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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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In general, I like Freddie DeBoer's takes on education. There's a lot of poor thinking about how if only... teachers were better paid, or worse paid; students were tested more, or tested less; unions were weaker, or stronger -- then things would be better. Freddie's there to point out that American public education is exactly what one would expect, given that it is full of Americans.

Enter his newest essay. American schools are exactly what you would expect, given their demographics, there isn't much to be done about that, the teachers and systems are exactly what they need to be, given the constraints they're under, and so... well off parents are racist for preferring schools that are allowed to expel the very lowest performing children.

Wait, what?

My main impression is that when he hears "bad kids," he's somehow thinking of a well meaning black kid who uses AAVE and wants to play sports ball more than learn math, but is in general pretty normal. And in a lot of classrooms it does. But sometimes, in some classrooms, it means a kid freaks out, smashes the other kids' stuff, sometimes hits the other kids, screeches, thrashes around on the floor, and then when they eventually leave, they come back five minutes later with candy in their mouth. None of the other kids are allowed to eat candy in that classroom even if they have it. It doesn't matter, the teacher just mutters to finish the candy quickly and get on with it.

Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually. It is a Problem with the laws and court decisions, not necessarily individual decisions on a school or even district level, but Freddie is simply wrong in how he talks about the "hardest to educate students." Education Realist was more on track when he wrote about the topic a couple of years ago.

Special ed law originated before medical advances kept children alive in conditions we never anticipated. Imagine just one severely disabled child born at 25 weeks, blind, wheelchair bound, incontinent, and destined to life institutionalization. That child will need an expensive wheelchair, transportation, at least two paras, at a cost of what–$100K or more? Now multiply by what, 100,000 kids? Fewer? more? Now move up the disability chain to kids who can walk, can make it to the bathroom with an escort, but and can’t be put in a classroom without two full-time paras and they’ll disrupt the classroom every day. Or the kids who are locked in an autistic world, screaming if touched. There are still several steps up the chain until you get to the merely low cognitive ability students, the “mildly retarded” as they used to be called, the Downs Syndrome children that IDEA was originally intended to support.

This isn't the same disregulation most parents are pulling their kids out for, since they're in segregated classrooms, but is in fact the "hardest to educate students" that public schools are dealing with. As I recall Freddie did teach actual school at one point, but it looks like he was teaching high school composition, and for all his research, still underplays what the bottom of even normal suburban public schools are like.

I am surprised that you are surprised. Freddie has always been able to look reality in the face but only up to a certain point. It's easy to forget sometimes, but he really is a literal Marxist, and that informs everything he writes. In the redistributionist world of his dreams, these inequalities would not exist because no one would have the option of selfishly providing a better education for their own children by removing them from environments with disruptive students and taking resources away from those students.

It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.

The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.

If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?

Yeah, but actual communist countries have very little in common with US Marxist’s recommendations. Props to them for figuring out the Soviet system didn’t work, I guess, even if they’re wrong about the whys and wherefores.

Education, at least in STEM fields, was one of the few areas where the Soviet system arguably outcompeted the American one though. They went from a society of illiterate farmers to dominating in Math olympiads, chess, getting most of the early milestones in the space race, and had more women in STEM than probably a lot of the West has today. Quite impressive given the degree to which their economy was crippled by central planning and ideological suppression.

The soviet ability to keep up with the US technologically despite ideological suppression indicates that their education system was good, yes. But modern US leftists are already rejecting everything else about the soviet system(because the system as a whole did not work).

Actual communist countries also didn't allow people to shoplift freely, consume narcotics in the street, walk into their countries by the millions and demand welfare. Lots of things become possible when you have full immunity from Progressive social critique.

Speaking plainly, the problem isn't figuring out that the calculus kid and the illiterate kid shouldn't be in the same classroom. The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom, and is almost entirely insulated from any form of consequences for the bad outcomes their desires produce. It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom

I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.

The phenomenon that was written about it Coming Apart and its consequences...

