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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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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