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I am a teacher in Canada, so I can't say much about the US Dept of Ed, but I can say a few things about how special ed works up here as a general reply to many of the comments below. Assume that whatever happens in Canada, it's probably worse in the US.
I work at a high school in a pretty affluent area. The affluence generally comes from remunerative blue collar work, not professional work. My school has over 1200 students and a third of them have special ed plans. There is virtually no violence at my school, no crime, students are polite and obedient. They just don't do or learn anything because of special ed plans.
These special ed plans are sometimes the result of tests carried out by private psychologists, sometimes the result of tests carried out by school psychologists, but are frequently ordered by family doctors. At least one was one sentence emailed by a paediatrician when the kid hadn't even been checked. None of these pathways is any worse than the others- they are all fraudulent.
They nearly all specify that the student needs extra time and a "quiet space" for tests because of anxiety.
The "quiet space" requirement is written up on demand because the kids know it will get them their own little room for tests. Everyone but the parents knows this, but if you try to tell the parents they freak out because the school isn't taking their child's special learning style seriously. Moreover, you can hear a pin drop during a test in even the rowdiest classes and so the requirement now demands "an alternative space." Last exam season, it was not possible to give every kid a private or semi-private room, so all the alternative space kids were sent to one big room, resulting in an "alternative space" that contained more students than any of the 4 exam rooms with containing the normal kids. All stakeholders found this acceptable.
The "extra time" requirement is invoked any time a kid starts to do poorly. "Well you didn't give her enough time to show what she really knows." This was originally intended for exams, although the extra time kids almost almost get the same 54% they would have gotten in half the time. By now, however, parents demand it for everything. If one attempts to explain that taking 40 minutes for a 20-minute assignment every day means 20 minutes of missed class time - a class wherein the student was already struggling- parents are baffled. Up until grade 10, it had never occurred to them that there might not be unlimited time in the school day. Any teacher who doesn't provide this time is summoned to A Meeting with the parents and the principal, and since the average teacher is Lisa Simpson, this prospect is so threatening that it never needs to happen.
The third most common "accomodation" is to have all written material read out loud by an aide. Since around 20% of 1200 students are officially entitled to this, it is not possible for a human aide to read to them all, and so text-to-speech programs are used. When text-to-speech is offered, students don't use it because the advantage of the human aide is that you can read the best aides for clues about the right answer and straight up ask the worst aides what they think the answer is. This is usually enough to get a passing mark. Refusing the text-to-speech but using an aide if available is an admission by the student that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Note that the most common exam to have read to you is the grade 12 English reading comprehension exam. All stakeholders find this acceptable.
The fourth most common accomodation is to have someone write out your essay for you as you dictate it, not because you are a poor handwriter (parents, students and other teachers react with horror at the suggestion that even a one-paragraph response could be completed by hand) but because you are a poor typist. When you ask the aides who do this what they did to help the student, they straight up admit to helping the student "organize their thoughts before putting them into words." The students find this to be the most helpful part of having a "scribe. " All stakeholders find this acceptable.
These are only the academic allowances. Almost every student with a special ed plan is entitled to "movement breaks." Weird in high school, but whatever. In practice this means that if they get bored they are allowed to wander the halls with their friends. Predictably, these sorts of kids get bored with schoolwork very quickly. They also get preferential seating. All are entitled to laptops to "help with notetaking" (no notes are ever taken). One specific kid must always have his computer and also no one is ever allowed to sit behind him. Doctor's orders. Any kid who appears to be indigenous is allowed to leave class literally whenever they want to get free cookies because "you can't learn if you're hungry." No other ethnicity is believed to get hungry.
All of this is million dollar (Canadian) Goodharting scheme. The point of special ed is to launder cheating so that students who would otherwise fail can pass classes that absolutely do not matter. The parents of an illiterate student in grade ten are more worried about her geography mark than about the fact that she can't read. When you ask the dedicated special ed teachers about this, they don't even understand the question because the idea of doing anything to a)verify that the special ed needs are legit and b)rectify or mitigate the disabilities that cause them is so far off their radar that they never imagine it. The special ed teacher's main job is compliance- making sure the other teachers give out the extra time and movement breaks.
Anti-school Motteposters might protest that school is hell/prison/etc and so if a kid can use these tricks to escape the drudgery and the power-tripping teachers then they should go for it. But these students are the ones schools are actually designed for. They are the lowest common denominator and will not learn to code (or whatever) with the time they save by gaming special ed. In fact, the special ed gaming costs them huge amounts of time. While sitting in class might be boring, sitting in the cheating room for 45 minutes so that no one questions why you finished the test so quickly is far more boring. Listening to a 50-year-old Phillipina immigrant trying to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic" on question 10 and realizing you have 50 questions left to endure is far more boring. Furthermore, the more one believes that school is a waste of time and money, the more one should rage at the fact that parents, whose attitude toward all of this reveals that they see school as no more than a daycare, continue to accept the billion-dollar form of daycare when they could just use the minimum-wage daycare across the street. And finally, the more you mistrust teachers (and you should) the more you should hate this system because it covers up their incompetence. When a third of kids show up in grade 10 apparently unable to read, no one goes to the grades 1-9 teachers to demand an explanation. "They all have special ed plans" is considered a sufficient explanation for everything.
