Every week, Carolyn Walker sees the product of one of the nation's most expensive special education programs. A 17-year-old struggles with first-grade work. A 14-year-old boy can't recite the months of the year. A 10th-grader doesn't know the alphabet.

"I don't know how they keep going to school when they're so deficient," says Walker, who runs the Partnership for Learning, a nonprofit tutoring program for teens accused of their first crime. "I don't know what the school is thinking in terms of passing them and moving them on."

As far behind in school as these children are, they're not unusual.

They are, however, luckier than many of their special education peers in one regard.

The judge who sent these children to the Partnership for Learning has given them a choice: learn to read or pay the price.

Most Baltimore special education students don't get that second chance.

Ten years after city officials promised to improve special education, the rolls of the program are filled with children who cannot read, even though the city is spending more per special education student than any other district in Maryland.

The high cost - an average of $9,700 per child - has exacted a price on the entire school system: Baltimore spends less per pupil for regular education than any other district in the state.

Meanwhile, the people responsible for fixing special education - school officials, lawyers and a federal judge - remain locked in a bitter, 14-year-old court battle. The legal wrangling has generated millions of dollars in legal fees, file cabinets full of requirements and periodic threats of contempt for the school district. But it has done very little to improve student performance.

"Winning or losing the lawsuit shouldn't be anybody's primary objective," says U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis, who declines to comment on the specifics of the case. "The real objective should be getting the kids of this city a decent education."

'Educational malpractice'

Consider Antoine, a 10th-grade special education student who arrived at the Partnership for Learning unable to recite the alphabet.

After about a year of once-a-week tutoring sessions with Assistant State's Attorney Phil Pickus, Antoine could read three-syllable words and, Pickus said, was beginning to tackle sports magazines. Though Antoine's attendance was irregular, and he ultimately left before finishing the program, his experience with a part-time volunteer tutor proved that he could learn.

"It's educational malpractice," Pickus says of the failure of the schools to teach Antoine.

Pickus is not alone in his assessment.

Everyone from state schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick to former schools Chief Executive Officer Robert Schiller acknowledges that the city's special education program is badly broken, though the executives say they have seen improvement in recent months. Schiller says a new team is managing the bureaucracy more efficiently, but he recognizes that overall classroom instruction is still abysmal.

"I'd like to be kind," says Schiller, "but clearly from the academic side, it's not a passing grade."

The problems are myriad.

Court files and the school system's internal audits tell of thousands of special education children whose hearings were late, whose instruction plans weren't followed, who, in short, fell through the cracks.

Costs are high, but little money has been spent on reading curricula and teacher training.

Too many students have been placed in special education who don't belong there. These children, experts note, do not have serious emotional, physical or mental handicaps. They are youngsters capable of learning who simply weren't taught.

More than any other measure, these children who could learn but do not evidence the fundamental failure of special education.

No one can say how many teen-agers reach high school unable to read. There are no hard numbers to define the progress of special education students because the school system does not track their test scores after fifth grade. This omission underscores the low priority placed on student performance.

What is known is that with each passing year of elementary school, special education students fall farther behind other students on national tests.

In the third grade, special education students score almost as well as other city pupils on national reading tests - though both groups score at least a year behind the norm. Third grade is also the year that most special education students enter the program.

By fifth grade, special education students test 2 1/2 years below grade level. This leaves them more than a year behind their regular education peers in Baltimore, who themselves are a year and a half behind the national norm.

Special education students take the state test of basic skills required to get a high school diploma - a simple exam that requires fifth-grade-level ability in reading and math - but Baltimore school officials don't know how many of them pass it.

Teachers and principals, however, don't need test scores to tell them that special education students are not learning what they should. They have seen the disparities when these pupils are moved into regular classrooms, as they were at Patterson High School in 1996.

Special education is supposed to provide the extra help children with disabilities need to learn on grade level and ultimately work successfully in regular classrooms. Outside of Baltimore, more than 60 percent of Maryland's special education students are in regular classrooms.

But two years ago, when Patterson High administrators abruptly transferred more than 150 students from small, separate classrooms into regular classrooms, the resulting chaos underscored how little the special education students had learned.

Not only had special education failed to give these students the extra help they needed, but also that education in many cases had been vastly inferior.

The students were placed on the "diploma track" and expected to master biology, anatomy, geometry and American history - even if they couldn't read the textbooks.

