TEA ups special ed numbers but lags nation
Federal agency faults dyslexia evaluations
The percentage of Texas schoolchildren receiving special education services has increased, but the state remains below the national average five years after lifting an arbitrary cap that prevented thousands of qualified kids from receiving services.
Since Texas lifted the cap on the percentage of students who can be identified to receive such services, the special education participation rate in the state increased from 8.8 percent in the 2011-12 school year to 11.3 percent in 2020-21, according to numbers the Texas Education Agency presented Thursday to a state commission on special education funding. The national average was 14 percent in the 2019-20 school year, the most recent available figures show.
A 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation found TEA for years had penalized districts for providing special education to more than 8.5 percent of their students, an arbitrarily devised number that resulted in hundreds of thousands of kids being denied services to which they were entitled. TEA scrapped the cap in 2017.
There were approximately 604,973 students receiving special education services in the 2020-21 school year, compared to 498,320 in 2017-18, TEA officials said in this week’s presentation.
“That is undoubtedly higher today as we speak,” Education Commissioner Mike Morath told the group of legislators Thursday. “There’s been a massive increase in the identification of students.”
The state performed the most initial special education evaluations in the nation during the 201920 school year, TEA numbers show.
The state education agency enacted the now-eradicated limit in 2004 when faced with a $1.1 billion state budget cut. Lawmakers filed 16 bills, including one to prohibit the state from capping special education enrollment and another
to increase funding for services for children with autism and kids with dyslexia, following the Chronicle's reporting.
On Thursday, Morath credited the Legislature's changes for driving improvements in recent years.
When he started in 2016, he said, TEA had 20 employees focused on special education support and oversight. There now are 82 such employees.
Last August, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to TEA saying the agency had failed to implement the majority of the corrective actions it had pledged to comply with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The letter also told the agency that if it did not comply with the law, it risked losing grant funds for special education.
In September, TEA met with the Education Department's Office of Special Education Programs to clarify its expectations, according to Morath. OSEP told the state agency in October that its documentation again was insufficient and imposed new conditions. OSEP provided TEA with technical assistance in November to reach the goals set for the state.
In Thursday's presentation, Morath outlined the steps TEA is taking to meet federal compliance, adding the state has a lot more work to do to “honor our moral commitment to children.”
Parent advocates agree Texas still has a long way to go, especially when it comes to serving children with dyslexia.
“Until they wholeheartedly make changes and loopholes are eliminated it's still a broken system,” said Robbi Cooper, an advocate for Decoding Dyslexia Texas.
OSEP said in August that Texas school districts were not promptly referring children for dyslexia evaluations and that it was concerned with “TEA's lack of monitoring and supervision” of districts that were failing to properly evaluate those students.
OSEP also said state officials have an apparent misunderstanding that kids with dyslexia could not be evaluated under IDEA. Parents reported to the federal agency instances of their children with dyslexia only being evaluated under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Cooper said though great gains were made when TEA revised its Dyslexia Handbook in 2021, some “critical gray areas” remain, including not evaluating students who may have the disability under IDEA. Without evaluations under that designation, students with dyslexia do not receive Individualized Education Programs, which hold teachers and schools accountable for following specific learning plans for each child.
“We hear constantly of parents being dismayed because they are told their child is not eligible,” she said. “Until that changes, there is still a big hole in the system. You can't go halfway and say that it's fixed.”
Morath said more dedicated support was needed for dyslexia evaluations and highlighted some efforts already underway, including $50 million in state funding for training and licensing diagnosticians and a $50 million grant to reimburse districts for evaluation costs.
Daphne Corder, an advocate and a mother of a student with dyslexia, said even with recent changes, children and families, especially those of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, still are being negatively impacted by the state's policies on educating kids with dyslexia.
“As a parent advocate, I have a unique perspective,” she said. “I can see the patterns and I can see that (some) schools are still not compliant.”