the psychological-clinical effort to treat ADD as an authoritarian attempt to impose control on creative and entrepreneurial personalities.  These critics see the public school as the principal instrument used to reduce individualists to conformity. 
 

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