Yeah, Not a Surprise

It appears that the New York State Education Department has finally taking action against special education fraud, and Orthodox yeshivas' strong opposition to reform.

Call me a cynic, but my guess is that said yeshivas were gaming the system to get undeserved state support:

In an effort to combat fraud, the New York State Education Department yesterday adopted a new rule that will change how special education funding is distributed for services to students who attend New York City’s non-public schools, including yeshivas.

The change comes after a 2022 New York Times report that found New York City was paying over $350 million a year “to private companies that provide services in Hasidic and Orthodox schools.” Since proposing the change in May, NYSED officials have worked to allay fears that the rule would not just punish fraudsters, but also make it harder for people who genuinely need special services to access them.

At their meeting on Monday, NYSED’s governing body, the Board of Regents, adopted the change as an emergency rule which will go into immediate effect before the start of the school year.

The subhead of the Times story pretty much says it all, "New York has paid companies millions of dollars to help children with disabilities in religious schools. But the services are not always needed or even provided."

That's a nice way of saying, "Fraud."

………

The rule targets a special education service called “special education teacher support services,” known as SETSS, which is similar to tutoring and only offered in New York City. According to the 2022 Times report, about 80% of requests for such services came from Orthodox districts in the prior year. The service, which is often one-to-one and takes place outside the classroom, is ill-defined and thus vulnerable to fraud, according to the Times.

The city is willing to pay up to $125 per hour for this service, but many tutors charge more than that, forcing parents who want to hire them to go through the complaint process that NYSED now seeks to limit.

According to Lloyd Donders, a lawyer who represents parents in such cases, the standard rate for the service is $42, but since “you can’t actually get someone at that rate,” the city has an “enhanced” rate of $125. “I don’t think the DOE puts up a fight unless you ask them for more than $125,” Donders told Shtetl.

At a public meeting on Monday, NYSED Commissioner Betty Rosa said too many people are profiting from rates that go far beyond $125 an hour.

I'm thinking that some private schools might have arrangements with the tutors.

It may not be something as blatant as kickbacks, it might be a way for schools to supplement salaries of their employees for state money, but I would not rule out the former.

Yeah, This Stinks

In Jacksonville, Illinois, there is a school for disabled children called the Garrison School which has the distinction of calling in police to handle discipline issues more than any other school in the nation.

The reliance on cops for school discipline has, and continues to be, a real problem in US education, but the fact that the worst school for this is a school for disabled children is a disgrace.

It is also an indication that the people in the building are incompetent, and have little or no knowledge about how to address the unique needs of their students:

On the last street before leaving Jacksonville, there’s a dark brick one-story building that the locals know as the school for “bad” kids. It’s actually a tiny public school for children with disabilities. It sits across the street from farmland and is 2 miles from the Illinois city’s police department, which makes for a short trip when the school calls 911.

Administrators at the Garrison School call the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. And because staff members regularly press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — officers have arrested students more than 100 times in the last five school years, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found. That is an astounding number given that Garrison, the only school that is part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, has fewer than 65 students in most years.

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers the last time data was collected nationwide. That school year, 2017-18, more than half of all Garrison students were arrested.

………

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers the last time data was collected nationwide. That school year, 2017-18, more than half of all Garrison students were arrested.

………

The students enrolled each year at Garrison have severe emotional or behavioral disabilities that kept them from succeeding at previous schools. Some also have been diagnosed with autism, ADHD or other disorders. Many have experienced horrifying trauma, including sexual abuse, the death of parents and incarceration of family members, according to interviews with families and school employees.

Getting arrested for behavior at school is not inevitable for students with such challenges. There are about 60 similar public special education schools across Illinois, but none comes anywhere close to Garrison in their number of student arrests, the investigation found.

………x`

In response to questions from reporters about Garrison, Illinois Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said the frequent arrests there were “concerning.” An Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson said a state team visited the school this month to examine “potential violations” raised through ProPublica and Tribune reporting.

The team confirmed an overreliance on police and, as a result, the state will provide training and other professional development, spokesperson Jackie Matthews said. 

………

The Tribune and ProPublica documented and analyzed 415 of Garrison’s “police incident reports” dating to 2015 and found the school has called police, on average, once every two school days.

The reports, written by school staff and obtained through public records requests, describe in detail what happened up until the moment police were called. These narratives, along with recordings of 911 calls, show that school workers often summon police not amid an emergency but because someone at the school wants police to hold the child responsible for their behavior.

