Vol. 8 No. 7 (July 1998) pp. 301-303.

JUMPING THE QUEUE: AN INQUIRY INTO THE LEGAL TREATMENT OF STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES by Mark Kelman and Gillian Lester. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 352 pp. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 0-674-48909-8.

Reviewed by Richard K. Scotch, School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas. Email: scotch@utdallas.edu.
 

JUMPING THE QUEUE is a major analytic contribution to the debate over how public schools should accommodate children with learning disabilities (LD). The authors, Mark Kelman and Gillian Lester, are law professors who analyze the legal, educational, and ethical basis for how these children are served by the schools pursuant to the federal special education law known as IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). IDEA requires that local public schools provide individually appropriate services for students with physical and mental impairments. The basis for IDEA's mandate is a civil rights guarantee of nondiscrimination. Prior to the law's passage, many children with disabilities received no public education at all, and many others were warehoused in generic special education programs that provided services inappropriate to their individual impairments. IDEA built upon a series of federal court decisions in the 1960s and early 1970s which upheld the right of children with disabilities to receive a free and appropriate public education and related services.

IDEA requires local public school districts to provide services determined to be needed by each child with a disability without regard to cost, with burden of financing these services on the districts (although some supplemental federal funds are provided). While many school districts initially resisted IDEA's broad mandate, wide acceptance has evolved for IDEA's objectives and procedural requirements. By most accounts, IDEA has been very successful in expanding the range of needed services provided to millions of school age children with disabilities, and in integrating many of these children into mainstream educational settings. In recent years, however, critics of IDEA have objected to how the law has been applied to children with learning disabilities, questioning whether many diagnoses of learning disabilities are legitimate and criticizing the accommodations demanded for learning disabled children.

Kelman and Lester compile a broad amount of material from diverse secondary sources to support this critique of how IDEA applies to learning disabilities. Drawing on literatures from education, law, medicine, psychology, and social science, they summarize what is known about diagnosing and responding pedagogically to learning disabilities; describe the current legal status of students with learning disabilities under IDEA; and critically discuss the implications for equity and public policy of current law and educational practice. The authors supplement their secondary analysis with interview data they collected from local special education coordinators in California and three other states and some additional interviews conducted with classroom teachers and college disability student service staff.

A major focus of the book involves the diagnosis of learning disability (LD), which is based on a discrepancy between a child's actual academic performance and a projection of her hypothetical academic performance based on IQ testing. Among the population of students with limited academic achievement, the diagnosis of LD leads to a legal entitlement to extensive supplemental resources and accommodations, while other students with similar performance have no such claim. Given the resource constraints on most public school systems, then, low- performing LD students have access to far more assistance than do students with garden variety" low performance. The authors contend that this disparity is unjustified either on the basis of need, potential benefit, or equity. In reviewing the educational literature, they claim that there is extremely weak evidence that the special assistance received by LD students has any significant benefit for them, and suggest that special assistance to low-performing students without LD may in fact be more efficacious than assistance to students with LD.

The book begins with introductory chapters on technical issues and federal regulations that appear to lay out objectively the issues involved in diagnosing and serving children with learning disabilities. Two chapters follow which describe practices in local districts on diagnosis and placement and on resource management and discipline, based on the authors' interviews with local school officials and their analysis of state rates of LD diagnoses. The first half of the book is largely descriptive and is clearly presented and largely free of polemic.

Kelman and Lester continue more analytically, applying alternative conceptions of distributive justice to the hypothetical allocation of discretionary resources in a classroom with both LD and nonLD students. A similar chapter focuses on the debate over providing accommodations in testing to law students with LD. A diverse range of possible actions are considered in both chapters, with their ethical rationales and likely consequences thoroughly analyzed. Here the authors clearly indicate their point of view, but their analyses raise important questions that ought to be addressed by anyone facing policy choices over learning disabilities.

A concluding chapter provides a characterization and critique of what is referred to as left multiculturalism, which the authors see as the political rationale for the current approach to accommodating LD students. Here they do not respond to actual stated policy positions or the position of specific advocates, but rather construct and critique a generic perspective they call left multiculturalism. I suspect that many mainstream LD advocates would consider this construct a caricature of their actual positions. This characterization would inspire more confidence if it were more carefully built upon actual statements of advocates in the interviews conducted by the authors or in published sources. While the authors may not have been able to resist the opportunity to denounce a position they abhor, this left-bashing detracts from their otherwise humane, thoughtful, and carefully reasoned analyses and their quite sensible recommendations for policy change.

More constructively, the concluding chapter also provides specific recommendations for policy change, which include replacing the absolute legal guarantee of special services for LD students with a program providing support to all students with poor performance. Such support would be contingent on its demonstrated efficacy in improving performance, with appropriate safeguards introduced to remove perverse incentives for school districts to create ineffective programs they could then eliminate. Kelman and Lester's proposals appear more equitable than current practices, and to be quite feasible if the legal obstacles to their implementation were overcome.

Kelman and Lester have written a book that deserves wide attention. They draw persuasively on evidence from a wide range of research representing diverse perspectives, and their carefully constructed arguments are quite persuasive. While the authors have an unfortunate taste for convoluted sentences which make some of their particular points difficult to follow, most of their overall analysis is very clear and, in general, well supported; one could construct several course syllabi from the footnoted material here. This book is a welcome contribution to a debate frequently characterized by anecdotal accounts and moral outrage from both sides.

Despite its axes to grind, JUMPING THE QUEUE is a broad, well researched, and thoughtful contribution to the existing literature on special education policy that should be read by everyone concerned with services to students with learning disabilities and other disabled students. The discussion of alternative rationales for policy interventions would also make this book of interest to readers concerned with disability policy, with other civil rights-based policy remedies and with larger issues of redistributive social policy and social justice.


Copyright 1998