Supreme Court Ties 4-4 on Important Special Ed. Case

October 11, 2007

Supreme Court Ties 4-4 on Important Special Ed. Case

It doesn't happen often, but the US Supreme Court issued a split 4-4 decision today in a case that had the potential to require public school districts to pay private school tuition for special education students the districts are unable to educate on their own. The split decision means that no national precedent is set, and the lower-court decision in New York stands

The Court's indecision highlights an issue of growing importance in education circles: the responsiblity of public schools to educate all children. From personal experience, I can definitely testify that schools often times struggle to integrate special education services with general education. In our school, I would estimate that no fewer than 25% of our students ought to have IEP's, or Individualized Educational Programs, the federally required school response for a student with an educational or behavioral disability. However, only a handful of these students actually have an IEP, which means that the rest of them are not being served as well as they deserve. Instead of one-on-one instruction with a special education teacher, these students are being grouped in with classmates with much different ability levels--often times to the detriment of both groups.

Why do so many students not have the IEP's they need? One reason is that the process of evaluating students is very onerous. It can take as long as one year to figure out whether a child has a learning disability. Moreover, once a student gets an IEP it is the responsibity of the parent and the school to ensure that future teachers and schools have access to it--something that just hasn't happened in our school. There are also lots of perverse incentives for schools to put off evaluating students: the district has to foot the bill for all evaluation and resulting educating costs. Since special education students require lower student-teacher ratios, the impact of an evaluation finding a student with a severe learning disability can affect a school district's budget for years.

All of this points to some interesting questions about how NCLB and future iterations of the Individuals with Disabilites in Education Act will treat special ed and what level of government is financially responsible. One major source of debate is whether special education students should be included in evaluating a school as meeitng annual yearly progress under NCLB (or whether they should be expected to take the same kind of assessments). Many school officials argue that this is unfair to the school since special ed students typically make up only a small percentage of a school population. But special education advocates point out that if you take special ed students out of the accountability metrics the natural result will be an even worse under-servicing of these students.

The 4-4 New York case leaves even more ambiguity into the question of who is responsible when a school is not serving its special education students well enough. The lower court ruled that the school must indeed reimburse a parent for private school tuition if the school fails to educate the child itself. Now states will continue to have to make this decision on their own, without guidance from the federal court.

Aaron Tang is the Co-Director of Our Education, a non-profit organization working to build a national youth movement for quality education. He also teaches 8th grade history in Saint Louis, MO.