TheDOEannounced today a 5-year, $55 million contract to electronically track records for students with special needs, both within the public schools and for a minority of students in private or parochial schools who receive city-funded special ed services. (The bid was awarded to a Virginia company with a previously checkered record with the City, according to the Times.)

While the innovation is hugely welcome -- as in, welcome to the 21st century -- its arrival comes far behind similar systems for gen ed students. Advocates for special education students and their families often voice the opinion that special ed kids take a back seat to mainstream students. In fact, special ed is its own kind of parallel DOE universe, with unique processes for assessment, enrollment, and school placement. But rarely is the disparity so explicit as it seems today, when technologies in place for mainstream kids finally reach the special ed realm.

As Advocates for Children's Executive Director Kim Sweet noted, the new systems are long overdue and are designed to prevent the kind of falling-through-the cracks, incomplete or haphazard record-keeping of the past. But even this good news -- and it is good news -- prompts another question: Why are innovations in the two systems, mainstream and special ed, so far apart? For those who see two worlds, one for the able and one for the challenged, this belated victory seems, well, bittersweet.