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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   33386 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?

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.

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