On Pajamas Media, a father talks about his journey from Connecticut to Austin to Plano, Texas in search of the right special ed program for his daughter, who has a neurological disorder called polymicrogyria.
There are two worlds in American education, one for the neurotypical (or “normalâ€, I suppose) kids and one for the broken. In Connecticut as in much of the nation, special needs students, those often overlooked and unsexiest of student populations, faced an uphill struggle for services. Schuyler spent most of her days in a special education class, quietly seated off to the side while the teachers and their assistants spent all their time and energy taking care of children with severe autism and Down syndrome. It was understandable; many of these students would injure themselves or others if they weren’t supervised this way. But it was a poor environment for Schuyler.
Plano had a class for children like Schuyler, who uses a communications device. She’s thriving.
Dad Robert Rummel-Hudson blogs at Schuyler’s Monster.
Every special ed kid costs schools more money. They are incredibly expensive. Wealthy parents get lawyers and game the system for millions, and all the rest of the kids get inadequate educations that still cost more money.
They should be removed from the system and their education funded differently. Public schools should be reserved for the “neurotypical”.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t receive funding; it should just come from a different pool of money–health care, probably.
Shuffling the special ed kids off to a different school with a different funding mechanism sounds to me like, in practice, a way to underfund their education.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. But whatever it is, it shouldn’t be considered the same as funding education for the vast majority of normal kids.
Cal and I disagree, then, about whether all kids deserve an education.
But let’s explore this further. Which kids get shuffled off to the underfunded special ed ghetto? Just the really expensive ones like Schuyler, or will we ship off the ones that are just a little bit expensive, like a kid with dyslexia?
Is it money? The suburban kid with a mild learning disability is still, most likely, cheaper to educate than the neurotypical inner city kid with the educationally deprived background. Which of those two, if either, gets shipped off to the cheapie school?
I think it’s a mistake to let the schools off the hook for some kids. That constitutes an invitation for them to cherry-pick. Schools should have to educate the kids they have.
Cal’s ignorance and hostility made my jaw drop.
Well, yes and no. IDEA mandates that the federal government dispurse money to fund special education, and that the states . School funding is an arcane and complicated subject, however, students classified as “special education” in fact are funded at a higher rate than general education students. For a highly-readable discussion of the subject, I refer you to Lisa Snell’s article, “How schools use the “learning disability” label to cover up their failures” in in Reason Magazine,.
Again, yes and no.
Some points for your ignorant commenter:
1. The majority of students in special education are there because of specific learning disabilities, which can be remediated. Figures vary by state, about 13% of schoolchildren ages 13-16 are in special education; of those, somewhere around 60% of students have specific learning disabilities, according to the Center for Secondary Education and Transition.
2. Failing to remediate learning disabilities has a very high social cost. Those who exit the education system with poor reading and math skills are more likely to committ crimes. According to The JFA Institute’s April 2004 study, The Impact of Ignoring Dyslexia and Reading Disabilities in the Criminal Justice System (downloadable from this page) , for every $1 invested in remediating dyslexia, the state can expect to save $12 in later criminal justice/corrections spending.
3. In some states, “Special Ed” also includes services for the gifted and talented (see for example, Colorado
4. Students with ADHD are also often in the special education system, under the category of “other health impaired”. According to several studies, inmates in the correctional system have much higher incidence of undiagnosed/untreated ADHD. To my knowledge, no studies have yet been done on the social savings of successfully treading ADHD in school-aged children, yet the evidence from the JFA study suggest that the savings will exist.
5. Children with severe disabilities are expensive to educate. However, the numbers are quite small. According to the National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities, Given a population of 10,000 school children, about 39 will be in the “severe and profound” category.
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Marcus Winters and Jay Greene addressed this popular myth in the Spring 2007 issue of Education Next, in their article Debunking a Special Education Myth
I’d like to ask Cal to expand on this notion a little bit. Who determines what is “neurotypical”? Is it the child with the 155 IQ and some behavioral issues? Is it the child with normal cognitive capacities, but with mobility problems caused by cerebral palsy? Explain.
Good luck with reforming education funding, Cal. Those of us with kids with special needs are doing all we can to get our kids educated to the extent of their abilities, today. We can’t wait around for funding reform, while our kids languish.