………

Warning signs that Garrison was punishing students with policing have been there for years, waiting for someone to take notice.

Since as far back as 2011, the federal government has published data online about police involvement and arrests at schools. That year, the data showed, Garrison called police on 54% of its students and 14% were arrested. Three subsequent publications of similar data show the arrest rate climbing each time — until, in 2017-18, more than half of Garrison’s students were arrested.

It appears that staff at the school have routinely been using police and the threat of arrest as a means of retaliation against students who they find insufficiently deferential.

The people being marched out of the building in handcuffs should not be the students.

Why Are These Folks Not in Jail?

It appears that some schools are routinely fitting disabled students with shock belts.
This is evil beyond belief:

An international body entrusted with upholding human rights across the Americas has called for an immediate ban on the controversial use of electric shocks on severely disabled children in a school outside Boston.

The Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, is believed to be the only school in the world that routinely inflicts high-powered electric shocks as a form of punishment on vulnerable children and adults. About 47 of its students are currently subjected to the “treatment”, which involves individuals being zapped with electric currents far more powerful than those discharged by stun guns.

Disability rights campaigners have tried for decades to stop the practice, which the school’s administrators call “aversive therapy”. So far the institution has managed to fend off all opposition, arguing that electric shocks are an acceptable way of discouraging harmful habits.

Now the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued a rare formal notice known as “precautionary measures” that calls for immediate cessation of the electric shocks.

In a seven-page resolution, the Washington-based panel says that the practice poses a “serious impact on the rights” of the vulnerable children at the school, “particularly on their right to personal integrity which may be subjected to a form of torture”.

The commission cites the work in 2013 of the then UN monitor on torture, Juan Méndez, who found JRC’s electric shock technique was a potential violation of the UN convention against torture and other international laws. It also notes several federal agencies and professional groups have called for a ban on “aversive techniques” on grounds they can cause psychological trauma.

They are torturing students, and it must be stopped.

Can We Please Give them Back to Mexico? (Part CCCXLIV)

Texas is at it again. It is now arbitrarily denying special ed services to meet a quota set by state regulators:

During the first week of school at Shadow Forest Elementary, a frail kindergartner named Roanin Walker had a meltdown at recess. Overwhelmed by the shrieking and giggling, he hid by the swings and then tried to escape the playground, hitting a classmate and biting a teacher before being restrained.

The principal called Roanin's mother.

"There's been an incident."

Heidi Walker was frightened, but as she hurried to the Humble school that day in 2014, she felt strangely relieved.

She had warned school administrators months earlier that her 5-year-old had been diagnosed with a disability similar to autism. Now they would understand, she thought. Surely they would give him the therapy and counseling he needed.

Walker knew the law was on her side. Since 1975, Congress has required public schools in the United States to provide specialized education services to all eligible children with any type of disability.

But what she didn't know is that in Texas, unelected state officials have quietly devised a system that has kept thousands of disabled kids like Roanin out of special education.

………

More than a dozen teachers and administrators from across the state told the Chronicle they have delayed or denied special education to disabled students in order to stay below the 8.5 percent benchmark. They revealed a variety of methods, from putting kids into a cheaper alternative program known as "Section 504" to persuading parents to pull their children out of public school altogether.

"We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs," said Jamie Womack Williams, who taught in the Tyler Independent School District until 2010. "It was all a numbers game."

………

"It's extremely disturbing," said longtime education advocate Jonathan Kozol, who described the policy as a cap on special education meant to save money.

"It's completely incompatible with federal law," Kozol said. "It looks as if they're actually punishing districts that meet the needs of kids."

In a statement, Texas Education Agency officials denied they had kept disabled students out of special education and said their guideline calling for enrollments of 8.5 percent was not a cap or a target but an "indicator" of performance by school districts. They said state-by-state comparisons were inappropriate and attributed the state's dramatic declines in special educations enrollments to new teaching techniques that have lowered the number of children with "learning disabilities," such as dyslexia.

In fact, despite the number of children affected, no one has studied Texas' 32 percent drop in special education enrollment.

………

There is no agreed-upon number for what percentage of kids have a disability that requires special education services.

The best approximation may be 15.4 percent. That's how many U.S. kids ages 2-8 whom doctors have diagnosed with a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder, according to a March 2016 study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's a long read, and it is infuriating.

H/t Diane Ravitch.

