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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 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'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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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