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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.

I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.

Some articles from the past couple days:

I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.

I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.

Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).

Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?

I am a teacher in Canada, so I can't say much about the US Dept of Ed, but I can say a few things about how special ed works up here as a general reply to many of the comments below. Assume that whatever happens in Canada, it's probably worse in the US.

I work at a high school in a pretty affluent area. The affluence generally comes from remunerative blue collar work, not professional work. My school has over 1200 students and a third of them have special ed plans. There is virtually no violence at my school, no crime, students are polite and obedient. They just don't do or learn anything because of special ed plans.

These special ed plans are sometimes the result of tests carried out by private psychologists, sometimes the result of tests carried out by school psychologists, but are frequently ordered by family doctors. At least one was one sentence emailed by a paediatrician when the kid hadn't even been checked. None of these pathways is any worse than the others- they are all fraudulent.

They nearly all specify that the student needs extra time and a "quiet space" for tests because of anxiety.

The "quiet space" requirement is written up on demand because the kids know it will get them their own little room for tests. Everyone but the parents knows this, but if you try to tell the parents they freak out because the school isn't taking their child's special learning style seriously. Moreover, you can hear a pin drop during a test in even the rowdiest classes and so the requirement now demands "an alternative space." Last exam season, it was not possible to give every kid a private or semi-private room, so all the alternative space kids were sent to one big room, resulting in an "alternative space" that contained more students than any of the 4 exam rooms with containing the normal kids. All stakeholders found this acceptable.

The "extra time" requirement is invoked any time a kid starts to do poorly. "Well you didn't give her enough time to show what she really knows." This was originally intended for exams, although the extra time kids almost almost get the same 54% they would have gotten in half the time. By now, however, parents demand it for everything. If one attempts to explain that taking 40 minutes for a 20-minute assignment every day means 20 minutes of missed class time - a class wherein the student was already struggling- parents are baffled. Up until grade 10, it had never occurred to them that there might not be unlimited time in the school day. Any teacher who doesn't provide this time is summoned to A Meeting with the parents and the principal, and since the average teacher is Lisa Simpson, this prospect is so threatening that it never needs to happen.

The third most common "accomodation" is to have all written material read out loud by an aide. Since around 20% of 1200 students are officially entitled to this, it is not possible for a human aide to read to them all, and so text-to-speech programs are used. When text-to-speech is offered, students don't use it because the advantage of the human aide is that you can read the best aides for clues about the right answer and straight up ask the worst aides what they think the answer is. This is usually enough to get a passing mark. Refusing the text-to-speech but using an aide if available is an admission by the student that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Note that the most common exam to have read to you is the grade 12 English reading comprehension exam. All stakeholders find this acceptable.

The fourth most common accomodation is to have someone write out your essay for you as you dictate it, not because you are a poor handwriter (parents, students and other teachers react with horror at the suggestion that even a one-paragraph response could be completed by hand) but because you are a poor typist. When you ask the aides who do this what they did to help the student, they straight up admit to helping the student "organize their thoughts before putting them into words." The students find this to be the most helpful part of having a "scribe. " All stakeholders find this acceptable.

These are only the academic allowances. Almost every student with a special ed plan is entitled to "movement breaks." Weird in high school, but whatever. In practice this means that if they get bored they are allowed to wander the halls with their friends. Predictably, these sorts of kids get bored with schoolwork very quickly. They also get preferential seating. All are entitled to laptops to "help with notetaking" (no notes are ever taken). One specific kid must always have his computer and also no one is ever allowed to sit behind him. Doctor's orders. Any kid who appears to be indigenous is allowed to leave class literally whenever they want to get free cookies because "you can't learn if you're hungry." No other ethnicity is believed to get hungry.

All of this is million dollar (Canadian) Goodharting scheme. The point of special ed is to launder cheating so that students who would otherwise fail can pass classes that absolutely do not matter. The parents of an illiterate student in grade ten are more worried about her geography mark than about the fact that she can't read. When you ask the dedicated special ed teachers about this, they don't even understand the question because the idea of doing anything to a)verify that the special ed needs are legit and b)rectify or mitigate the disabilities that cause them is so far off their radar that they never imagine it. The special ed teacher's main job is compliance- making sure the other teachers give out the extra time and movement breaks.

Anti-school Motteposters might protest that school is hell/prison/etc and so if a kid can use these tricks to escape the drudgery and the power-tripping teachers then they should go for it. But these students are the ones schools are actually designed for. They are the lowest common denominator and will not learn to code (or whatever) with the time they save by gaming special ed. In fact, the special ed gaming costs them huge amounts of time. While sitting in class might be boring, sitting in the cheating room for 45 minutes so that no one questions why you finished the test so quickly is far more boring. Listening to a 50-year-old Phillipina immigrant trying to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic" on question 10 and realizing you have 50 questions left to endure is far more boring. Furthermore, the more one believes that school is a waste of time and money, the more one should rage at the fact that parents, whose attitude toward all of this reveals that they see school as no more than a daycare, continue to accept the billion-dollar form of daycare when they could just use the minimum-wage daycare across the street. And finally, the more you mistrust teachers (and you should) the more you should hate this system because it covers up their incompetence. When a third of kids show up in grade 10 apparently unable to read, no one goes to the grades 1-9 teachers to demand an explanation. "They all have special ed plans" is considered a sufficient explanation for everything.

That seems fairly similar to how things are in the US. I work in schools, but not in subjects with mandatory tests, but I get to see all the IEPs for the school, and they're mostly things about longer times for tests, breaking down instructions into shorter chunks, repeating instructions, preferential seating, and less stimulating environments (especially for testing).

The very high needs children who have a one on one aid are also on IEPs, but it's quite different situationally, even though their IEPs generally look more or less the same.

Perhaps it ultimately won't make much of a difference whether there's a national Department of Education or not, since the expectations are already there for all of the accommodations.

When I was in Catholic school, I had very poor handwriting- and this was back when absolutely everything was expected to be cursive- so my teachers, rather than struggling, wrote a note asking the doctor to diagnose me with disgraphia(I think I spelled that right) so I could be put in the accommodations room for written work. The reason, of course, was so that my in-class essays could be typewritten. So far, so reasonable. But there was 1 accommodations room, everyone got the same thing. I remember extreme boredom from the extra time(we weren’t allowed to bring a book in- for reasons that seem understandable), but also if released to the accommodations room we had to stay there. I never witnessed anyone being read to; presumably Catholic schools just expelled students who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to read in a timely fashion.

