PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Miriam Nunberg, Senior Fellow at the Education Law and Policy Institute, New York Law School Legal Services
5:10:59
ยท
3 min
Miriam Nunberg, representing herself, ELPI, and 14 parents and advocates, testified about the challenges in ensuring the rights of students with disabilities in NYC, focusing on the poor quality of DOE evaluations and the resulting inequities. She emphasized the need for higher quality, unbiased evaluation practices to ensure equity and access for all students with disabilities.
- DOE evaluations often fail to meet professional and legal standards, providing little useful information for IEP teams.
- Families with resources can obtain better private evaluations, leading to higher quality IEPs and creating significant inequities.
- There are demographic disparities in disability classifications, potentially due to evaluation quality differences, with implications for student placements and outcomes.
Miriam Nunberg
5:10:59
Hi.
5:11:00
My name is Miriam Nunberg.
5:11:01
I'm a senior fellow at the Education Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School's Legal Services and a private special education attorney advocate.
5:11:10
I'm also a former attorney with the US Department of Education's Office For Civil Rights.
5:11:15
I'm speaking on behalf of myself, ELPI, and 14 parents and advocates.
5:11:20
Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this important issue.
5:11:24
Ensuring the rights of students with disabilities in New York City is a constant struggle as DOE special education staff are often overwhelmed and lack a clear understanding of legal requirements.
5:11:35
Families too often have to hire advocates just to to secure their children's basic rights.
5:11:41
In my private practice, my focus is not private special private school tuition reimbursement.
5:11:47
My focus is keeping kids in the public schools with strong IEPs.
5:11:51
A major obstacle to that is the poor quality of DOE evaluations, which consist of superficial short form tests that fail professional and legal standards.
5:12:02
These evaluations fail to identify impairments or provide service recommendations providing little to no information for IEP teams.
5:12:10
The DOE's recently improved vouchers for neuropsych evaluations don't resolve the problem as they are so difficult to use that evaluations can be delayed for months.
5:12:20
Families also have to know how to use to, to ask for them, especially at the higher rate they are, and they are rarely offered even to students with extreme needs.
5:12:29
The EOPI recently surveyed special ed families with troubling findings regarding DOE evaluations, also experienced by the signers to this testimony.
5:12:40
Many never received the evaluations they requested or were told to seek evaluations on their own.
5:12:45
Of those who did receive DOE evaluations, few found them helpful, leading many to pay for private ones.
5:12:52
Others report being told that the DOE does not evaluate for autism, for example.
5:12:59
They were not offered a neuropsych despite the need.
5:13:02
They report shoddy evaluation practices, failure to address mental health issues, and waiting 9 months for a DOE evaluation.
5:13:10
These failures create significant inequities like we've been discussing all all day.
5:13:15
Families with resources can obtain excellent timely private evaluations with accurate diagnosis and detailed recommendations leading to higher quality IEPs.
5:13:25
This disparity may explain the demographic differences between the highly stigmatizing ED classification and the much more palatable other health impaired or OHI classification, which is usually based on an ADHD diagnosis.
5:13:39
Our analysis found that students who are white, higher income, and or in wealthier districts districts are classified with o h I at a higher rate than any other group possibly due to receiving accurate evaluations.
5:13:52
In contrast, low income black and high need students are disproportionately classified as ED leading to restrictive d 75 placements offering limited access to the full curriculum and poor post secondary outcomes including police involvement.
5:14:07
Rather than provide sufficient evaluations for students suspected of be of having emotional disabilities, the DOE has traditionally evaluated them by supplementing its psycho ed evaluations with non validated checklists that include subjective terms like normal and appropriate to describe their behavior.
5:14:26
The DOE also provides insufficient training on valid means of ED assessment, and if this has changed, that information is not publicly available.
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The solution is clear.
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The DOE must adopt higher quality, unbiased evaluation practices that meet professional standards.
5:14:41
These changes are essential to assure ensure equity and access for all students with disabilities.