AUSTIN — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested over the weekend that he supports an effort to increase funding, training and transparency in special education, including by permanently ending the state’s de facto cap on the percentage of students who can receive services.
“Texas will fix flaws in special education beginning this week,” Abbott wrote Saturday on Twitter along with a link to a story about the effort and a hearing on the legislation scheduled for Tuesday. “We’ll get this done this session.”
The tweet, while brief, was one of Abbott’s most extensive comments about special education since the Houston Chronicle revealed the state’s de facto cap last September and reported that it had denied services to tens of thousands of students with disabilities.
The Texas Education Agency policy, which was not based on any research and not publicly discussed or announced when it was enacted in 2004, punished Texas school districts for giving special education services to more than 8.5 percent of students. In the decade after its enactment, the percentage of Texas students receiving services fell from near the longtime national average of 13 percent down to exactly 8.5 percent.
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If Texas had remained at the national average, as many as 250,000 more students with dyslexia, autism, speech impairments and many other disabilities would be receiving services such as tutoring, therapy and counseling.
The Chronicle’s series sparked a bipartisan chorus of outrage, a still-ongoing federal investigation and a Texas Education Agency decision to suspend and eventually eliminate the policy. Abbott largely has stayed out of the public conversation, however. Previously, his only major public comment came in December, when he responded to a question about the state policy from a reporter by predicting that it soon would be eliminated and then pivoting to a pitch for a voucher system that would give parents some money to seek out private schools that could cater to their needs.
Nearly four months later, the Texas Legislature is preparing for a major debate about how to fix special education. Lawmakers have filed 51 bills related to the issue — nearly twice as many as during the last legislative session. At least 16 of those pieces of legislation were filed directly in response to the Chronicle’s reporting. The most prominent of the proposals would permanently bar the state from ever again capping special education enrollments.
That bill is set to be heard Tuesday as part of the first legislative committee meeting on special education.