That seems fairly similar to how things are in the US. I work in schools, but not in subjects with mandatory tests, but I get to see all the IEPs for the school, and they're mostly things about longer times for tests, breaking down instructions into shorter chunks, repeating instructions, preferential seating, and less stimulating environments (especially for testing).
The very high needs children who have a one on one aid are also on IEPs, but it's quite different situationally, even though their IEPs generally look more or less the same.
Perhaps it ultimately won't make much of a difference whether there's a national Department of Education or not, since the expectations are already there for all of the accommodations.
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When I was in Catholic school, I had very poor handwriting- and this was back when absolutely everything was expected to be cursive- so my teachers, rather than struggling, wrote a note asking the doctor to diagnose me with disgraphia(I think I spelled that right) so I could be put in the accommodations room for written work. The reason, of course, was so that my in-class essays could be typewritten. So far, so reasonable. But there was 1 accommodations room, everyone got the same thing. I remember extreme boredom from the extra time(we weren’t allowed to bring a book in- for reasons that seem understandable), but also if released to the accommodations room we had to stay there. I never witnessed anyone being read to; presumably Catholic schools just expelled students who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to read in a timely fashion.
The accommodation room consisted of booths facing the wall, with dividers and an open back. Each one was equipped with a special silent typewriter but the desk was otherwise bare. There were two aids that monitored it, and one private booth for proctoring oral exams. In the third grade I managed to get permission to bring one of the special silent typewriters into the conventional classroom for spelling tests, and then traipse back to print it off- this seemed a treat to me at the time.
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Wow -- I guess I've seen aspects of this around my kids' school but this all sounds quite extreme -- are you back East somewhere? In suburban BC I would find all of this quite disturbing.
I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.
Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.
Huh -- "come to BC" is all I can suggest then -- there's a certain amount of trans/FN pity indoctrination (which the kids mostly don't seem to be really buying), more seriously disabled kids per class than I'd like, and... that's about it.
A fourth grade teacher wanted to diagnose my son with ADD (we had none of it) but other than that I know of approximately 'accommodation' kids working the system as you describe.
Not a lot of immigrants in my (undisclosed) location, either.
I've worked in BC. It might be better, but you have to keep in mind that none of this is advertised or even visible unless your kid sucks at school or you go shopping for it. And I'm talking about high school- before high school, a lot of the problems are just passed along, year after year, because no one can fail. Once high school hits and suddenly kids can fail, the Goodharting begins.
My kids are in high school, and they would know if 50%+ of the class were being spirited away to a special room as test-taking accommodation.
It does seem like the new policy (since I was in high school) is more accommodating in terms of retaking tests you've blown, and handing in homework late -- but AFAICT this applies to everybody, and isn't an obviously terrible idea.
It's not 50%. It's like 20%. At school-wide exam time, in five exam rooms of 30 kids, if each room loses 6, then the "alternate space" contains 30 and each normal room contains 24. For regular tests it's 2 or 3 here and there.
As far as retaking tests, if you can retake them there is little incentive to study, so you can just blow them and it doesn't matter. Since it's a massive pain to make fair tests (about 8 hours for the kind of history tests that are expected in my region, for example) there are usually only two versions, so by the third attempt the kid has already seen all the questions and discussed them with everyone else. Besides the obvious problems, this also makes it impossible to go through the tests with the students and explain why the correct answers are correct, point out the tricky bits, etc.
Late homework is just as bad. Of course marks should just be a reflection of how well the kid knows things, but culturally this is an impossible attitude. Marks are the currency we use to pay students. The point of the homework (we can debate the effectiveness, but this is the intent) is to learn something at a certain point in the course sequence. The mark you get for the homework is the currency the school uses to get you to learn it at the correct time. (The mark you get on the test is the currency the school pays you for having actually learned it). When there is no penalty for late homework, kids let it pile up until literally the last day of the year, after the exam is complete, and then show up and try to desperately churn out a bunch of work from the first week to see what happens to their mark (no matter how many times you explain the math, they won't/can't calculate the effect). So the teacher can just waive the homework. This is the easiest option, but not fair to the kids who played along, and also punishes the kid trying to hand it in late, because now his tests count for much more (and he's no genius and he didn't do the homework, so his test marks are low). Or the teacher can accept all the homework, which is annoying because it is pointless. The tests and exams are over- the proof of learning is complete, so the evidence of the learning process is useless.
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