The accommodation room consisted of booths facing the wall, with dividers and an open back. Each one was equipped with a special silent typewriter but the desk was otherwise bare. There were two aids that monitored it, and one private booth for proctoring oral exams. In the third grade I managed to get permission to bring one of the special silent typewriters into the conventional classroom for spelling tests, and then traipse back to print it off- this seemed a treat to me at the time.

Wow -- I guess I've seen aspects of this around my kids' school but this all sounds quite extreme -- are you back East somewhere? In suburban BC I would find all of this quite disturbing.

I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.

Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.

Huh -- "come to BC" is all I can suggest then -- there's a certain amount of trans/FN pity indoctrination (which the kids mostly don't seem to be really buying), more seriously disabled kids per class than I'd like, and... that's about it.

A fourth grade teacher wanted to diagnose my son with ADD (we had none of it) but other than that I know of approximately 'accommodation' kids working the system as you describe.

Not a lot of immigrants in my (undisclosed) location, either.

I've worked in BC. It might be better, but you have to keep in mind that none of this is advertised or even visible unless your kid sucks at school or you go shopping for it. And I'm talking about high school- before high school, a lot of the problems are just passed along, year after year, because no one can fail. Once high school hits and suddenly kids can fail, the Goodharting begins.

My kids are in high school, and they would know if 50%+ of the class were being spirited away to a special room as test-taking accommodation.

It does seem like the new policy (since I was in high school) is more accommodating in terms of retaking tests you've blown, and handing in homework late -- but AFAICT this applies to everybody, and isn't an obviously terrible idea.

It's not 50%. It's like 20%. At school-wide exam time, in five exam rooms of 30 kids, if each room loses 6, then the "alternate space" contains 30 and each normal room contains 24. For regular tests it's 2 or 3 here and there.

As far as retaking tests, if you can retake them there is little incentive to study, so you can just blow them and it doesn't matter. Since it's a massive pain to make fair tests (about 8 hours for the kind of history tests that are expected in my region, for example) there are usually only two versions, so by the third attempt the kid has already seen all the questions and discussed them with everyone else. Besides the obvious problems, this also makes it impossible to go through the tests with the students and explain why the correct answers are correct, point out the tricky bits, etc.

Late homework is just as bad. Of course marks should just be a reflection of how well the kid knows things, but culturally this is an impossible attitude. Marks are the currency we use to pay students. The point of the homework (we can debate the effectiveness, but this is the intent) is to learn something at a certain point in the course sequence. The mark you get for the homework is the currency the school uses to get you to learn it at the correct time. (The mark you get on the test is the currency the school pays you for having actually learned it). When there is no penalty for late homework, kids let it pile up until literally the last day of the year, after the exam is complete, and then show up and try to desperately churn out a bunch of work from the first week to see what happens to their mark (no matter how many times you explain the math, they won't/can't calculate the effect). So the teacher can just waive the homework. This is the easiest option, but not fair to the kids who played along, and also punishes the kid trying to hand it in late, because now his tests count for much more (and he's no genius and he didn't do the homework, so his test marks are low). Or the teacher can accept all the homework, which is annoying because it is pointless. The tests and exams are over- the proof of learning is complete, so the evidence of the learning process is useless.

Anyone know what proportion of kids in their school district are in special education programs? I was shocked to hear that it's over 25% and about to hit 30 here.
(The state caps funding at some level lower than that, so they're asking for an even higher levy)

I know the kids aren't alright these days, but unless my district is a huge outlier it seems like another institutional metastasization to absorb the overproduction of social workers.

At least in my state there is financial incentive for districts to classify kids as special needs. They get more than double funding for each such child, though that amount diminishes as you climb above 16% special ed students: https://ospi.k12.wa.us/policy-funding/special-education-funding-and-finance/special-education-funding-washington-state

The penalty is a percentage multiplier applied to the total amount of extra funds, and it's possible to lose funds. There are two tiers of special ed students, one that pays out a 112% bonus, students who spend > 80% of their time in general ed, and another that pays out 106%, for students who spend less time than that in general ed.

In either case you start losing revenue at about 58% special ed. Well before that you'd be losing money since you'd need to actually spend some amount of those funds on special ed services.

Would not be surprised if 25% is the real break-even factoring in the need to spend on services.

At first glance, Colorado is not as incentivized as Washington - at least to get that filthy federal lucre.

If I'm missing context here, I'd love to know more.

I think that number includes 504s and BIPs (behavior intervention plans), and IEPs is closer to 10%

That depends entirely on what constitutes "special education programs". I remember going to some supplementary reading classes during grade school, along with a good number of other students, for an hour once every couple of weeks for maybe a year. Were we a special education program? It wasn't part of our regular class and we met with a special education teacher. Some other people went to a speech therapist, was that a "special education programme"?

Without knowing how special education program is defined, these kinds of stats aren't very interesting.

Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

The speed at which students will learn 9 years worth of material will vary vastly and the pain points and bottle necks in learning will vary vastly. It isn't at all surprising that at least 25% of students will be out of sync with the curriculum.

Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

That explains five percentage points and assumes that half of "special education programs" are for gifted children.

If you want to map it to one tail of IQ, then 25% of students have <90 IQ. I don't think that the typical student with an IQ of 89 needs coaching, so something else is causing those numbers.

The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

My understanding is that classrooms are generally integrated and they therefore go at the speed of the slowest student. Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.

Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.

But it is inclusive if we rebrand it as special ed.

Depends, gifted education has been getting dismantled in certain districts under the guise of social justice

I recall reading about New York City and Seattle closing advanced schools. Not equitable you see. A quick googling confirms.

The decision to phase out the cohort schools was made to address concerns about racial inequities, as the highly capable programs were perceived as not serving all students equally.

Same as universities implementing racist policies to discriminate against Asians. They worked hard to avoid clearly stating "too Asian so we are ending the advanced programs".

Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.

The IQ 130+ students aren't getting individual calc tutors in middle school, it bears pointing out.

Differentiated education is good. But you could go much further with the same amount of resources by grouping students of roughly the same ability and teaching classes targeted to their abilities. Even if you want to put more resources into students at the lower end, it makes more sense to group them in low student-teacher ratio classes appropriate to their learning rate.

