Editorial

EDITORIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: COMMON SENSE Every country has limits as to what it can do for its citizens. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation now being implemented by Congress states that funding for domestic programs such as education and rehabilitation must be drastically curtailed. The wisdom of these huge reductions in our country's investment in its youth and potential work force is dubious at best. However, since Gramm-Rudman-Hollings is a fact of life, the issue is how to implement it. Lack of Accountability Education and rehabilitation are currently notoriously lacking in accountability. For example, mainstreaming legislation was passed with no factually based estimate of its cost or effect. At the time PL 94-142 was passed mainstream programs had existed for three decades, and there were baseline data available. We have had PL 94142 for 11 years and there has still been no comprehensive valid measure of its cost or effect on handicapped children. In an administration that pontificates endlessly on accountability in government , it is ironic that these huge educational outlays are made with no accurate fiscal record keeping or measure of results. In the face of this inexcusable lack of accountability we have high-level administrators in the Office of Education and members of Congress telling educators of the deaf (one at a national meeting) that mainstreaming is successful and that alternatives waste money and are essentially inhumane. Residential schools too are guilty of a gross lack of accountability. For example, per capita costs are computed independent of the financial outlay for the physical plant (regular public schools do this also). Comprehensive follow-up studies of graduates are few and far between. Yet, how else can the success or failure of a program be adequately assessed? If we in education do not address the issues of costs and results, how can we complain about the cuts implicit in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation? Common sense and experience tell us that a failure to invest in the education of handicapped youth will ultimately cost more in dollars and human misery than it will ever save. However, this kind of platitudinous generalization is a disgracefully inept defense of a budget or program. Accountability and Basic Data Processing The problem of a lack of accountability generalizes to simple situations not requiring sophisticated accounting procedures. For example, many schools and programs for the deaf spend 12 to 15 years educating a deaf child. Standardized academic achievement tests are administered at least annually. Yet, when the students complete school and are referred to vocational réhabilitation, no achievement test data are sent with them. Instead, meaningless report cards with idiosyncratic grading systems which no rehabilitation counselor (or teacher in most cases) can understand are sent. This kind of effort to evade accountability is self-serving perhaps because the academic achievement test scores are often low. However, it hurts the deaf youth and the rehabilitation process. Residential schools legitimately argue their prevocational and vocational programs to be superior to those available in alternative settings. Yet, many of these same schools fail to communicate to employers and rehabilitation counselors in operationally stated terms what vocational and work skills the graduating student has mastered. There is no conceivable justification for a 12- to 15-year investment in an academic and vocational education that can cost up to several hundred thousand dollars to be reported to the employer or rehabilitation counselor through report cards that give no objective data about actual academic level or vocational skills. This is analogous to the Ford Motor Company trying to justify its costs to stockholders by some general statement such as, "so many four-wheel vehicles were produced." Just as a stockholder would not know whether those four-wheel vehicles were Lincoln Continentals or plastic toys, employers and/or rehabilitation counselors often cannot tell from deaf school records whether they have an Einstein or a borderline mental retardate . A.A.D. / December 1985 485 Editorial Summary Congress will go on making bizarre generalizations . Educators, because we lack the data we Until education in general and special educa- should have wiU ^ unable t0 rebut these gener. taon in particular learn to document costs and 3U2300118 and defend the children for whose...