Fourteen years ago, Vaughn G. became the unknown soldier of special education, a West Baltimore boy whose name was chosen to lead a class-action lawsuit seeking better schooling for disabled youngsters.

In the decade since Vaughn G. vs. The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore was settled amid high expectations, neither the young man nor the crusade named for him has fared well.

Though ever larger and more costly, Baltimore's special education program is widely viewed as a failure -- evidenced by court records, test scores and unemployable teen-agers who finish high school unable to read the street signs in their neighborhoods.

What is less well known is that spending on special education is draining money from general education and weakening the backbone of the entire system. As a result, Baltimore's regular students -- most of whom are poor -- get the least expensive, most stripped-down public schooling in Maryland.

And Vaughn G.? Today, Vaughn Garris, 28 and twice convicted of child abuse, sits in prison.

"I don't know if the lawsuit helped anyone," says Garris. "It didn't help me. look where I am."

The same might be said for the school system.

Consider:

* The city ranks last in Maryland in spending per pupil for regular education, below even Appalachia-poor Allegany County, and first in spending per student for special education, according to state figures. Baltimore schools, which include costs not counted by the state, say they spend averages of $3,100 per pupil in regular education and $9,700 per pupil in special education.

* Baltimore has more students in special education, proportionally, than any other major city except Boston. With almost 18 percent of its 108,000 students officially labeled "disabled," the city's rate is half again higher than the national norm 12 percent.

* In the last six years, spending for special education has grown 50 percent, while funding for the rest of the students has increased 7 percent -- not even enough to keep up with inflation.

* This imbalance perpetuates a downward spiral: A shoddy regular education program produces students who are capable of learning to read but do not. These children are placed in special education. The ranks of special education grow, draining still more resources from regular education.

"They keep creating a child that can be called educationally handicapped because they didn't have something better to do with him when he first appeared on the scene," says Winifred DePalma, one of the lead attorneys in the Vaughn G. lawsuit. "If more of these kids were being served in the regular classroom, no question you'd have fewer children in special education."

Disparities in funding

For more than a decade, even as the emphasis on special education has grown, the quality of the overall system in Baltimore has declined. Last year, when then-interim Chief Executive Officer Robert Schiller called city schools "academically bankrupt," few argued.

Only one in nine Baltimore third-graders passed the state's reading test last year; fifth-graders were almost two years behind their peers on national tests. And for the last several years only a fourth of the ninth-graders at the city's zoned high schools graduated.

At Western High School, where 85 percent of the graduates go to college, students sold candy to raise money for goggles to wear in science lab and, until this fall, used textbooks that were more than a decade old.

"In an age of information, we had always hoped to get textbooks that at least listed DNA," says former principal Ann Carusi, who was promoted recently to area executive officer.

So many "extras" have disappeared from school budgets that inner-city principals, such as Bernice Whelchel at City Springs Elementary, turn to local businesses to raise money for computers and playgrounds. Teachers ask not for luxuries but for pocket change to buy pencils, paper and cardboard letters for the blackboard. Books for empty library shelves this spring came from suburban children in Pikesville and Howard County.

The disparities between what special education and other students receive are obvious.

In some of the city's toughest schools, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers grapple with classrooms of 35 pupils and more, while next door, a special education teacher works with four or five pupils.

Fewer than a third of the city's 124 elementary schools have a full-time art, music, physical education teacher or librarian. Yet, in the last two years, the school system has added 570 new staffers for special education, including 105 one-on-one aides, each assigned to a single student, all day.

Money is lavished on services such as transportation for special education students, who ride much-ridiculed yellow "cheese" buses while other students their age walk or take mass transit. Last year, the city spent $15.5 million to bus 4,500 special education students -- about $362 a month per person, or more than one-and-a-half times the price of a monthly Baltimore-Washington Amtrak pass.

Yet, little has been spent on what experts say regular and special education students need most: effective reading instruction.

"If you don't get proper reading instruction in the early grades, you get low self-esteem and you get emotional problems and you get an aversion to going to school and it's all downhill from there," says University of Maryland law professor Stanley Herr, who has handled special education cases on behalf of students against the Baltimore schools. "After that, it's a recipe for acting out and emotional issues and school truancy -- the whole picture that we have in Baltimore."

Andre Hawkins knows this all too well.

When his son, Leon Eaton, hadn't learned to read by third grade, Leon was placed in special education. But Leon still struggled and Hawkins grew desperate, trying for two years to get his son into a private tutoring program.

Then Leon was arrested for setting fire to a vacant lot about two years ago. As part of a probation arrangement, the judge sent him to the Partnership for Learning, a reading program for first-time juvenile offenders.

There, a volunteer part-time tutor used a phonics-based method to do what Baltimore schools had failed to do in seven years: She taught Leon, now 15, to read.

"It was a shame he had to do something to get extra help," says Hawkins.

Lack of expertise

National studies show that 85 percent to 90 percent of learning disabled children have difficulty reading. Decades of research by the National Institutes of Health and others argue that almost all these children can learn to read if they're taught with effective methods.

These researchers have found that though about 60 percent of the population seems to learn to read almost naturally, the remainder needs explicit instruction to understand the relationship of spoken sounds to written letters, or what is known as "phonics."

In Baltimore, until this spring when the school board adopted phonics-based reading textbooks for the lower grades, the city had no standard reading curriculum.

For years, principals had selected the reading programs for their schools.

