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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.
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.
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