"I feel as if I'm trying to make up for 10 years of ... education this child has not received. "HE CANNOT READ," one Patterson High School teacher wrote to school officials investigating problems caused by the transfers.

Students, too, became frustrated and discouraged.

"I get so mad I just lay my head down and go to sleep because I do not understand what [the teacher] is saying most of the time," one sophomore girl wrote to a favorite teacher, asking for help after she was transferred into a regular class.

The girl, who reads on a third-grade level and asked that her

name not be used, was taught Shakespeare's "Macbeth" from a coloring book and told to trace drawings from "Gray's Anatomy." No one gave her the remedial reading lessons she needed because at Patterson such classes don't exist.

Pushed to get 'out of the way'

Patterson student Debbie Prestileo, 17, spent her junior year copying sentences off the blackboard - though she can't read a word she wrote.

Mildly retarded, Debbie has been in special education since kindergarten, according to school records. Her mother has been told repeatedly that her daughter is "too slow" to learn - a prognosis she rejects as she watches her daughter move through daily life, working as a cook at a fast-food restaurant and navigating the city's transportation system.

Furthermore, when Debbie tries to read on her own, she can make out a few small words and letter combinations - signs, the experts say, that she can probably learn if she's taught correctly.

Debbie's mother, also named Debbie Prestileo, can barely contain her anger at a school system she believes neglected her child.

"What the hell is the Baltimore public school system doing?" she askes. "An 11th-grade kid is going to graduate, and she cannot read!"

Debbie has a senior ring with a small blue stone, Class of '99, and she expects to graduate in May.

"I think the school just pushes you up to get you out of there," her mother says. "They get you out of the way."

Patterson's principal resigned last summer and declined to be interviewed for this article. Special education administrator Gayle Amos acknowledges that the high school is troubled but not alone in a problem-plagued district.

Special education advocates take an even dimmer view.

"They have tens of thousands of children who are basically marking time in their high school classes and headed for oblivion," says special education attorney Winifred DePalma. "They can't keep writing off the current high school students."

Those students who reach high school unable to read have little chance of getting the help they need, experts say.

Although national studies show that 85 percent to 90 percent of learning-disabled students have difficulty with reading, Baltimore schools have no system-wide policies or guidelines to teach these students to read, according to Amos.

Most special education teachers simply adapt the regular curriculum for their students, school officials say. And until this 00 year, most schools used whole-language, literature-based programs that didn't provide the explicit training in the relationship of sounds to letters, or phonics, that experts say many beginning readers need.

A few determined principals, such as Canton Middle School's Craig Spilman, have turned for advice to outside experts and adopted phonics-based programs and hired reading specialists. But most elementary and middle schools don't have remedial reading labs or teachers trained to work with problem readers.

No guarantees of help

When students haven't learned to read by the third grade, they are often placed in special education, where, in many cases, they still don't get the help they need.

"They expend all this time going through [the special education assessment] process, [but] they don't use that information to really understand what is wrong with the child," says lawyer Susan Leviton, who has spent 25 years working with special education issues. "They put all those kids in a resource room and water everything down."

Baltimore has one of the highest percentages of special education students in the nation - 17.6 percent of its 108,000 pupils. Former school officials, as well as outside experts, estimate that with better reading instruction and smaller classes in the lower grades, the city could reduce the number of children who need special education by about a third - to 13 percent,

nearly the national norm.

But even with the high number of students placed in special education, the assessment process is so erratic, court records show, that some children who need help are overlooked.

Such was the case for Tameka.

She couldn't read at all when she reached 10th grade, even though her school records show passing scores.

"I was happy I passed, but I knew I wasn't supposed to be in those grades," says Tameka, 18, who asked that her last name not be used.

Tameka would probably never have been tested for special education if she hadn't been arrested as a passenger in a stolen car and sent, as a condition of her probation, to the Partnership for Learning, a nonprofit agency that works closely with the office of Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. There, PFL director Walker recognized Tameka's problem at once and asked Tameka's high school to evaluate her. But for Tameka, it was too late.

She dropped out and began working with a volunteer PFL tutor.

In April, she couldn't read a drug-awareness poster's message: "We have better things to do than drugs." By June, she had

mastered simple sentences: "Rob had a rash. Matt had a lot of fish."