I was offered the opportunity to go straight into college at government expense three times- twice my mom vetoed it because she thought I’d wind up dating an oriental(yes, really) if they were most of my social circle and once I decided against it because I liked the Catholic school system. That’s probably the closest a large institution can do to ‘individualized calculus tutoring in middle school’.

Anyone know what proportion of kids in their school district are in special education programs? I was shocked to hear that it's over 25% and about to hit 30 here.

That's legit possibly the most shocking stat I've ever heard. If someone had told me 5%, I would have considered it on the high side of plausible, but just barely, and that's more than 5x that. I really hope that your district is an extreme outlier. Otherwise, either there's massive fraud or mismanagement in public education (best case) or we really are headed for an Idiocracy future. Unfortunately, those also aren't mutually exclusive.

I think it's mainly over-diagnosis and excessively pathologising certain behaviour. Also parents don't want to turn down any kind of extra support they feel they are receiving.

Or, every child with an accommodations plan is labeled as special Ed, and huge numbers of kids have fraudulent ADHD diagnoses because higher grades are worth the side effects of aderal to their parents.

My mom was a special education teacher for many years, most of that time was with the moderate to severe kids. I worked as an aide in her class on several different occasions. The reality is that many mildly mentally disabled kids can be taught enough to be able to be mostly functional adults (though they'll likely need help on a somewhat regular basis) while the moderate to severe ones never will, and will require constant care and supervision for the rest of their lives.

Schooling does little to nothing for these kids, but the problem is that school's real purpose is to be a state subsidized daycare to enable women to leave the home and work. Even though I vehemently disagree with school being used this way, that's the reality. Without these programs these parents will have to (gasp!) take care of their kids instead of working two jobs!

I think that it's reasonable for the government to provide care for disabled children, teens, and even sometimes adults, since Americans do not live in multigenerational clans or villages, where care can be somewhat distributed. But it seems both very expensive and also rather miserable to be in a school, specifically all the time if someone isn't being educated. They aren't that comfortable, I guess they're reasonably safe and the food is acceptable, but large schools just don't seems like a natural setting for primarily providing supervision.

I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.

Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.

We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.

I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.

I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."

I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.

I've worked with the disabled in vocational rehab in the past. The young adults I worked with here moderate-function, too disabled for things like extra time on tests to ever really be a thing in their lives. Both of these types do exist; there really are a lot of people that just need a bit of extra help and can find gainful, independent imployment. There really are a lot of parents ruthlessly gaming the system as well. Sometimes these happen at the same time with the same person. Of note with the populations I worked with, there was never really a question about if these people were disabled or not; they were all obviously developmentally disabled to even an untrained observer. One thing I that has stuck with me over the years though was that even some of the more profoundly disabled ones had been coached by their parent to ether exagerate or hide their disablilty depending on the audience. Since I was an authority figure to them at first, one of my biggest challenges was to get them to stop exaggerating.

My sister wouldn't have graduated college without the extra time provided by disability accommodations for dyslexia and dyscalculia. I spent an entire semester of her undergrad with her on video calls (as emotional support, and as someone she could trust would get the right final answer), watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes that have never once been relevant to her professional endeavors, and I had a front-row seat to the frustration and exhaustion induced by learning disabilities on otherwise exceptional people. It takes her minutes to do problems I can do in my head - not because I'm any smarter, but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.

That extra time let her squeak through the remedial courses with a passing grade. Years later, she's now a successful practicing psychiatrist, and I'm confident that several of her needs-based clients would say she has utilized her education for the betterment of society.

I also don't think this had anything to do with our parents pushing parenting duties onto teachers. For all their other flaws, not once did they ever abdicate any parental responsibilities. They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself, and spent years researching and trying different approaches, alongside private tutors and disability specialists, at great personal cost, to help my sister over her hump. And it worked! And if the schools didn't give her extra time on her tests, she would have flunked out of college and it would have all been for naught.

I agree that the disability accommodation system is full of parents making their children someone else's problem, and this is probably the majority of its use now. There's a level-headed argument to be made that the cost to society of exploiting that system is way more than the benefit for the handful of people like my sister. I just want to point out that there are people benefitting from disability accommodations in a way that doesn't encourage learned helplessness later in life.

A lot of people are jumping on this so I'll give my two cents as a diagnosed dyslexic. Only being privy to the one experience I cannot be totally sure if dyslexia is a real thing or not as I can't directly experience how others interact with words. I will say that I find reading long texts difficult and tedious, frequently needing to reread sections and losing my position while doing so. I never actually used my diagnosis besides getting some side lessons in elementary and middle school. I took the ACT without any help and my lowest section was actually science because I only completed about half of the questions within the time frame despite getting them all right. This probably resulted in getting less scholarships/into less prestigious colleges than I would have otherwise.

I think @blooblyblobl 's sister is probably fine as a doctor, it's not like you literally cannot focus and interpret text or that big proper nouns will get confused with each other. It's that as you try to read faster text gets kind of jumbled and you need to slow down and reread sections. There are plenty of coping mechanisms.

I find it unsurprising and troubling that your sister went into psychiatry, the wooliest field of medicine which is least amenable to objective oversight (ie a bad psych can go unmolested for a long time in a way that a bad anæsthesiologist can not)

From the description you've provided it's... A bit horrifying that your sister is actually practicing as a doctor. I'm sure she says she "can do it", but look - there were plenty of conmen throughout the twentieth century who practiced as doctors, successfully, without any medical training. Even surgeons! And I'm sure plenty of their colleagues would have said they were fine doctors, not knowing about their absent/fraudulent qualifications. Many conmen did this for years and years!

The fact that your sister has not yet run into a situation where her incapacity causes some public disaster is meh.

If the description you've provided is accurate, she doesn't have the requisite mental equipment to be a doctor, and it's a serious indictment of whatever country's medical school she graduated from that she's practicing as one. Horrifying tbh

Without commenting on the sister in particular, I do find these sorts of stories ironically depressing.

"I suffer from severe [performance inhibiting condition], and yet through incredible perseverance, added efforts from friends, family, etc., a few convenient accommodations, and some really painful medical interventions, I was able to become a mediocre practitioner in [Career Field]!"

