Special Education - At What Cost to General Education?

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Special Education - At What Cost to General Education?

by B. ParrishThe CSEF Resource, Winter 1999-2000

Center for Special Education Finance

Questions about the impact of rising costs of special education on general

education programming are among the most contentious issues faced by the

public education community today. In " Irreconcilable Differences? Defining

the Rising Conflict Between Regular and Special Education, " Meredith and

Underwood (1995) raise the issue of resource competition between these two

groups of students as a major concern. They conclude that " the cost of

educating disabled students ... is threatening our ability to educate

nondisabled students in many districts and, therefore, is placing the entire

public education edifice potentially at risk. "

In Vermont, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Special Education Costs, set up by

the Legislature in 1998, concluded that " the cost of special education is

rising at a rate that Vermont cannot sustain ... cost-containment must become

a system-wide priority. "

In California, the Governor currently faces claims against the state from

school districts for $1.9 billion for insufficiently funding special

education. As described by the Los Angeles Times (1999, November 1), " finding

ways to pay for special education services has become a crisis in many school

districts as numbers of qualified students have increased. Since 1990, when

Riverside County schools first sued, the population of special education

students has almost doubled statewide. "

Similarly, Wisconsin's recent Evaluation of Special Education Funding (1999)

reports rising special education costs of nearly 37 percent between 1992-93

and 1997-98 and special education enrollments growing by 19 percent in

relation to public school enrollment increases of just over 6 percent.

These developments seem to support the findings of Rothstein and Miles (1995)

in their well-publicized report, Where's the Money Gone? Analyzing nine

school districts between 1967 and 1991, they found that expenditures going to

general education had dropped from 80 percent to 59 percent, while the share

going to special education had climbed from 4 percent to 17 percent. In a

similar analysis of spending in New York, Lankford and Wyckoff (1999) found

that the share of resources spent on general education teaching fell from 53

percent in 1979-80 to 49 percent in 1992-93, while the share of resources

spent on special education more than doubled - from 5 to 11 percent.

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Mike Savory

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