Most chose whole-language books that taught youngsters to read by immersing them in words and short stories. Few schools actively taught phonics.

Likewise, the city has had no policies or even guidelines for reading instruction in special education, according to school curriculum officials. Except in rare instances where innovative principals have sought help from private institutions, most schools don't have reading experts or reading labs.

Most city special education teachers have simply adapted the general whole-language curriculum for their students -- giving problem readers a second dose of a program that did not work for them.

Even with the new curriculum, Baltimore doesn't require reading experts in each elementary -- something that Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties have. And principals, such as Liberty Elementary School's Linda Chinnia, are clamoring for help.

"The old model of the reading teacher -- that would be a very valuable asset," Chinnia says.

Indeed.

Former CEO Schiller estimates that with better reading instruction and smaller classes in the lower grades, Baltimore could reduce the number of children in special education to about 13 percent -- very near the national and state norms.

Susan Leviton, the lawyer who filed the Vaughn G. lawsuit, goes even further.

"If you could assure that every child after third grade could read," says Leviton, "you could cut special ed by 60 percent right away."

Costs ignored

When people say the rolls of special education can be cut -- that there are too many children in special education -- they are not talking about students with obvious physical and emotional disabilities, such as mental retardation, blindness, deafness or autism.

Baltimore has about the same percentage of these children as do other urban schools. Many of these children have benefited from special education-only schools such as Joseph C. Briscoe Senior High School and Harbor View Learning Center.

The problems arise when the ranks of special education fill with students who are simply years behind in school.

Almost two-thirds of Baltimore's special education students are labeled "learning disabled" or "speech and language impaired." These broad categories are often catch-alls for children with academic difficulties.

The number of children labeled "emotionally disturbed" also is higher than in other Maryland schools -- an indication, special education director Gayle Amos acknowledges, that teachers have used special education as a dumping ground to rid their classrooms of behavior problems.

"Many of these kids are indistinguishable from low achievers otherwise," says Johns Hopkins University professor James McPartland, an education expert who has worked with Patterson High School. "They are not damaged youngsters. They are children who haven't learned."

Even so, many of these children are treated as though they are severely disabled -- isolated in small classrooms, accompanied by personal aides, and transported door-to-door, occasionally even in taxicabs.

Amos, chief of the Division of Special Education and Student Support Services, acknowledges that pressure from the Vaughn lawsuit has created a climate that encourages administrators to give children deluxe services without considering need or cost. As a result, about 60 percent of Baltimore's special education students receive the most intensive services, usually segregated in smaller classes and afforded more therapy, according to state figures.

Elsewhere in Maryland, only 27 percent of special education students are placed in separate classrooms.

1,300 more teachers

Baltimore's combination of high numbers and high costs per child have driven up special education spending until it now consumes a third of all unrestricted educational funds -- to serve a fifth of the city's students.

Judson Porter, director of internal auditing for Baltimore schools, has studied these costs and differences between Baltimore's percentages and the state and national averages. He has concluded that if Baltimore more closely resembled the norms, the city would spend $50 million a year less on special education. In other words, the city would have $50 million more a year to improve regular education.

With that windfall, according to Porter's calculations, the school system could hire 1,300 regular education teachers. Class sizes then could be cut to 14 or 15 pupils in the first three grades and to 20 students in middle schools, assuming classroom space was available for all of them. That move alone, education experts say, could significantly improve general education and reduce the number of pupils in need of special education.

Improve early grades

Money alone, however, won't solve the school system's most intractable problems, which go far beyond special education.

With a new chief executive officer and a relatively new school board, Baltimore schools face the task of rebuilding from years of neglect that have seen test scores and schoolhouses deteriorate.

Recently, Chairman J. Tyson Tildon was reminded of just how much work the new board faces when three boys, ages 9 to 13, offered to pump his gas for a few dollars.

Tildon agreed, if the boys could read the message on the credit-card processing machine. "Welcome to the Mulberry Street Exxon," it said.

Only one boy was able to read as far as "Welcome to the."

"I was shocked," says Tildon.

"So many of our teachers just haven't been given the right tools to teach our children to read," Tildon says. "And I'm learning that many of [the teachers] haven't even been taught correctly in the first place."

Under former schools Superintendent Walter Amprey, teachers were rarely demoted or fired. Principals were allowed to remain at the helm even as test scores in their buildings plummeted. And school officials admit that almost no one was held accountable for miserable student performance -- until the state assumed partial control of the school system last year.

Schiller began the attack on what administrators privately refer to as a "culture of incompetence," removing many principals last spring. And new Chief Executive Officer Robert Booker has accelerated the campaign, denying tenure to more than 100 teachers and demoting almost a dozen principals.

"You have to set the standard," Booker says. "As long as employees think they can do a little and get away with it, they will."

Special education advocates concur.

"You can't fix special education," says lawyer Leslie Seid Margolis, "without fixing regular education."

Maryland schools

Percentage of students in special education.

Baltimore City -- 17.6%

Anne Arundel Co. -- 714.3%

Baltimore Co. -- 12.4%

State average -- 12.2%

Montgomery Co. -- 12.1%

Prince George's Co. -- 10.2%

Howard Co. -- 10.1%

SOURCE: Maryland Special Education Census Data, Dec. 1, 1997; individual school districts., Researched by Paula Lavigne

In this series

Tomorrow: How special education fails its students.

Tuesday: The great giveaway: Pupils get TVs instead of teaching.

Pub Date: 9/20/98