This is So Not a Surprise

In news that surprise no one, Eve Moskowitz's Success Academy has been sued for systematic discrimination against disabled students:

When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a "Got to Go" list, the company's head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.

"Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law," Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. "These children deserve better."

………

When it was revealed that a Brooklyn school run by the Success Academy charter network was systematically pushing out struggling and disabled students identified on a "Got to Go" list, the company's head Eva Moskowitz said the list was the work of a rogue principal, unrepresentative of any broader policy. Critics of the lucrative, influential 36-school network have long alleged that it maintains high test scores by pressuring parents of students with disabilities to pull them from its schools. A federal civil rights complaint filed yesterday by 13 parents along with politicians and advocacy groups bolsters the case, alleging that difficulties faced by special-needs kids are actually the result of a company-wide policy that has been in effect for years.

"Success Academy operates schools in some of the most distressed neighborhoods of this city and receives considerable public funding but fails to serve students with disabilities in accordance with the law," Legal Services NYC direct Raun Rasmussen said in a statement. "These children deserve better."

 ………

The other cases all echo this one, with some variations—some parents have already withdrawn their child, one was expelled in his fourth year, and some parents, like Jackson, are still fighting to receive special education within Success schools.

Each set of allegations involves school administrators ignoring or downplaying disability diagnoses, and when confronted with them, failing to provide such support measures as small classes or paraprofessionals. When behavioral problems arise with the inadequately accommodated special-needs child, rather than reassessing, the schools allegedly suspend the kids, force parents to pick them up early, and in some cases, call paramedics to take them to emergency rooms.

 ………

Meanwhile, the State University of New York, which licenses charter schools, is planning to investigate Success's alleged pressure tactics, according to a New York Post report.

This is how charter schools work, because this is what we pay them for.

Essentially, they get paid for high test scores, and the easiest way to do this is to make sure that under-performing or difficult students never enroll, and to make sure that those who do enroll leave.

Now We Know Why Bill DiBlasio Turned Down a few Charter Applications

You may have read about the battle between Bill DiBlasio and political hack/Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz over the allocation of public spaces for some of her schools, with New York Governor and complete tool, Mario Cuomo rather unsurprisingly taking her side.

What you may not be aware of is that the DiBlasio administration approved 36 of 45 applications, and 5 of 8 for Success Academy.

What you may also not know is that the requests by Moscowitz would have taken space from a puclic school literally doing therapy for disabled students in the halls:

From now on, she will apply four criteria in reviewing proposed co-locations. She won’t put elementary and high schools in the same building. She won’t keep approving small schools that only require more high-paid supervisors to run them. She won’t approve co-locations that require expensive renovations of school properties.

And, most importantly, she won’t allow reduced services or seats for special education students.

“These are the most vulnerable and highest needs kids in our system,” Fariña said, but “they were the first kids to lose space or be moved” under the prior administration.

No one is happier about her policy change than the parents and staff at the Mickey Mantle school, a program for autistic and emotionally disturbed children that was slated to lose space and seats to the proposed expansion of Success Academy.

“Our school already lost a music, a theater arts and an art room the past few years,” said Barry Daub, principal at Mickey Mantle. Those losses happened to make room for Harlem Success 1, launched in the same building in 2006.

Mickey Mantle would have lost enrollment and even more space if Fariña had approved the Success Academy expansion.

“We would be doing physical and occupational therapy in the halls,” Daub said..

(emphasis mine)

Charter advocates don't care.

More often than not, they do not serve the disabled community.  They lack the resources to do so, and they have absolutely no interests in developing those capabilities.

They just want to make sure that the senior executives, and their Wall Street backers stay on the gravy train. (Moscowitz, who has fewer than 7000 students in her schools, is paid more than the New York City Schools Chancellor, who manages more than a million students)

Another Nail in the Anti-Vaxxers Delusions

Researchers have determined that indicatations of autism are present in children in the first 6 months of life:

An early indication of autism can be identified in babies under six months old, a study suggests.

US researchers, writing in Nature, analysed how infants looked at faces from birth to the age of three.

They found children later diagnosed with autism initially developed normally but showed diminished eye contact - a hallmark of autism - between two and six months of age.

A UK expert said the findings raise hope for early interventions.

In the study, researchers led by Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta used eye-tracking technology to measure the way babies looked at and responded to social clues.

They found infants later diagnosed with autism had shown a steady decline in attention to the eyes of other people from the age of two months onwards, when watching videos of natural human interactions.

