[WS:] This seems consistent with what my wife, who is a special education resource teacher, tells me. However, the "parental instigation" seems to be mainly a middle class phenomenon, as parents attempt to manipulate the system to get preferential treatment for their kids. This preferential treatment may range from special acommodations at exams to sending thier kids to private schools on the taxpayer's dime.
With the low socio-economic status kids the story is somewhat different. Schools who want to improve thieir statistics to meet the No Child left Behind requirements often do so by dumping kids with behavioral problems or poor grades - and to do so, they claim that such kids have learning disabilities.
However, she also says that there are many children with genuine learning disablities who do not get services they need due to budget cuts and administration's insistence to follow the curriculum set for general education population. That is, everyone has to pass standardized test, special and general education students alike, and if they do not, school can be penalized under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Wojtek
On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 12:59 PM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Carrol writes: 'I had students who wanted treatment but whose parents'
> response was "No child of mine is crazy!" That factor would suggest the
> incidence of mental illness is STILL under- rather than over-diagnoesed.'
>
> I had the opposite experience, students claiming to have attention deficit
> disorder and therefore needing extra time on exams - in that they were
> supported by their parents. I would be sceptical about a statistic like the
> OECD's increasing mental illness, since this would, presumably, reflect
> greater diagnosis of mental illness. A lot of the stigma against mental
> illness has fallen away. A friend of mine reported a case in Hove where the
> primary schools had an explosion of 'special needs' categorisations, after
> parents learned that their children could get extra help. Later on,
> something similar happened at my daughters' school. The school took on a new
> special needs consultant. Before her re-evaluation, there were around 20 of
> the 220 children at the school under the special needs category. After, she
> bumped up the figures to one quarter of the children having special needs. I
> was surprised that this was seen as a great victory at the school governors'
> meeting (because they!
> could get more cash, you might think, cynically, but also because they
> said, at least, that it was a determination to address those special needs).
> I said I thought the estimate was rather high, but the head was insistent
> that this was typical for an inner london school. (It was a little high, but
> not that much). Special needs is not the same thing as mental illness,
> clearly, but here was a case where a change in the measure led to an
> increase in the incidence of special needs.
>
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