Like man, you had to ignore a lot of incentives, advice, and straight up warning signs to push through to become, at best, approximately as good as the average person who doesn't have your condition. When you might have ended up a lot happier just following the economic signals and going down a path that didn't require 5x the resources to produce 2/3 of the optimal outcome.

Like, imagine a 5'2" dude REALLY wanted to play in the NBA. So he does severe training regimens, he gets leg lengthening surgery, he has extensive coaching from ex-NBA stars, and finally, he manages to convince the NBA to let him wear stilts on the Court as an accommodation. And After all this, he makes it to the NBA and performs at a slightly below average level overall. Which is impressive for him! But that's a lot of resources spent to get the guy up to merely 'adequate' performance, which is to say he's not contributing much to the overall success, despite all the inputs required to get him there.

When the guy with that sort of willpower and drive could have found his true calling as a Horse Jockey at a much lower price for everyone.

Well, does our hypothetical manlet want to be a horse jockey? Would he find it fulfilling, compared to his strongly indicated preference of merely playing professional basketball?

I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it." I don't agree with this, even though I think we'd agree on a close converse of "if you could be the best, or above average at an occupation, it's not wrong to pursue it."

Is "contributing to the overall success [of the NBA]" as you put it expressed solely by players at the peak of natural talent and aptitude, or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on? Like, sure it's not optimal, is it actually wrong in your estimation?

(Not to get totally sidetracked by the analogy, I think my line of questioning still tracks to the original topic at least.)

or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on?

"Field Fillers" and Jobbers are a thing in the more entertainment-oriented sports, at least.

I think, again, as matter of politics, of giving these kinds of helps when you could simply bend to the path that doesn’t require so many resources, I think there’s a point at which the public is not served by giving basketball lessons to short people. Lots of people don’t get to do the jobs they want, either from lack of ability, or poverty, or being born in the wrong region, or family culture. I think this is an immensely unreasonable approach to finding a career for a whole host of reasons starting with ability and leading through technological advancement, pay for the work, demand, and so on. If I want to be a dog walker, I can do so, but given the low wage, low demand, and the fact that a person can probably build a dog walking robot would make offering this as a job training program rather stupid — especially if the student is sitting in a wheelchair.

I mean, if you know you’ll be quite bad at an important field lots of people want to go into, it seems quite selfish to insist on going in anyways.

It is probably better if everyone gets a living; that is not equal to everyone fulfilling their hopes and dreams. Sometimes your hopes and dreams are stupid.

"if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it."

"If it will cost you 5000 hours of time and $200,000+ in 'extra' efforts to get to a particular position, it behooves you to figure out if the payoff is worthwhile." I can 'believe' that the extra utils the manlet gets from becoming an NBA player might pay off for him.

BUT... its not clear that he'll really be happier/better off/wealthier than he would have been going for a more directly attainable goal.

I don't want to imply that his only alternate choice is horse jockey. Flyweight MMA Champion of the World is absolutely on the table, for example. But if he decides he'd like to instead be the Heavyweight champion, should we celebrate his decision to on a massive regimen of steroids, get risky surgeries, and bulk himself up at the expense of his mental and physical wellbeing just so he can get outclassed by the 'natural' heavyweights?

What's the point?

Part of the secret to a happy/content life, I think, is 'setting realistic goals'. And in situations where your skill at a given job has other people's lives hanging in the balance, then yes, you really DO need to be especially good at it.

The nice thing about playing in the NBA is that individual screwups will almost never be fatal. We can 'afford' to indulge somebody's fantasies there without much collateral 'damage.'

But I wouldn't want an epileptic to become an airline pilot, even if they 'overcame the odds' to get through flight school and have hundreds of hours of successful flight time under their belts. (note, if a proven 'cure' for epilepsy existed, this would be a different situation). For the love of God just do not choose a career where a single incident can kill a hundred people!

That's fair and I think we're on the same page. Thank you for the elaboration. :)

I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it."

This seems clearly true for tournament professions, where only the best get a high payoff. If you have no chance of making it out of the NBA G-league, basketball probably isn't the field for you. If you have no chance of making it IN to the NBA G-league, it definitely isn't.

watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes

Children take algebra in middle school. If we want our doctors to be the best, or even good, then we simply cannot have anyone who struggles with middle school mathematics as an adult. Questionable that someone who struggles with remedial algebra is in college, much less med school. How did she get in? Don't you have to take like the MCAT? Are you overselling here disability? You're describing a woman who can barely read...

but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.

oh god, she can't even read and shes a doctor prescribing medication. What if she needed to read it six times instead of five, would she even know? You're telling us she is incapable of deciphering words.

They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself,

A disabled doctor. I'm glad your sister got to prove herself at the expense of the health of her patients. Good for her, I'm sure she is really self actualized.

I know this sounds really rude, but I don't know your sister. I know her through your words. And you have told me she is someone who can barely read, struggles with basic math, and also prescribes extremely vulnerable patients powerful medication. If what you're telling us is accurate, its just evil. Its your sister putting her aspirations over the health of her patients. No, your sister who can't read shouldn't be a doctor. How did she get through med school? Can she really not read?

I think it's far more likely that the person you're replying to is overstating or accidentally exaggerating the degree of disability here.

I have a hard time imagining someone who can't read becoming a doctor. Maths? The most that average doctors do is basic arithmetic or algebra that's middle school level.

I'm talking figuring out what x should be when when trying to divide doses or transform one unit of measurement to another. With a calculator at hand, and a willingness to redo sums multiple times, even someone with severe impairment would probably manage. These days, you can just look up doses for just about every drug under the sun online.

I struggle to think of any occasion I'd run into in clinical practise where I'd be expected to do more, if I was conducting a study or analyzing a research paper, I'd probably have to brush up my stats and maybe learn something that school or med school didn't teach me.

Funnily enough, I'm in psych training, and also have what could loosely be described as a learning difficulty in the form of ADHD. I never asked for nor received extra time or additional adjustments on the exams I had to clear, as far as the standardized tests in India were concerned, you had to be missing an arm or something to qualify for that. Google tells me that people with dysgraphia could get extra time, but I'll be damned if I heard of that ever happening, or anyone I ran into in my career who fit the bill.

Knowledge, both procedural and arcane, matter the most in med school. I'd hope that this lady had that, and had coping mechanisms that let her circumvent her issues. If she's made it this far, without being sued into oblivion, she can probably handle herself.

Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.

Some people are like that.

