There’s a lot of cheering in the Beltway today as President Barack Obama eviscerates much of his legacy as school reformer-in-chief (as well as reverses the strong federal role in advancing systemic reform that reached its apex with the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions) with the signing of the laughably-title Every Student Succeeds Act. But as Contributing Editor Sandy Kress and other writers on these pages have pointed out, there are numerous reasons why no one who proclaims to be a school reformer should welcome this.

this_is_dropout_nation_logoThe latest example can be seen in Hartford, Conn., where the traditional district’s mistreatment of English Language Learner children and peers condemned to its special ed ghettos is another reminder of why accountability. Our most-vulnerable children deserve far more than what the Obama Administration and the cadre of congressional leaders who passed this shoddy legislation are giving to them.

Back in November, it was revealed that children in special ed at the district’s SAND Elementary School were forced to wear stickers on the backs of their shirts labeling their learning issues. This was developed by Chris Hempel, then an assistant superintendent in charge of teacher training, as one of the district’s professional development training sessions. Kids who were both English Language Learners and in special ed, for example, were required to wear blue stickers, while peers who were merely learning disabled were forced to wear yellow stickers.

As a result of the stickers, children in the school’s regular classrooms ended up targeting and referring to those kids in the kind of way that would lead to bullying and other nastiness. For those children in special ed — including those with low-incidence disabilities for whom school is already a struggle — the district’s “training” regimen was pure educational abuse.

But as you would expect given everything we know about overlabeling of kids as special ed, kids weren’t the only ones who ended up taking aim at peers. In the session, teachers were required to collect information on each of the ELL students and kids in special ed that specified the issues that they observed. In some cases, teachers were noting that a kid was “academically low and needy” or “acting babyish”; other children were called “needy” and “fidgety”. Given that the teachers weren’t asked to investigate the underlying issues each kid faced, this exercise essentially gave laggard teachers excuses to further harm children in their care.

If not for children talking about the stickers, parents and the public would have never heard anything about the exercises. It not for the parents, with help from Parent Power activists such as Hartford Parent University President Milly Arciniegas and Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union, these exercises would have continued to have gone on for years. Thanks to the families and the outcry over the labeling, Hempel was sent packing, albeit with much of his $146,260 in annual salary until he either finds a new job or the end of the school year.

On one hand, this is good news. But not really. For one, Hempel will still be allowed to work in public education systems in both Connecticut and the rest of the nation. After all, he resigned instead of going through the lengthy process of dismissal that protects laggard teachers and school leaders alike. So there is a good chance that Hempill will educationally abuse other children at some point down the road.

Secondly, Hempel wasn’t the only one who thought it was perfectly fine to engage in this shameful labeling in the first place. Even worse, it isn’t shocking. This is because American public education damages our most-vulnerable children at nearly every turn — and what happened in Hartford was just a very visible example.

Far too many young children, especially young men of all backgrounds, are labeled as special ed cases when they are really struggling with functional illiteracy and other learning issues. Forty percent of the nation’s 5.8 million special ed students covered under Part B of the Individuals with Disability Education Act are labeled as suffering from a “specific learning disability”, a vague catch-all that can include anything including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Another six percent are allegedly emotionally disturbed, which could easily mean that the kids could either be poorly disciplined at home or suffer severe depression. Two percent are considered developmentally delayed, which could mean that the kids are either cognitively damaged, dyslexic or wasn’t taught to read by their parents.

Even mental retardation (or intellectual disabilities, to which seven percent of kids in special ed are labeled) may not necessarily mean what it seems. As Reid Lyon and other researchers have determined, many kids who appear mildly retarded (or seem to have other forms of cognitive disability) are actually be struggling with literacy.

Children from poor and minority households are the ones most-likely to end up being put into special ed ghettos. Eleven percent of black children aged 6-to-21, for example, were condemned to special ed ghettos in 2011-2012, while just eight percent of white peers were subjected to such educational malpractice. This is borne out in Hartford and Connecticut: Fifteen-point-four percent of black students in Hartford’s schools were condemned to special ed in 2011-2012, versus 8.5 percent of white peers. Eleven-point-six percent of Nutmeg State black kids were condemned to special ed, while only 7.2 percent of white peers were placed in those conditions.

One reason why so many kids from poor and minority backgrounds are put into special ed: The low expectations of the adults who are supposed to serve them.  As Vanderbilt University Professor Daniel J. Reschly noted in his 2007 testimony to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, adults label certain groups of students as learning disabled because they think they are destined to end up that way.

Once children end up in special ed ghettos and ELL programs, they are more-likely to be subjected to overuse of harsh traditional school discipline.

On average, districts and other school operators mete out-of-school suspensions to children in special ed at levels double-to-triple that for peers in regular classrooms, according to an analysis of federal education data led by Daniel Losen for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Districts meted out-of-school suspensions to 18.1 percent of children in secondary schools, double the nine percent rate for kids in regular classrooms.