Lead researcher Dr Warren Jones told BBC News: "It tells us for the first time that it's possible to detect some signs of autism in the first months of life.

"These are the earliest signs of autism that we've ever observed."

I'm not surprised by this study.

My wife pegged Charlie as being on the spectrum in his first week outside of the womb. She knew something was different in the first 5 minutes.

Of course, she is a trained special educator, so it's in her profession.

What this means is that autism is present well before when know-nothings claim that vaccinations "cause" autism.

Can we please stop listening to Jenny McCarthy Now?

This Cracked Me Up

I showed this to Charlie, who is on the spectrum, and he found it hysterically funny too.

The autism spectrum is orthogonal to a sense of humor.

H/t Autism: Different, Not Less.

OK, SNL Still Has It

Saturday Night Lives take on an "Even Tempered Apology from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel":

Congress Passes Hate Crimes Legislation

Obama is expected to sign it.

One surprise:

The 68-29 vote was a victory for civil rights groups that have long sought to expand the federal statute beyond attacks motivated by religion, race, color or national origin.

The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, includes penalties for assaults based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity.

(emphasis mine)

For some reason, I thought that disability was already a protected class.

In fact, Sharon,* who does special ed consulting and advocacy, thought that the disabled were already a protected class too.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Deep Thought

I was talking with Sharon^* about her special education consulting and advocacy business today, and told her about some friends of mine who raise Morgan horses, who would front load purchases before a given year, and then end load purchases after the end of the year, so as to create a profit every 5 years or so, because otherwise the IRS would call it a hobby, and would not allow them to deduct expenses from other income.

Then I told her that this was completely different from her business.

Then I thought about it, and told her it was completely the same as her business: Both people have to shovel loads of horsesh$#, only hers comes from school administrators.

BTW, if you kid has unmet special education needs, you want to contact her, she's a pit bull, Or maybe a Tazmanian Devil, for her clients.....

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Well, This is Disturbing

Seriously, it actually made me feel a bit weepy.

An Interesting Development in Autism Spectrum Conditions

It appears that there is a genetic link between nicotine addiction and autism, in the neurexin-1 gene, which creates an excess of neurexin-1 beta protein, which aids in nerve cells linking up with nicotine like substances to neuro receptors, in people addicted to nicotine.

It turns out that the levels of the protein, and the gene, are deficient in some people on the Autism spectrum.

It raises some interesting questions, though at this point I would be very cautious, and I think that a first step would be to compare smoking and non smoking populations of people on the spectrum.

The fact that quack physician Jeff Bradford has apparently already started putting nicotine patches on his patients should not be viewed as significant by anyone except, perhaps, for malpractice lawyers.

Giving small children nicotine is an invitation to injury or death, because a nicotine overdose can kill someone very quickly.

H/T A Photon In The Darkness.

Family Bragging Rights

My daughter, Natalie is on the “Principal’s Honor Roll” at Franklin Middle school, which means that she is maintaining an above “B” average.

Considering the challenges Natalie has had, she had problems learning to read and she is still on an IEP,^* this is a very pleasant development.

We took her out to an Italian restaurant that she rather likes by way of reward.

^*Individualized education plan, a personalized plan to address the specific needs of a special education student.

Stop Jenny McCarthy

There is a website about Jenny McCarthy, and the lies that she spreads regarding conditions on the Autism spectrum.

I have a child on the Autism Spectrum (Aspergers), and my wife noted signs at birth, and had specific concerns about a condition on the spectrum before he turned 3, but my anecdote is no more valid than McCarthy's where she claims that vaccines cause autism, and that her son "recovered".

Neither happen in Autism. The data is clear: there is no correlation between Autism Spectrum disorders and vaccines.

While correlation does not prove causation, lack of correlation does prove lack of causation, and this has been proved dozens of times.

As to "curing" people on the spectrum, you can't, as is the case with children "recovering" from Autism. They aren't broken, they are different, and so they need to learn how to bridge the gap with the rest of the world.

Measles Cases Skyrocket Because of Bad, Ignorant Parents

Yep, it's those vaccination flat Earthers again, with measles cases to date this year being three times more than all of last year.

I will note that a significant number of the cases are infants who are too young to get the vaccine, so the loss of herd immunity because of these harms the helpless whose bear no blame.

There is no correlation between thimerosal in particular, or vaccines in general, and autism.