And she can just use AI for maths.

Bad take, dude. AI makes lots of mistakes. How is she supposed to discover them?

Deepseek R1 is surely better at maths than most people on this forum and doubtless far superior to this doctor: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i5r85h/deepseekr1_scored_100_on_a_2023_a_levels/

I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.

(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)

His sister is a psychiatrist not pharmacist

Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived

TBF those two words are very similar and easily confused if your brain happens to like... swap some letters around.

To whom would you rather trust your well-being:

  • The medical professional who has spent their entire life developing strategies to meticulously check over their work to ensure consistency and accuracy
  • The average medical professional (they're confident they just don't make that kind of mistake)

I think you are significantly overestimating the scope of the problem - her failure mode was losing points for questions she did not have time to answer, as opposed to answering questions wrongly, on a timed test with pencil and paper. This is demonstrably not a representative model of the real world, in which computers, colleagues, and the spoken word exist, variables may be named at one's pleasure, operators correspond to explicit and distinct positions on the keyboard, and you get at least half a decade of extra practice before they let you loose on the unsuspecting populace. Today, her learning disabilities are effectively non-issues; in fact, her meticulousness means she tends to catch mistakes made by others as well (which has made for some colorful stories).

It is precisely this kind of tractable problem, which only really exists in a pedagogical spherical-cow setting, that requires accommodations, as opposed to nebulous claims of racial or mental victimhood from the lazy, the conniving, or the otherwise unqualified comprising the median. The challenge, as it has always been, is telling them apart. Again, there's an argument to be made that it's not worth it to try, and it may even be a good one. But it's not open-and-shut.

I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.

If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.

Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.

One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.

There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i

Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.

I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…

Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.

Weighted fonts are one method by which things can be made easier on dyslexics. Notably, Comic Sans is surprisingly useful as one in a pinch, though still beaten out by purpose-built fonts.

Yes, the whole theoretical point of academic tests is to be an objective measure of the capacity of students. Because when you go out and get a real job, you have to actually be able to do that job. If these remedial courses aren't necessary for being a psychiatrist, then there should be a path to becoming a practicing psychiatrist that doesn't require them. If they ARE necessary, then lightening the requirements because, gosh, you can't satisfy the requirements but really want to graduate ends up causing harm later on in life.

I mean, these classes are far from the only example of things you don’t need. We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

I do always think of the local-ish story of the Native American law student forced to take math classes at ASU. Now, sure, depending on the specific field of law, math may actually prove to be a useful skill to have, but I could probably imagine some areas of law where it's not really necessary.

Hard to properly and believably inflate your billable hours when you can't do math.

We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.

Personally, I've never seen one.

I've seen a few of these in my life (both personally and as a treating physician) and have a few coworkers who meet this description. The classic example is boys who are a little too male for our current teaching paradigms. Think poor behavioral regulation or ADHD. If they have a supportive home environment and intellectual reserve it is very possible they'll stay out of just enough trouble/troubling behavioral patterns for their frontal lobe to develop and adequate coping skills/treatment to come into play.

Then they end up being productive members of society.

The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen, then they fall out of society. School alone is pretty ineffective at covering that but you do need both.

The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen

I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.

School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.

Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.

boys who are a little too male

I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.

I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".

School alone is pretty ineffective

Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)

With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.

The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.

and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not.

Yes!

People with a good enough "life" (genetics, money, family support, intellectual reserve, whatever) can often do well or age out with enough time to establish "normal" life patterns and for some general brain development.

Even anti-socials often age out of a lot of the bad behavior.

Institutions that help with this can work! ...but are not always worth the costs.

I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.

I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.

If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.

Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.

As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.

In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.

I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.

IIRC from my deep dive into ADHD skepticism-

  • some cases of ADHD diagnosis are actually hearing or vision related issues that will resolve themselves, and these are very common in elementary school aged boys. Experienced elementary teachers tend to have lower rates of ADHD diagnoses in their classes because they deal with these by adjusting the seating chart first, and that’s usually enough to route around the problem.

  • ADHD diagnoses are much higher in boys born just after the age cutoff than in boys born just before it- that is, cases are concentrated among the youngest boys in a given class.

  • ADHD as a thing that the system worries about is globally correlated with treating elementary school in a seriously academic way, with grades, homework, etc. The US is a global outlier in both respects.

  • The medications in use improve focus and make behavior easier at the cost of side effects regardless of ADHD; teachers are strongly incentivized to get kids on them to make their jobs easier, and they deliver higher grades anyways, so parents usually don’t complain. Doctors who always make the diagnosis and write the scrip are known to the school systems and sometimes recommended by them.

  • Countries which don’t think ADHD is real are doing fine academically.

The TDLR is that there’s a lot of things going into the ADHD overdiagnosis issue beyond ‘why don’t I have a classroom full of girls’ moaning by teachers.

Do you have more info on countries that don't diagnose ADHD? This seems like the kind of thing that is very culture bound in a fascinating way.

I can remember that France was one, I think, but this is all memories from a deep dive several years ago. I concluded that while ADHD probably is real, most cases are some other issue being misdiagnosed and it shouldn’t be considered a possibility before high school. Oh, and I remembered that the diagnosis patterns by ethnicity don’t match any of the usual patterns- blacks get the least but Asians don’t have an elevated rate, it’s a whites and Indians(both kinds) thing.

I mean I'm just here to say it works SOMETIMES.

I suspect that part of the problem is the refusal to give up on anybody leaving everyone behind, as is common elsewhere.

Personally, I've never seen one.

I can testify there to the case of one of my own family members, who was sick as a child and benefited from such programs, he teetered on the verge of dropping off society because of difficulties caused by his impairment, but managed to remain on the good side of things and now holds a respectable job that he enjoys and is good at.

His parents' valiant efforts should get most of the credit, but I do think total academic failure would have pushed him over the line, and into drugs and crime.

I can also say that I have seen people exploit the system in sometimes disgusting ways, but people whom these things truly help exist, and I know so.

Fake special needs people exist and are a problem, perhaps too much of a problem for these programs to continue existing as they do, but real special needs people also exist, and dealing with them can sadly be a nightmare for everyone involved if the system is too rigid.

My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.

This is the way. It's absolutely asinine to me that so many parents think it's the schools' job to raise their kids for them. But you're 100% correct, it's your job not theirs. Even the teachers hate it - my wife's family has several teachers in it, and they complain about how students' parents act as though they are supposed to be fixing kids' behavioral issues. They would rather just dump it off on the school rather than, you know, being a parent.

