A different sort of handicap.

PUTTING incontinent nine-year-olds into regular third-grade classes is a minor disruption for students in a standard curriculum compared to the irrevocable damage suffered by millions of normal children with average intelligence who have been placed in special education programs because their regular reading instructors could not teach them to read.

In 1975 Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to provide specially trained teachers with high-priced helpers, including psychologists and physical therapists, for children with disabilities such as impaired sight or hearing, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, and mental retardation. No one expected these highly trained instructors to teach any but students with disabilities that are real obstacles to learning. Proponents and opponents of the bill alike would be surprised to learn that 4 million of the 5 million public-school special education students have no mental or physical handicaps.

About 2.5 million of these students are in the "learning disabled" category. By definition these are students with average or above-average IQs who--for some reason--cannot read. Another million are in the "language disorder" group. These kids stutter, lisp, and have other pronunciation difficulties that are rarely associated with physical defects. About half a million are in the "emotionally disturbed" classification. Most of these are older students who have short attention spans--possibly because they have never learned to read. Together, these three groups include some 4 million students with no mental or physical handicap who should have learned to read, write, and figure in regular classes.

Though the number of students in public schools has shrunk by several million since the crowded Baby Boomer years of the Sixties and Seventies, the special education enrollment has climbed by 30 per cent (from 3.7 million to 5 million). And the enrollment in the "learning disabled" category has almost tripled. Last year 11 million of the nation's 42 million public-school students participated in special education programs or in the program set up under Chapter I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (intended to help the "disadvantaged").

This is a very expensive proposition. Federally mandated special education programs for about 1 million truly disabled students and 4 million teaching failures cost over $25 billion in the 1991-92 school year. Most of it was disbursed in salaries for 600,000 special education employees. The total expense for special education since 1976-77 (the first year it was in its present form) is over $200 billion, a figure few have noticed because state and local school districts have paid 92 per cent of it.

In Oklahoma, the state I know best, the average per-pupil cost in 1992-93 for regular students was $2,700; for students in special education classes, the cost was $8,600. Because the average cost for special education students was more than three times the average cost for regular students, and the average cost for Chapter I students was $1,300 more than the average cost for regular students, Oklahoma spent more than 42 per cent of its $2 billion education budget on the 22 per cent enrolled in Chapter I and special education. Oklahoma spent $150 million more on two programs that produce most of its illiterate graduates and drop-outs than it spent teaching math, science, history, geography, and English to all of its 588,000 students.

Annual reports to Congress on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act show that almost 7 out of 10 special education students drop out, "age out" (upon reaching their 22nd birthday), are expelled, or leave school with unearned diplomas. Perhaps 1 or 2 out of 10 complete a standard high-school curriculum of any kind. And contrary to notions that most Chapter I and special education pupils are in the early grades, rolls show that nearly half are in grades 6 through 12.

Somehow it never occurs to public-school administrators that the problem may be in the method of teaching rather than the children. In particular, the switch from phonics to the "see and say" technique of reading instruction has crippled public-school education. In 1929 and 1930, hundreds of primary teachers, guided by college reading professors, stopped teaching beginners to read by matching sounds with letters and started teaching them to recognize the 1,500 most commonly used words simply by seeing them printed over and over in the new "see and say" readers. The method was never tested in the classroom, and its adoption by the vast majority of public schools has coincided with dramatic declines in literacy and academic achievement.

RECENT neurological research confirms that everyone reads --if he reads--by matching spoken sounds with letters that spell sounds (as in phonics), not by matching the general shape of words or sentences with meanings. The children who have learned to read in whole-word or whole-language classes have done so in spite of that instruction--not because of it. Handicapped by a wrongheaded approach to teaching, many have not learned to read. Placing such children in special education classes allows the school system to hide its teaching failures.

States should eliminate special education for all but the truly handicapped--those with physical or mental disabilities that are real obstacles to learning. This will reduce the number of special education students from the current 5 million to about 1 million. School districts can use some of the money saved in this way to provide compensatory programs for children from homes with illiterate or barely literate parents after those children have learned to read. Schools can also use the money to retrain all of the 100,000 Chapter I teachers and their 100,000 helpers, along with most of the 300,000 special education teachers and their 300,000 helpers. Maybe they could be core-subject teachers. We haven't needed those because half of our students don't read well enough to do lessons in math, science, history, government, and literature.