As someone who was educated in semi-elite schools for most of my childhood/college, I recall the real kick in the teeth I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common (still likely a minority or barely a majority in the schools I attended). People who grew up in even more elite institutions and then stayed only in elite institutions professionally, surrounded primarily by other people with similar experiences, just don't seem to have the capacity to understand just how dysfunctional vast swathes of society are, and how much of keeping society running is making sure their dysfunction doesn't cause too much damage. It seems like just another case of the apex fallacy, which seems endemic in the culture wars, including gender relations, race relations, and immigration.

Now, one possible point of hope there is that it's easier than ever before to see direct evidence of the actual lives of the actual people with whom one doesn't share an environment. I've seen people reference this with respect to the popularization of bodycam footage since they became near-ubiquitous among police forces post-Floyd. However, people - including myself - had foolish, naive, stupid, idiotic ideas about the proliferation of social media bringing people of different ideas and principles together, when, AFAICT, it has done the exact opposite. And generative AI adds a new wrinkle as well. After all, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink. So I'm pretty pessimistic.

I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common

Quite often the rules are set up to make those mutually exclusive.

cough real communism hasn't been tried yet man cough

shoots up

Edit: Sorry, effort incoming

The rebuttal to "actual communist countries have tried..." is often some flavor of "actually that's not a real communist country...". When pressed further, the rebuttal expands to "actual communism has never been tried because it was hijacked by..."

Despite the first two sentences in this comment, I don't actually believe hard drug users are debating the merits of communism on the street while shooting up. I do believe self identified communists have an idealized, unrealistic belief in the ability of communism to mitigate the ugly and selfish parts of human nature. Which is why communism always ends up in some sort of failure state, and why we should carefully critique any social planning recommendations from communists.

More effort than this, please.

It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

Gove's reforms in England, as well as the recent improvements to reading education in Mississippi and other southern red states copying them suggest that it is less difficult than you would expect.

I'm ignorant about Mississippi, but I can only assume that the teacher's unions don't have the power they have in NY and Chicago.

That's not really an easily fixable problem once entrenched. Though the one in Chicago seems to have burned its popularity due to being particularly brazen with Brandon Johnson. On the other hand, they got what they wanted.

I don't think those examples actually touch on the point of difficulty, which is convincing every state to copy Mississippi in terms of whatever it is they did that caused improvements.

If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.

That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.

I doubt it. School quality being better than other states' doesn't imply producing better educated people than other states, it implies producing a better delta in educated status compared to other states, controlled for the children's potential ceiling, and my guess is that both the floor and the ceiling for children in Mississippi are lower than for most other states. It is also but one of many, MANY dimensions by which parents measure their likelihood of moving to the state, and my guess is that Mississippi has a lot of negatives in other very important dimensions. Furthermore, even if those weren't true, this is the kind of thing that would take at least a decade to see confirmation on any meaningful differences in output, which means even more time before people start moving in meaningful numbers, and that gives plenty of time for people in other states to find and come up with excuses for why the differences in output, as measured by the education level of public HS graduates, isn't due to Mississippi's specific methods of educating.

There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism. The universalist egalitarian HBD denial seems to be East Coast Christianity (embodied by the likes of Quakers); there is a current of native anti-intellectualism that I can't pinpoint the source of (remember how the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into harder universal schooling by the Sputnik crisis); and "you can be anything you want!" denial of differences in individual talent is perhaps just mass-produced Hollywood fantasy.

I feel like you are projecting your map of local German politics onto the US in a way that doesn't really apply.

Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.

I would like to think I know both well enough to distinguish between them.

Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.

Not that I strictly agree, but I am not aware of making any claim that contradicts this, unless you think that Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing (which I think would be false, and the East Coast universalist-leaning denominations are my specific counterexample).

Its not that "Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing" so much as the left in the US defines itself (at least in part) through its opposition to "Christian Moralism".

The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".

The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".

I think even before we get to questions relating to HBD, we have the fact that the right treats inequality of outcomes differently than the left. Thomas Sowell mentioned how there are tons of arbitrary inequalities. in the modern world such as mountain vs lowland, first vs. later born, birth month, and a bunch of others. Middlemen minorities who succeed despite often being discriminated against are another example of inequality despite there being no discrimination in favor of, of there is discrimination against, the middlemen. The standard American conservative position is 'There are tons of inequalities in the world, and if there is a clear injustice it should be remedied, but we can't rip up society to try the quixotic task of making everyone equal."

