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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.
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