CHILDREN IN SPECIAL-EDUCATION

Twenty-five years ago educational services for children with disabilit ies were frequently fragmented, underfunded, highly segregated, and un reliable. Public schools were often ill prepared and unwilling to prov ide special and necessary services to children with disabilities. Over the past two decades, efforts to provide an appropriate education for children with disabilities in America-through a series of state statu tes, federal court cases, and federal laws-have led to the development of a large special education system to address the needs of these chi ldren. This journal issue focuses on the development of that special e ducation system and examines its components, its strengths and weaknes ses, and the areas in which improvement is needed. This Child Indicato rs article examines some of the key federal statistics on the provisio n of special education services for children with disabilities. Statis tics have played a part in shaping special education policy. A high-li ght of congressional hearings in the 1970s was the finding that 2.5 mi llion children with disabilities in this country were not receiving an education appropriate to their needs, while almost 2 million others w ere receiving no education at all.(1) As described by Martin and Marti n in this journal issue, congressional response to such statistical ev idence of underservice of the disabled included passage of Public Law 94-142, the Education of Al Handicapped Children Act, which required t hat all students with disabilities receive a free public education app ropriately tailored to their individual needs. A key element of this s tatute and its successors was that federal funding be provided to stat es for special education services based on state reports of the number of students with disabilities receiving special education and related services. This and other aspects of federal legislation have fostered the development of a data collection system to monitor the provision of special education services to disabled students by local and state educational agencies. This article examines data collected by the fede ral Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) on the identification and classification of special education students. These data are used throughout this journal issue, but a key question raised in this artic le is whether these data can be used to determine If the special educa tion system is adequately and appropriately serving the nation's popul ation of disabled children. The analysis suggests that the OSEP count data, by themselves, do not indicate how many children have disabiliti es and what types of disabilities they have; and although the data qua ntify the number of children receiving services, they cannot be used t o evaluate whether the services received are appropriate for those chi ldren's needs. The federal data do, however, show large variations in the numbers and proportions of children who are served in special educ ation programs over time and across jurisdictions. OSEP data indicate a large increase in the number of children served in special education programs since the 1976-17 school year. Much of the increase appears to be the result of an increase in the number of children classified a s having specific learning disabilities, a classification that is not well defined and is under considerable debate. Despite the overall gro wth trend, the proportion of children who are in special education var ies by state, from 5% of children in special education in Hawaii to 11 % in Massachusetts. in addition, different states use different classi fication systems to describe children in special education programs. B ecause of these differences, population-based data on the prevalence o f disabilities among children would be helpful in determining the actu al number of children who might benefit from special education service s. The prevalence data could be compared with the OSEP count data to a ssess in gross terms the adequacy of special education services delive red to children with disabilities. But because of methodological probl ems, available national surveys do not provide reliable information on the prevalence of different conditions.