If you take that position, instead of the position of trying to remedy all inequalities, whether HBD is true or not doesn't really matter. If you aren't gong to uproot society to try and force equal outcomes, the presence of a gap between two groups being environmental or genetic doesn't really change how society and the people within it should relate to each other.

For the record I'm not ignoring you, I just agree with a much of what you've said and don't have anything to add.

As recently as Obama, Democratic presidents also made a show of their Christian beliefs and church attendance, and even in the '90s 90% of US adults self-identified as Christian. Do you think the "left in the US" popped into existence ex nihilo after that, freshly importing the belief system of the Soviet Union and throwing away everything that the >=40% who must have voted for them while considering themselves Christian believed in? There is such a thing as intellectual lineage, including from systems that someone now disagrees with. For centuries, Christians and Jews had nothing but occasionally murderous disdain for each other, but Christianity at no point denied straight up copying half of its holy book from the Jews, either. For a more spicy example, many a red-blooded American right-winger is quick to point out how the Nazis were more formally a National Socialist German Workers' Party, but there is little denying that they defined themselves (at least in part) through their opposition to communism!

Note that I said "Christian Moralism" not "Christianity" the need/desire to move beyond Christian morals and replace them with something more "rational" "scientific" or "pure" has been a core theme of left-wing ideology for over a century. And for all this time it has been the "right" that pushes back.

Yes Nazis defined themselves in part through thier opposition to Communism but also through thier opposition to what we would describe today as "traditional western values" both Hitler in his own manifesto and his contemporary critics like Lewis wrote at length about his disdain for the "slave morality" that was/is Christianity.

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian Art School Socialist of ambiguous sexuality who thought Jews and Billionaires were to blame for all of the world's ills and wrote positivity about the Islamic revolutionaries of his day. Fact is that if Hitler circa 1938 were to be Isekaied into the present day, he would be an immediate darling of the left-wing podcast circuit.

If the Nazis fighting Communists makes the Nazis a right wing movement, would you also describe Trotsky as "right wing" because he fought against Stalin and the Bolsheviks?

You don't have to go back to Obama to find democrats making a big show of how Christian they are- Joe Biden's mass attendance was a regular slow news day story.

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There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism

The liberal meritocratic side of the party may need naive blank slateism more than the communists.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the argument that this is tax money, redistribution is the best form of distribution, and the Public doesn't care how aggravating your childhood is. Well, I'd rather have even more niche schools than charter friendly states currently have, but it's a valid preference. My main problem with the current article is:

Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color, pull their kids out of public schools.

Which is entirely unproven, and more snide than he usually is. What if it's not that the kids are poor, but that they're flailing around in the school entrance, screaming their heads off? (I've seen this) What if it's not that they're of color, but that they're pacing around relentlessly, stealing everyone's school supplies, tearing up their papers, for hours at a time? (I've seen this) What if your child has a disability, and their also disabled classmate keeps pulling her by the hair, and the staff are all wearing helmets and shin guards, because the classmate kicks them and throws things at their heads, but your child doesn't have those protections, and isn't able to protect herself because she's a six year child with Down's syndrome? (I've seen this)

I don't mind Freddie having his Marxist policy preferences, as long as he shows that he knows how disruptive the most disruptive 5% of children are.

This is going to sound messed up, but can we (if we update laws) reasonably not educate these children? As medical advances in life saving technology improve, we are investing more on a slim minority of children, instead of the education of all children as a whole. I have no idea about how this would be implemented, maybe a child would have to take a basic test of some sort to prove worthy of educational investment, I suppose. We are not a post scarcity society that can infinitely provide health care at taxpayer expense when our national debt is constantly increasing. It's just leaving a debt to future generations, kicking the can down the road.

There's a sense in which we don't educate them, certainly. In my preferred world, the ones who aren't expected to live independently would have a pleasant sensory environment prioritized over being in a school setting, freaking out at "transitions" every hour or so. We could build some gardens with greenhouses for what we currently spend on specialists, and have them hang out enjoying the pleasant sensory experience.

My main impression of why we don't is that if they're in a normal school, with normal administrators stopping in and checking on them now and then, and normal specials teachers trying to engage with them, it will be obvious if their minders become weird and abusive towards them. Whereas if they're in a completely different environment, everyone might just spiral into even more misery and degradation, even if there are gardens.

