The Department of Education says new “early intervention” techniques that target learning problems in regular classrooms have helped reduce the number of referrals to special education. The public advocate says, however, that the new system can do harm to struggling students because many students do not undergo special-ed evaluations until late in the school year.

The deputy superintendent in the office of special education initiatives, Linda Wernikoff, said the early intervention programs help “provide accommodations and differentiated instruction” to struggling students in general education classes. These alternatives include providing literacy and math coaches and using reading programs such as Wilson Orton Gillingham, Schools Attuned, and Voyager Passport.

“For the first time we had so many interventions in schools – you had reading coaches, you had math coaches, you had Voyager, you had all these other things going on – that people waited to see what was the child’s response,” Ms. Wernikoff said, “and maybe after all of these interventions, they still felt the child needed support, and they wanted to have the child evaluated to see if in fact the child was disabled.”

She said the programs ensure that children who are referred for specialed evaluations should indeed be referred.

“Prior to a special-ed evaluation, you should be providing remediation in general ed first, so special ed is not the knee-jerk reaction,” the deputy superintendent said. “When you’re making that step to refer the child for a specialed evaluation, you really, truly, believe the child is disabled or might be disabled.”

As a result, Ms. Wernikoff said, the number of case referrals dropped to 129,969 in the 2003-04 school year, from 134,678 the year before.

Although the total of referrals fell, more children were being referred for special-ed evaluations at the end of the year, after teachers had tried out different interventions in class. The number of initial referrals in the final two months of the school year climbed to 9,400, from 7,850 the year before.

Ms. Wernikoff said the late referrals meant that many evaluations were not due by the end of the school year. At the end of the year, 22% of cases were not completed, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, but Ms. Wernikoff said a full 81% of the uncompleted cases were not due, since they were filed within 60 days of the end of school.

The percentage of cases left incomplete at the end of the year more than doubled from the previous school year and was the highest in the past six years.

Ms. Wernikoff said about 14,300 files are now open, many of them holdovers from June. She said the department plans to complete them “immediately.”

She said she can’t predict if last year’s trends will be repeated this year, but she said 250 additional teachers were trained this summer in the Schools Attuned intervention program and 800 were trained in Wilson. She said the training would help more teachers in regular classrooms “address learning differences, accommodate those needs, differentiate instruction.”

Also, Ms. Wernikoff said, the department has hired 25 more school psychologists – in addition to the 1,055 already working in the schools – to help evaluate children who are referred to special education.

In all, 171,782 city children were enrolled in special education last year – about 16% of the public-school population.

While the department sees the new approach to special-ed referrals as a positive for the city’s struggling students, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, looks at the same evidence and sees an approach that could be “very, very harmful” to students.

Ms. Gotbaum – who complained last year that the education department created a backlog when it fired some special-ed workers and reorganized the system – called the idea of pushing referrals to the end of the year “outrageous.” She said there is a “very scientific” way of evaluating children, and in-classroom trial-and-error interventions won’t necessarily diagnose a child’s problem correctly.

“If you have a child who can’t read, that child needs to be evaluated by scientific principles,” the public advocate said.

“The teacher, who is very busy, is not going to be able to assess the nature of the kid’s needs, nor is the teacher going to know how to provide intervention,” she said. “It’s very hard to evaluate. … I don’t think the teachers have the equipment, the time – they have so many other kids. They don’t have the training to do that.”

In addition, the public advocate said, delaying referrals to the end of the year could have bad effects on children who would benefit from an immediate diagnosis. Besides, she said, it contributes to what she still says is a backlog of evaluations.

“The backlog ends when they get consultants who can come in, and more than 25 new psychologists,” she said, adding, “when every child is getting the services he needs.”