Surely it's both? The schools have control over the children 8h a day, time during which they interact with their peers. This is very likely the most important part of the day for socialisation and a part that the parents can't really influence much.

Of course the parents play an important role but so does the school. It's a collective responsibility.

This makes a lot of sense - if the children are at school most of the day, then the school has to be an ally in making sure they turn out properly. Traditional English schools (Eton, Winchester, Westminster) have always seen it as their responsibility to build character. It does result in a certain level of conformity of course.

No, and don't call me Shirley.

As a parent your kids are ultimately your responsibility, your investment in the future of humanity. No one else can be expected to care more about thier future/individual well-being than you.

I'd say that the school's responsibility is subservient to the parents' responsibility. The parents have a sort of "natural" responsibility over the child, in part due to being the ones to voluntarily create the child and to keep the child. As such, it's the parent's responsibility to actually check if the school is doing a decent enough job at raising their child during the 8 hours a day the child is there and, if not, to correct it in some way, whether that be changing schools, changing the way the school treats the child, making up at home for the school's failures, etc. It's like how some company's R&D department might be the responsibility of the vice president in charge of that or whatever, but it's ultimately the CEO's responsibility to make sure that the company has a system in place to hire a competent person for that role and to make sure that that person is performing that role competently, and so any failure of the R&D department is ultimately due to a failure of the CEO.

After all, parents also tend to have much more skin in the game for the child than the school, since the child doesn't stop being their child once they graduate, though the child does stop being the school's student. And generally, the relationship between the child and parent tends to be more sustained in the long term than the relationship between the child and the school he went to when he was a child. So from a purely selfish, narcissistic perspective, a parent would want to consider himself the responsible party, since if the school fails in raising the child right, the negative consequences fall more on the parent than on the school.

No, when you're a parent the buck stops with you. The school can be your ally in raising your kids, but they are not the responsible party.

There are multiple responsible parties. The parents are the primary responsible party but the school is another.

I disagree. The parents are the only responsible party when it comes to raising the kid. The school is responsible for education, but they don't bear responsibility if the kid turns out to be a drug dealer or something.

To some degree this is cultural, and the vehemence here on both sides can be attributed to cultural assumptions.

In Japan the school is very much (I was going to put a percent on it but that would be pushing it) charged with raising the children. If you see a kid out in the world pulling some jackass stunt, the question "What is your school and who is your home teacher?" is enough to chill their veins. You don't ask "Who's your dad?"

Enculturation in the Japanese sense cannot occur outside the context of the group, so it is within the group (i.e. the school group[s]) that this process occurs, year by year, from a very very young age.

To some degree this is how one can understand the term "bullying" in Japan. There are of course exceptions, but bullying here is largely when you have a kid who for whatever reason just doesn't toe the line after years of having the rules dinned into his or her brain. (There could of course be all sorts of reasons for this.) So you have an entire class, not just one punk, turning against a student. Bullying here is not one monster terrorizing a class, but a class "terrorizing" one individual.

Teachers here, in particular in primary and secondary education, for the most part (of course I am writing generally) take the job of raising the children (子どもを育てる) as an explicit part of their jobs. In the cases of troubled students (think fighting in school, but also just basic withdrawal) meetings are held, and there is a great deal of discussion and handwringing, often in absurd ways and resulting in very odd strategies. If a kid makes up his or her mind to just rebel, schools will eventually go through with expulsion. And compulsory education only lasts through age 15, or the first year or so of high school.

I've probably overwritten this. I am aware it's different in the US, where people have specific ideas of parenting, self-expression, individuality, and personal choice.

It seems relevant that in the UK you have different classes for each subject whereas AFAIK in Japan you’re with the same group all day every day.

I think, anyway, my memories of school are faded.

School might not be directly liable for long term consequences like someone eventually becoming a drug dealer but they are legally responsible and liable for most of what happens in school, extending far beyond just education.

Should the edifice change? in what way?

Stop trying to educate the congenitally (literally, in a lot of cases) ineducable. That's a lot of what special ed programs are attempting. There's also a large part of it being gamed by rich savvy parents to give their kids (who are victims of nothing more than regression to the mean) a leg up on the grounds of some fake condition, and you can obviously take that away too. If government MUST shepherd these kids on to their life in a halfway house working as a sub-minimum wage grocery-cart pusher, it can be done far more cheaply if we don't spend years pretending to educate them.

The actual educating kids on their life to a halfway house is in fact very expensive- teaching Downies basic skills for taking care of themselves/severe autists not to strip naked because their tags are bothering them/etc is something which requires lots of expensive specialists.

Most IEP’s are not that. Sure, parents are notorious for faking a ADHD diagnoses for extra time(and we should probably crack down on this), but I suspect school admins love putting kids on IEP’s because they get more money. School admins are not averse to fraud and have as their primary overarching goal spending as much taxpayer money as possible, no matter the effect.

most IEPs are not that

this is true, but I think a lot of the expenses from IEPs are from the hard cases - it costs a lot more to pay a specialist to 1:1 a kid every day than it does to give someone extra time on tests

teaching ... severe autists not to strip naked because their tags are bothering them ... is something which requires lots of expensive specialists.

Or a ten-dollar pair of scissors. (Cf. the Hair Dryer Incident, Slate Star Codex, November 2014.)

Unlike with the boolean yes-no presence of the hair dryer, cutting off annoying tags doesn't at all guarantee that the resulting roughened seam isn't going to be even more aggravating (and now impossible to deal with without tearing the clothes). I actually started to just put up with tags as is rather than risk failing the DEX check and ending up with unwearable shirts.

>t. autist

cutting off annoying tags doesn't at all guarantee that the resulting roughened seam isn't going to be even more aggravating

The fact that there are several brands of decent clothing (from underwear to jackets) that lack tags entirely has been a beautiful development. I don't care that it's cost-cutting, it's the correct thing to do.

I haven't seen those, only a compromise where the tag is flimsily attached somewhere else instead of having its base woven directly into the seam/collar (side note, why are tags even woven in like that so they're maximally troublesome to cleanly remove? Does it not occur to tailors that people prefer to cut these things off?) I can only hope this trend will reach my shithole someday.