Those gardens sound pretty nice, something like that with a pleasant sensory environment seems a worthwhile goal. It's essentially a really early retirement home - and it could be pitched to parents as the best choice for the children if it was well-run.

My mom had a 40 year career in essentially Special Education. She spent the last 25 years in a niche Private School that was essentially designed as 'the special education school for upper-middle+ children between 5th to 10th percentile in educational capability plus those with behavioral issues that made them difficult to educate but not actively dangerous' to begin with. That niche was a great spot for the first 15 or so years she was there, and generally the school would get most students up to like a 5th-grade educational level which enabled them to work a minimum wage role and kinda acted as a finishing school otherwise to make it less socially obvious.

Then a combination of factors hit. Upper-Middle+ economy eroded a bit/started valuing private education less, so a lot of the name-brand good private schools who'd happily offload their lower kids onto the private school in the good times started dropping their bottom thresholds a bit and/or bringing special education classes into their schools. As a result, the selective school had to dig deeper on their waiting lists which started increasingly hit those that my mom essentially implied were just not productively educatable. There were also some legal changes that meant that schools had to actually trial all applications on the waiting list, which causes perverse incentives with special education since a lot of the issues that lead to you putting your 2 year old's name down for a high school slot are ones that are very apparent/major and tend to slot you into the very bottom tier.

This was due to some parents managing to sue another school for discrimination for dismissing their child out of hand where they'd essentially made a read that the child was absolute bottom percentile and that they'd be better suited for the lower tier of education (which is perfectly fine and well-resourced but most parents aren't really capable of understanding why/what their child is being filtered on) which suits the like 0th-5th percentile. The schools being able to largely sort this themselves saved a ton of stress and issues in the system previously. But in her experience parents are more interventionalist on behalf of the lowest tier of kids (which frequently isn't really to their benefit. If a person's mental is 3 and they're gonna be there for the rest of their life there's really not much you can do aside from keep them entertained and engaged which is what the lowest tier services are pretty good at doing) and the legal situation now makes it a lot messier to sort.

Seems like people will pay for the illusion that their child is not special needs, even if they are. Probably would be a better use of resources to save that money in an index fund managed by a trust, but maybe the children already have that and money is no object for some parents.

This discussion makes me often think about Forrest Gump, where the titular character's mother is presented as being heroic for prostituting herself to the school superintendent in exchange for allowing Forrest, despite being officially tested as having something like 75 IQ, to attend classes with everyone else, because "he deserves the same education as any other kid" or something like that. The film also, of course, featured the same kid, who needed braces to walk, just one day suddenly becoming capable of running, not only like any other kid, but to a level enough to make him the star running back to what seemed like a high level college football team, despite having zero other football skills.

I'm always highly skeptical of the whole "we must manipulate fiction because fiction inevitably, implicitly, unconsciously manipulates people's beliefs about reality" crowd, but I think there may be a grain of truth in their claims.

he deserves the same education as any other kid

Which is an indication that society is at a point where the educated are in oversupply. He deserves it precisely because it no longer makes a difference, and at that point the pageantry of education is what matters: a costly signal from the group in oversupply meant to distinguish themselves as "one of the good ones". Which is important when there are too many of you.

The US hit that point in the '60s, and Forrest Gump is a period piece.

The Telepathy Tapes was one of the more popular podcasts in 2024 and it's obviously complete bullshit but for spiritually minded and hopeful parents/family of a severely autistic child it's something that takes a terrible situation and gives a shining ray of hope. The same thing with facilitated communication despite all evidence it's a hoax continues to pop up over and over.

It's emotional, and understandable. Accepting the tragedy that your kid can't talk or understand you and it's not fixable is very difficult. And telling these very emotionally driven and loving parents that it's too bad and education is a waste is an awful experience on its own, and that's if you even manage to convince them which you probably won't.

There are some snake oil salesman profiting from the unrealistic hopes of these parents, and in the kind of society I prefer they would be charged with fraud, the schemes exposed to the public, and lashed Singapore-style.