While correlation does not prove causation, lack of correlation does prove causation.

What's more the (hopefully soon to be stripped of his license) doctor who came up with the theory has a history of making up his own facts, and has a financial interest in alternatives to vaccines.

My earlier posts on the subject here.

I will note that my son is on the autism spectrum, he has Aspergers, and my wife, a special education professional trained to look for such things, spotted the first indicators in his first weeks of life. No vaccine problems there.

Vaccine Junk Science: the NY Times Almost Gets It Right

When they have the following paragraph in a story on an Autism-Thimerosal law suit:

Every major study and scientific organization to examine the issue has found no link between vaccination and autism, but the parents and their advocates have persisted.

The get close to being right...Except that it's paragraph 3, and it should be in paragraph 1.

A core fact on the vaccine stupidity is that there is no correlation between vaccines or Thimerosal and conditions on the Autism spectrum. Period, full stop, check my earlier posts.

It is a fraud put forward by an unethical doctor.

My Son's IEP Meeting Tuesday

As I've mentioned before, my son has Aspergers syndrome, a condition on the Autism Spectrum^*, and for most of the past three years has been in a private placement, the Forbush School, a part of Shepard Pratt Health System as a result.

While this has helped him quite a bit in dealing with his problems, which are almost exclusively behavioral/social and not academic^†, but he's also very high functioning, an IQ of around 135.^‡

So while Forbush has been good for him in terms of a social experience, academically, even with the very small classes they have there, he has increasingly found the academics not sufficiently challenging.

The problem with Baltimore County Public schools has always been that we have been unable to get sufficient support, and so we lawyered up, and he got placed at Forbush.

While Baltimore County could have supplied the necessary services, for less money than the Forbush tuition, they simply wouldn't.

So, while we were all on the same page about wanting him to go back to the mainstream public school, we were concerned that he would be placed in Behavior Learning Support (BLS) class for kids with severe behavior problems, which would have him in a situation with older kids who are behind him academically, which would be the worst of all possible worlds.

So, this Tuesday, we had a meeting to get our ducks in a row for him going to Chatsworth, an area elementary school which is set up with the most special ed resources.

It was a four hour meeting, and we went through the 25 pages in his IEP. Two goals were dropped, because the staff from Chatsworth found them redundant, and there were some minor rewrites, but basically we now have a situation where he will get the support he needs

He will start at Chatsworth on Monday, and he's both nervous and psyched. He's already spent about 5 half-day and 2 full-day visits to Chatsworth and sat in all the classes hew will be in, basically the Gifted and Talented (G&T) program, which is good, as he started to complain about what he calls, "Boring stuff he already knows."


^*There is some dispute between the experts as to whether it is a mild form of Autism, or a separate condition that is on the spectrum. Me, I don't care, I just want to make sure that he has the services he needs.
^†He has a bit of a problem writing long essays, because he can't keep the idea in his head long enough to physically get it out onto paper. If he dictates, he's fine though.
^‡Just today, I was explaining how X-rays work, and discussing a brief primer on wavelength and frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. We were at the Chiropractors, and they have an X-Ray machine there, and he was curious. He picked it all up in about 30 seconds. Like I've said before, scary smart.

It Appears That the Texas School System Really Sucks

Because no one in that entire state can count.

They still haven't finished the tally of the caucuses there. In fact, they don't expect to be done before the 29th.

Charlie's IEP Meeting

Well, Charlie had an individualized education plan (IEP) meeting today.

There is consensus, that he should be moved from Forbush, a private placement to Chatsworth, which is in the public school system.

Charlie is on the Autism Spectrum (Aspergers), but he's also talented and gifted, he rates at least a grade above his age in reading and math, and Forbush, with its focus on the more severely disabled, has difficulties in providing sufficient enrichment.

The problem is that Chatsworth is still building its Aspergers program, and he would be the only person at his level in the class if he moved in the next month, and since his issues, except for hand writing, are with social interactions, and not academics, he would either be alone, or in a class of 20+ other students (with an aide) if he went over now, so we are suggesting that it be done in September, while BCPS wants it sooner (they are paying for Forbush, which is expensive).

At this point, they want to update some of his tests, so that they can make sure that he is in a properly challenging situation, as he is scary smart.

It looks right now like he will be doing some more visits to Chatsworth to see how he handles everything.

One thing disturbed me at the meeting. His teacher looked so young. When did that happen? Teachers used to be older than me.