Recently, the Supreme Court heard Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District. The case focuses on the question: what is the scope of a district's obligations to students under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)? I'll write more about the case, the experience of attending the oral arguments (!), and why it's hugely important for students with disabilities in a later blog post.
For now, worth noting are two points about the case:
Going into the arguments, I knew the Justices would spend time questioning the plaintiff and defendants' lawyers about point #1 above (the benefit standard) and they did; in a later blog post, I'll talk more about the back-and-forth that the Justices and two sets of lawyers for the plaintiffs (the parent's lawyers; the government's SG) had regarding, as Justice Alito put it, the "blizzard of words" used to describe this benefit standard. Or as he put it:
"Significant," "meaningful," they're synonyms. If something is significant or meaningful, it's more than de minimis. And if it's more than de minimis, you could say it's significant. It's something that you note. So it's really -- I mean, what everybody seems to be looking for is the word that has just the right nuance to express this thought (Oral arguments transcript)
However, I wasn't sure if the Justices would bring up point #2 (the costs of meeting that benefit standard). However, cost did come up. Justice Kennedy asked: "is there any place to discuss the cost that the -- would -- would be incurred for, say, severely disabled students?" In response, the primary lawyer for the plaintiff (Stanford's Jeffrey Fisher), after arguing that most IEP's are not very costly to implement, noted the case Cedar Rapids v. Garret F. As Fisher describes, in that case the court faced a very costly service (full-time nursing services) and as he argued, "the Court quite clearly said that even there, where the school was saying that was going to cost 30 to $40,000, the Act [the IDEA] does not permit cost to trump what the act otherwise requires."
In other words, the IDEA's requirements trump cost-- school districts can't deny an IEP or services within the IEP based on cost. But does cost-blindness occur in practice, or do costs matter for special education IEP and service decisions?
The below visualization is part of a working paper I will link to in my next post that explores that issue. In particular, states confronted with the rising costs of special education services occasionally change the formula they use to distribute money to school districts to capitation financing, also sometimes called block grants. Instead of reimbursing the costs of services, or giving districts extra funding for each additional IEP the districts issue, the states give districts a flat amount based on factors like general student enrollment, student poverty, and other criteria not related to the number of IEP's the district issues or what services the district offers.
The visualization, focused on New Jersey, looks at how placement rates change in that state's switch to capitation financing. The figures highlights that not only do placement rates appear to change when incentives do, but also that some districts are more impacted by the financing change than others. The working paper I will link to explores why but for now, the visual depictions should give you some hints (student poverty levels; parents' due process cases against districts).
For now, worth noting are two points about the case:
- The case's explicit focus was on a benefit standard for children under the IDEA: the case was granted cert because of a Circuit split over what standard of benefit districts are required to offer under the IDEA's requirements for a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). In short, in 1982's Rowley, the court rejected the idea that districts are obligated to provide services reasonably calculated to offer maximal benefits to students. The circuit split was over whether the language that case used to describe these non-maximal benefits should be interpreted as a "meaningful benefit" (a higher standard) or a "more than trivial benefit" (a lower standard).
- From my perspective, an important implicit element of the case was cost. Legally, school districts are not supposed to take cost into account when making decisions about whether to offer services to a child with disabilities via an IEP and about which services to offer (if they do, they can be accused of what's called "pre-determination"- basically deciding a priori what and what not to offer a child before taking his or her individualized strengths and needs into account). But in practice, services for children with disabilities cost money and districts face challenges and questions about how to divide resources both among children with disabilities and between children who have an IEP/its corresponding legal protections and children who do not.
Going into the arguments, I knew the Justices would spend time questioning the plaintiff and defendants' lawyers about point #1 above (the benefit standard) and they did; in a later blog post, I'll talk more about the back-and-forth that the Justices and two sets of lawyers for the plaintiffs (the parent's lawyers; the government's SG) had regarding, as Justice Alito put it, the "blizzard of words" used to describe this benefit standard. Or as he put it:
"Significant," "meaningful," they're synonyms. If something is significant or meaningful, it's more than de minimis. And if it's more than de minimis, you could say it's significant. It's something that you note. So it's really -- I mean, what everybody seems to be looking for is the word that has just the right nuance to express this thought (Oral arguments transcript)
However, I wasn't sure if the Justices would bring up point #2 (the costs of meeting that benefit standard). However, cost did come up. Justice Kennedy asked: "is there any place to discuss the cost that the -- would -- would be incurred for, say, severely disabled students?" In response, the primary lawyer for the plaintiff (Stanford's Jeffrey Fisher), after arguing that most IEP's are not very costly to implement, noted the case Cedar Rapids v. Garret F. As Fisher describes, in that case the court faced a very costly service (full-time nursing services) and as he argued, "the Court quite clearly said that even there, where the school was saying that was going to cost 30 to $40,000, the Act [the IDEA] does not permit cost to trump what the act otherwise requires."
In other words, the IDEA's requirements trump cost-- school districts can't deny an IEP or services within the IEP based on cost. But does cost-blindness occur in practice, or do costs matter for special education IEP and service decisions?
The below visualization is part of a working paper I will link to in my next post that explores that issue. In particular, states confronted with the rising costs of special education services occasionally change the formula they use to distribute money to school districts to capitation financing, also sometimes called block grants. Instead of reimbursing the costs of services, or giving districts extra funding for each additional IEP the districts issue, the states give districts a flat amount based on factors like general student enrollment, student poverty, and other criteria not related to the number of IEP's the district issues or what services the district offers.
The visualization, focused on New Jersey, looks at how placement rates change in that state's switch to capitation financing. The figures highlights that not only do placement rates appear to change when incentives do, but also that some districts are more impacted by the financing change than others. The working paper I will link to explores why but for now, the visual depictions should give you some hints (student poverty levels; parents' due process cases against districts).