The overuse of suspensions is particularly problematic in both Hartford and the State of Connecticut as a whole. The district meted one or more out-of-school suspensions to 27 percent of kids in special ed in 2011-2012, a rate higher than the already-far-too-high 15 percent rate for peers in regular classrooms. At the state level, districts in the Nutmeg State suspended 14 percent of kids in special ed that same year, double the rate for peers in regular classrooms. The state’s suspended or expelled 150 kids per 10,000 students in special ed for more than 10 days in 2011-2012, higher than the already-abysmal 97 per 10,000 for the nation as a whole.

But the damage of harsh school discipline upon kids in special ed ghettos extend beyond suspensions. A special ed child could easily land in a setting in which barbaric discipline techniques such as placing kids into so-called seclusion rooms (or, as prison inmates, would call them, solitary confinement) and tying children down (called restraints) can be the norm. Special ed students made up 75 percent of kids held in restrains during 2011-2012 even though they account for just an eighth of all students, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The children subjected to these barbaric practices pay the price, both in physical injury (from broken hands to death) and emotional damage.

Hartford didn’t report using any of those practices that year. But some 2,180 kids in Connecticut’s special ed ghettos were subjected to restraints and seclusion in 2011-2012, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis of data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. That’s three-point-five percent of Nutmeg State kids condemned to special ed ghettos. Many of them have suffered harm: Some 1,313 children in the Nutmeg State were injured through use of those practices during a three-year period, according to education department officials there.

When kids in special ed aren’t being suspended, tied up or put into solitary confinement, they are shortchanged the high-quality education they need to survive and thrive economically and socially. This is especially clear in how states exclude them from standardized tests that show objectively how those kids are being served. Twenty-four percent of fourth-graders in special ed, along with 25.5 percent of eighth-graders and 20.5 percent of high schoolers were excluded from state reading tests in 2011-2012, according to federal data. Connecticut is particularly egregious on that front. It allowed districts to exclude 49 percent of fourth-graders in special ed, as well as 41 percent of eighth-grade peers, and 36 percent of high schoolers from standardized testing.

For these kids, their time in special ed often ends with dropping out. Sixty-four percent of children aged 14-to-21 left special ed ghettos and high school with a diploma in 2011-2012, according to the U.S. Department of Education; this is 15 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for the nation overall. The rest eventually drop out. Even worse, only 10.2 percent of children age 14-to-21 in special ed leave those ghettos for regular classrooms, essentially guaranteeing that most will never have a chance at attaining high-quality teaching and college-preparatory curricula. Only on this front, Connecticut is an exception: Some 81.2 percent of kids in special ed leaving school with a diploma, while 16.5 percent of 14-to-21 year olds in special ed moved into regular classrooms.

There has been some good news for kids in special ed, both nationally and in Connecticut. High-school graduation rates for kids in special ed increased by 12 percentage points between 2002-2003 and 2011-2012.  Just as importantly, more kids in special ed are learning. The percentage of eighth-graders in special ed reading Below Basic (as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress) declined by five percentage points between 2002-2003 and 2014-2015. The gains aren’t anything close to what our kids need. But they are a much-needed start that could have been spurred on with a reauthorized version of No Child that provided even stronger accountability when it comes to kids in special ed.

These improvements happened for two reasons. The first? The passage of the now-eviscerated No Child Left Behind Act, whose accountability provisions and focus on helping all children reach proficiency in reading, math, and science shined much-needed light on how American public education condemned the futures of our most-vulnerable children. George W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, George Miller, and John Boehner were right to declare to states and districts 13 years ago that they could no longer shortchange children they didn’t want to serve. And in the process, the law they passed spurred reforms that continue to benefit kids.

The second reason lies with the embrace by presidents since Ronald Reagan of a stronger role in advancing systemic reform through federal education policy. For all of the Obama Administration’s flaws, its focus on addressing the overuse of harsh school discipline (along with its push on overhauling teacher evaluations and expanding school choice), have been responsible for getting states and districts to use better approaches. Connecticut took a key, though flawed, step earlier this year when its legislature passed a law effectively banning the use of restraints and seclusion on kids in special ed. The state wouldn’t have even took this step if not for the federal government meeting its constitutional obligation to safeguard the civil rights of all children. Under such a role, Hartford would be rightfully scrutinized by the Department of Education for how it treats the most-vulnerable.

The bad news, however, is that thanks to the passage of the laughable Every Student Succeeds Act, the opportunity to make progress on helping kids trapped in special ed has been lost. The kids in Hartford and elsewhere have been told by Congress, President Obama, and erstwhile reformers who support this law that their lives don’t matter. This is immoral, intellectually indefensible, and unconscionable.