I have no idea where you live, so I can't offer any recommendations.

If you're in the US, Old Navy offers some like these.

If you're in Canada, or have access to Canada, go to Mark's and buy the 50-wash shirts. They're usually 7-10USD each, they last forever, and there are no tags anywhere on them.

This was a proxy for about 10,000 other things that bother severe autists about wearing clothes.

It might be worth a try, even so. Hand knitting clothing out of alpaca wool or something is probably still less expensive than most of the interventions in public education.

Yes, finding clothes that autists are willing to wear is a thing that parents of severe autists who insist on public nudity should be doing. But I’m given to understand that most of these kids are… not good communicators, making it challenging, and besides, it was a single example of antisocial behavior that has to be trained out of such kids.

I think honestly that the biggest reason for school failure is the lack of honesty about the students. Because every kid is attending public school unless their parents specifically opt out, they are forced to be a microcosm of what we think society is like. And for lots of reasons, this means that we can’t admit to ourselves that differences in talent exist in education.

Part of it is that education in modern society largely determines where a kid ends up in society. If your kid isn’t learning at the same speed as his peers, he’s going to have much worse jobs later on, and thus make less money, and live objectively worse lives. Obviously, no parent wants this for their own kids, so they will resist anything that seems to suggest that their child isn’t capable of doing what the other kids are. Teachers, being generally optimistic about the potential of a child, are also reluctant to tell them that they’re simply not good at a given skill. The result is that nobody is actually getting an appropriate education in a public school. Everyone is learning at the same speed: too fast for the stupid ones, and too slow for the smart ones. But everyone is learning the “college bound” curriculum, even if an objective look at some kids’ test scores makes it obvious that they cannot actually do well enough in college to get any sort of job that pays them enough to pay back the loans.

Of course, Theres the political part as well. A school system that does tracking like Asian and European schools do is going to find itself in arrears of the Civil Rights Act in fairly short order as the lower tiers of the school will be full of black, Hispanic, and MENA students, and the upper tiers will be full of white and East Asian students. Whether this is biology, culture, or poverty is unimportant to the problem here — getting the results that would happen if you put kids in classrooms that fit their actual education needs would be racist and probably sexist as well. Reality is illegal.

All of which hurts everyone but the most average kids. The smart kids, unless their parents put them in an expensive private school or teach them after school are limited. Sorry, kid, you have more potential than average, so you’ll be made bored at school, probably hate it, and never reach your full potential. The dumb kids are sent through a system that shunts them toward college-bound studies and away from the kinds of life skills that they can learn that would give them reasonably attainable job skills so they can earn a living wage. A college bound kid who can’t actually do college has no marketable skills and thus has a bright future in stores, restaurants, warehouses, and professional driving whether uber, taxi, or delivery. But we didn’t hurt his precious feelings, so all good, right?

And so I think if I were in charge I’d track kids, and if you’re below average, I’d put the kids in a skilled labor track as appropriate to the child. If you are not suited to college, you still need a skill, and that means pushing things like shop classes, cooking, repair, and so on so when those kids graduate, they have something they can do to support themselves and thus earn a living. For the above average kid, I’d put him in the most advanced classes he could handle — and see just how far his brain can take him. I think there are a lot of geniuses stuck, bored with a pace meant for future clerical workers who would shock the world given the chance.

It seems like public schools in the major cities in Texas have this, albeit as a patchwork and parents have to opt in. There’s career high schools, taking classes at community college is free(and community colleges are willing to track much more aggressively than high schools), etc.

I think we’re coming back to involved parents.

shop classes

Random thought, is shop class even a thing anymore? I mean I remember a shop class in middle school every year, and I think my freshman year of highschool too? But that was 20-30 years ago now. Even then it was pretty meager because of the safety aspects of working with power tools. I think there was a drill press we were allowed to use in middle school, and maybe a band saw in highschool? I remember the class being 95% "nothing" or stuff I don't remember, and 5% getting a supervised turn on the drill press. That and sanding. Every time you asked the teacher a question about your project, the answer was always "You should probably sand it more" and being pointed to this giant box of worn out scraps of sandpaper with random grits. I have no memory of a table saw, but it might have been there but verboten on account of how dangerous they are even for experienced woodworkers to use.

I'd love for there to be more shop in school, but I'm not sure the risk profile of working with power tools sits well with most moms.

Career and Technical Education high schools have pretty useful shop classes.

It's definitely still a thing, but district dependent. My high school had a fully equipped shop that was converted into a storage room years before my family went through. Not sure whether that was a district call, funding thing, liability or what. I would guess at some point a decision had to be made whether to fund the shop class, art, or other extracurriculars and my high school decided to dump the former.

I was talking about this with my father. He grew up in a rural area. He had both a woodworking shop class and a metalworking shop class at his high school and took both. That must have been in the 60's. A shame, really.

In the 1980s in Fairfax County, Virginia, I took wood shop and metal shop. I was on the college track, so I couldn't access other vo-tech classes because they conflicted with foreign language and advanced/gt classes. But they existed in the same school.

I’ve known a few people who graduated from highschool with welding certifications less than ten years ago. They all went to school in less affluent white parts of the far burbs, though- redneck parents have a higher risk tolerance and are also more willing to bluntly admit when their kids need to focus on non-college skills.

In the UK we used to have a strong two-track system.

The most damaging criticism came from a group of genuinely “bad at school, good at life” people. The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment. There weren’t that many of them but everyone loves an underdog story so they were very influential. It made the system look ludicrous.

I can’t now remember names but think eg Einstein or Gauss.

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

But it's not like putting those in the upper track would have actually helped there, higher-tier classes are if anything more restrictive. And it certainly wouldn't have helped the other kids in that track having their education disrupted.

Maybe this suggests the "bottom track" should be significantly shorter or more freeform: get the basics down, then either let the kids out of schooling early or let them spend that time in more focused programs. The writers decide they like writing and then get to spend their whole day on writing instead of learning chemistry. This seems like it might help mitigate the impression that being pushed into a lower track is a permanent blight on kids' lives, that they're being condemned to a label of "stupid".

Granted, they might later learn they're not all that great writers and regret wasting their time focusing so heavily on it, but they're unlikely to pivot into the chemistry or pre-calc classes they're missing in the upper tracks.

