1 in 6

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has just released results from a study that examined rates of disability in children ages 3-17, over a 12 year period from 1997-2008.  (You can read the whole report online here, but you'll have to buy a subscription to Pediatrics: CDC Report in Pediatrics).  Here's the high level summary:

• Between 1997 and 2008, the number of children with a disability rose from 8.2 million to roughly 10 million, or from less than 13% to more than 15% of all kids between the ages of 3 and 17. 
• The disabilities included in these numbers include autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, seizures, stuttering or stammering, hearing loss, blindness, or intellectual disability (formerly known as mental retardation).
• Nearly twice as many boys as girls had a disability.

That's higher than you thought, right? We're talking about significant numbers of kids in our school systems who need help in accessing their education.  I can tell you, though, that budgets for special education services - or for general education, for that matter - have not increased to keep up with these trends.



So, to what do we ascribe these increases?  The researchers suggested that, as you might expect, there's both an increase in diagnosing disorders like ADHD, ADD, and autism - but there also seem to be some genuine increases in the rates of those conditions (due to, perhaps, a rise in older first-time moms, and/or better outcomes for premature babies).

As far as the increased rates in boys, some folks believe that boys are just labeled as ADHD when they're just being boys, and because teachers can't deal with disruptive behavior when they have to manage large class sizes.  This is an interesting problem.  One of the one hand, I'm bothered by the idea that we, as a society, are labeling rambunctious boys as having ADHD and medicating them so that they can sit quietly along with 30 other kids.  What we should be doing, instead, is figuring out the way in which these kids most effectively learn, and then support that learning method - rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all mold.

On the other hand, if we label these kids as having ADHD, then they are more likely entitled to special education services under the IDEA, and can hopefully receive that individualized education plan that will help them learn.

And this again, my friends, is the catch-22 of the educational system.  Your kid is labeled as "disabled"?  They're entitled to accommodations and supports.  Your kid isn't labeled as "disabled"?  They're out of luck.

But given the number of kids that have some kind of developmental disability - fairly labeled or otherwise - maybe it's time we rethought how we're drawing lines between special education and general education.  Does it really make sense to view 1 in 6 students as "other", or different, or somehow outside the general education system?  I think not.