"It's basically like you're starting all over again," says Tameka. "I get all the way up here, and I still got the same problem I had when I was younger. ... I don't see how they just pass somebody on like that and not pay attention to them."

Millions in legal fees

Even as students such as Tameka have been neglected, the school system has poured millions of dollars and immeasurable effort into the 14-year-long court battle over special education. The fight has centered on everything but academics.

The legal wrangling - coupled with the school system's inability or reluctance to enact court-ordered reforms - has prolonged court oversight of the school district. A monitor who was supposed to oversee the school district for three years stayed almost 10 years and earned $1.8 million before she resigned in March to be replaced with a court master.

"I've practiced education law for a long time," says Abbey G. Hairston, a lawyer for the schools, "and I know what I'm doing right now is basically not in the interest of the children."

Federal case No. 84-1911, Vaughn G. vs. The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, Chief Executive Officer Robert Booker, The New Board of School Commissioners and State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, has filled almost two dozen thick folders at the federal courthouse. A court-approved 77-page "long-range compliance plan" so detailed that it tells school employees when to copy documents and how to hold training sessions has spun off sub-plans that occupy four file cabinets at school headquarters.

The tangle of procedures has become so complex that the district has hired an army of clerks and aides, administrators and social workers just to manage the paperwork. Special education teachers complain that they spend as much time attending meetings and filling out forms as they do working with the children.

"I enjoy the job, but sometimes it's like you leave with your head down and you wonder, 'Did I help any kids today?'" says Victoria Carter, a special education manager who oversees 50 emotionally disturbed teens at Southern High School. "It's a management nightmare."

At Southern, principal Darlene Lyles has 23 teachers, four managers, three clerks, a speech pathologist, two social workers, a psychologist and an assistant principal to manage the business of special education for 340 students. But she doesn't have the one resource she says she needs most: "Reading teachers on the high school level. That's the first thing I would buy," Lyles says.

Special education advocates argue that the court-ordered procedures are necessary because the school system has not lived up to its agreements.

"The original decree was 26 pages," says DePalma, " ... but they didn't do what it required ... so we ended up putting all the steps in there that they would have to do to get to the end."

Mistrust lingers

There have been victories, but mostly for individuals, case by case. Disabled children who need computers in the classroom get them now. Waits are shorter for hearings that determine whether students are placed in special education. And some parents are encouraged by the progress they have seen their children make in small classrooms with one-on-one aides.

After 10 years and $10 million misspent on three failed systems, the city finally has a computer system to track special education students. But school officials admit that the computer reports are, at best, 90 percent accurate.

The school system's own audits continue to find widespread failure to test special education students on time, to provide them with the prescribed services and to correct problems once they're discovered.

"Special education law sets up a plan. It tells you when to assess children, how to do it, and gives you times in which you have to do it," says Judge Garbis, speaking in general about the law. "It does not and cannot say if you're doing it right. The whole fuss is, are they doing it at all?"

The battling and the legacy of bad faith left by former Superintendent Walter G. Amprey - once held in contempt and threatened with jail for refusing to follow court orders - have created mistrust and occasional hostility between school officials and lawyers for the children.

"A judge can restrain you from talking to someone, but a judge can't make you work with someone and be nice," says Garbis. "That is virtually impossible."

The new school officials, meanwhile, acknowledge the problems the past and ask for forbearance while they try to reform what they privately refer to as a "culture of incompetence." They say a new management team is committed to change and is abler than its predecessors.

"We do recognize that this district does have a long way to go to improve," says Amos. "Untie our hands so we can move forward."

Special education lawyers and city officials are back in court this month for another round of battling. Lawyers for students charge that little has improved. They are asking that the school system be held in contempt and fined for failing to follow the long-range compliance plan.

They are also arguing that previous court decisions give them control over personnel matters; they want three top administrators fired.

School officials have countered by saying that the system is improving and that outsiders should not be allowed to manage it. They want to rewrite the long-range plan. They cite a recent audit that found fewer violations of special education procedures.

And, they warn, a continued courtroom siege promises dire consequences for the very children everyone is trying to help.

"If we are not careful, we are going to break this system financially," says board member Patricia Morris, "and the students still won't get the services they need."

In this series

Tomorrow: The great give-away: Pupils get TVs instead of teaching.

Pub Date: 9/21/98