I guess the downside is that this style might be attractive enough to pull kids from the upper tracks, but at the very least it would be an unknown that might negatively impact college admissions, so the default path-to-career-success looks basically the same.

Both Einstein and Gauss were tracked into the top track (Gymnasium) of the heavily tracked German school system, and accelerated further within it.

The classic example of a genius-tier mathematician who failed out of school due to poor performance in non-maths subjects is Ramanujan.

I mean outside of entertainment or entrepreneurship, how common is that? I can’t imagine that’s a typical experience for kids who are clearly not interested or successful in school. And as far as public policy, I think the best approach is to aim for the typical experience for students rather than waste time and money hoping that you have that one in ten thousand unicorn who fails middle school algebra and goes on to become the guy behind a tech company.

It’s very untypical, and I agree with you. Unfortunately people love an underdog, so the only time that Grammar schools (the upper level) appeared in the public conversation it was someone in the category boasting about how they’d (been) failed by the exam system but became famous anyway.

It’s just something that’s always bugged me about conversations like this, or criminality, or drug use. It’s like people want to spend billions of dollars on something that rarely works and only for the extreme outliers in hopes of saving a single unicorn. But in anything the government does, you’re doing an essential triage — you know going in that you cannot and will not save everyone that it’s possible to save, because you don’t have infinite resources or infinite time or perfect tools. The best that can be done by a policy is to try to do good for the vast majority of people who the policy affects.

In the case of education, I think tracking is the best option because it works for most people. Most people in lower education tiers are not going to somehow become successful writers, actors, and entrepreneurs. The vast majority will be doing low level work somewhere in the system. In that case, it’s much better to teach them skilled trades so they can be productive members of society, earn a reasonable wage, and raise a family than it is to flog them and drag them to university where not only are they going to fail, but when they do, they have little skill to fall back on. If he can at least make something, read a blueprint, cook a great meal, or repair things, he’ll be a productive member of society able to provide for himself and a family, everyone is better off. If he spends that time pretending to understand calculus he works for peanuts in retail, restaurant, warehouse industries for less than a living wage and we pay for his survival for life. Which is better for him? Which is better for the rest of us?

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

Is this really a bad outcome though? If you manage to get every smart person into the white collar stream, you no longer have any smart blue collar workers to advance society in those areas.

In fact a shortage of highly skilled blue collar workers is a crisis society will have to face going forwards. I’d actually like a top level post to discuss it but I’m not sure where to research for sources.

These people became writers, entertainers, well known public persons. They complained loudly about having been wrongly downgraded to the low-grade stream in their youth.

Just tell them that society needs at least a few writers and entertainers who aren't utter morons as well...

I'm obviously no Einstein, but I think I fit into the "didn't do well in school, did well IRL" category pretty well. If people like me were the reason for schools doing whatever the hell they are doing now, it truly feels ridiculous.

Not only don't I see how any of the changes to education systems that I observed over my lifetime would help me fit in, the only thing you'd have to do to make me happy is get rid of credentialism, and let me learn what I want to do on my own (which is exactly what happened).

To your question, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off going to trade school myself, but when I was growing up that was widely seen as the loser trajectory, so I was avoiding it like the plague. The end result being years of wasted effort at university, as I'm smart enough to get in, but unable to grind long enough to graduate.

The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to [Einstein] in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of the curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry.

Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. When the elementary teachers noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick who sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum,[a] which he attended from 1792 to 1795

None of this sounds like kids who were on the bottom track at school.

Today I learned. Thanks for correcting me. I had heard the Einstein myth around somewhere, and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

The summation story has an interesting backstory, but it doesn't seem to have been special punishment for Gauss, but rather a standard assignment for all of the students (and the exact nature of the assignment is lost to history).

and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

I heard that one too, but as the incident showing he's a prodigy, rather than one proving he's a dum-dum troublemaker. Instead of calculating the sum by brute-forcing, he came up with the arithmetic series sum formula on the spot.

Huh, I just did it like this:

001 + 002 + 003 + ... + 049 + 50 + 100
 +     +     +           +
099 + 098 + 097 + ... + 051
--------------------------------------
100 + 100 + 100 + ... + 100 + 50 + 100
--------------------------------------
100 x 49 + 50 + 100 = 4900 + 150 = 5050

Yup, and when you generalize this you get the arithmetic series sum formula. Congrats, you're as smart as 15 (or less) -year-old Gauss.

Nope. I can follow the derivation, but there is no way that would have occurred to me in an hour, or however long his class was. Shota Gauss (who sounds like a great Fate character) is smarter than me.

There's a popular myth that Einstein was bad at school and failed math classes. It is completely false.

IIRC, some other country gives their failing students a grade of "6" and the myth started when someone didn't realize foreign standards were different and mistook his top grade for failure.

It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.

I don't know that this can be addressed without a revolutionary change in how prestige is divvied out in society.

And in fact it may not be desirable for Americans in particular. You could have a system with less de jure social mobility if you make it noble to be on the lower rungs of society and create other games one can play to get prestige.

In Japan, age owes respect to the degree that there's negotiation to be had on who is owed deference if you are the young boss of an old employee. This and other such norms that reward mastery of even the lowest jobs makes all out elitism acceptable when it comes to schooling. But can Americans muster the discipline and ethno-cultural loyalty that such a system requires?

I'm here reminded of a pair of documentaries I saw about Japanese prisons. Prison is yet another solution to ugly reality that one's society must cope with justifying. The Japanese system is setup under the idea that criminals are deviant antisocial elements that must be reeducated into society, and it takes the form of a work camp where every minute of your time is dedicated to hammering pro-social habits into your mind like a soldier's drill. Complete with slogans you have to recite and beatings if you don't do what you're told properly.

The first documentary I saw was made by French television about such prisons, and it depicted a system that is opaque and produced some abuses, but engaged positively with the general idea of the prisoner's life being regimented to a totalitarian degree if that allowed successful reinsertion in society.

The second one was made by American television, and pictured the very concept of this reeducation as an insult to one's human dignity.

My point is then this: is America's infatuation with individual freedom, self made men and the "American dream" not categorically incompatible with dealing with the reality of such problems pragmatically? Is it not morally preferable to the American that everyone is given the same chances and elitism is nominally crushed even if that allows elites to deny a sense of noblesse oblige? Can American nationhood imply enough collective loyalty to shun the need for handouts in the name of Civil Rights?

Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.

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