Maybe we can't educate all the children to the ideal, but we can try to protect them and their families from predators.

society I prefer they would be charged with fraud, the schemes exposed to the public, and lashed Singapore-style.

Good luck with that when a substantial portion of the population believes in the claims. You're not gonna be charging the psychics like Uri Geller or the Ghost Hunters or the Ancient Aliens people or chiropracters or "natural herbal medicines" or other psuedoscientific whack anytime soon because a substantial portion believes it. Just take vitamin pills for instance, the FDA tried to regulate them a few decades ago as medicine and consumer backlash forced them to stop.

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I mean it's also a multi-barreled thing. There's parents with kids in the bottom 1st percentile who won't accept that their kid isn't really going to progress beyond toddlermode and that it's best to focus on enrichment and low-level socialization. There's also parents with like 10th percentile kids where a good outcome is 'achieves enough to be able to reasonably hold a stocker job at Walmart' where they insist on trying to handle them like there's a reasonable chance of them directing the family business on their own.

Also a peculiarity my mom observed a lot was the amount of cases where it was two intelligent parents who'd inevitably throw the occasional major autistic child from overlapping their own recessive tendencies. Probably a byproduct of the socio-economic filtering that the school had, but she saw a lot of Doctor/Doctor older parent couples.

Interesting bit with the doctor-doctor couples. Doctors should know the risks best with maternal age and major autism risks, I heard about it from a friend in the first year of medical school classes. Apparently it wasn't in the textbooks but the lecturer wanted to emphasize the risks because many doctors delay family to focus on their studies. By the time the subspecialty doctors are established in their careers they are 35+ on the young side.

Then again I have a family member who miscarried during her (now illegal) 100+ hours per week residency, so there's the risk of high stress pregnancies too.

A bit higher risk for older fathers than for older mothers, if I am not incorrect.

Not literally just Doctor-Doctor but yeah a lot of mid-thirties parents where they're both in high-intellect careers and both have vague spectrumatic inclinations.

It's a hard sell, emotionally and ideologically speaking. Education is meant to be for everyone, and the entire point of making it mandatory and free is so the children from the weakest backgrounds get a level playing field with the rich kids. Not educating the very weakest is counterproductive to this ideal.

Besides, you run into the problem that society is structured around school taking care of the kids for the majority of the workday. Forcing the kid out of school likely means the family has to take care of it, and a lot of parents simply won't be able to do this while also holding down a job. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

How about a Montessori-like system, where students progress through classes at their own speed (instead of age)? They would still interact with similarly-aged students in social activities like meals, except disruptive students who are bothering others would be a separate group (who would be assigned some form of therapy).

Self contained social education classes are often like that in some respects, though they need. lot of help still with things like bothering each other and toileting.

How about a Montessori-like system, where students progress through classes at their own speed (instead of age)? They would still interact with similarly-aged students in social activities like meals, except disruptive students who are bothering others would be a separate group (who would be assigned some form of therapy).

It pains me to sound like a midwit, but it's the question of legibility to the state. The state considers education its business, and it can't deal with complexity at scale.

For a less James Scott-pilled take, you can totally do this with charter schools, but they suffer from self-selection bias.

Maybe they can with online resources like Khan Academy. They’ve gotten much better very recently (the latest improvement being one-on-one LLM tutors), so schools haven’t yet adapted.

Then, teachers only must ensure students follow the rules and answer rare questions, strictly less than they do now.

Someone who can follow Khan Academy is probably at least 10th percentile in public education, and would be fine in a regular remedial class. They might have an IEP, but it'll just say things like they should sit near the teacher and have extra time on tests. Perhaps an extra study hall and interventionist time.

I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part, but I do like the idea of segregating students into different groups based on their abilities or how they act in the classroom. I am biased due to being the kind of kid who would have greatly benefitted from the bottom half of the class being shifted into different grades though. I think it would still be a hard pill to swallow for broader society.

At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class. The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.

On the other hand, the new system only needs to be better than what we currently have. Having the school environment be destroyed by a handful of kids that obviously have no business being there, seems overall worse than excluding said students from normal teaching.

I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part

The students would still be required to take core subjects, just at different speeds. Although I also think there should be more electives, by having one teacher administering multiple (with the help of online resources).

At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class.

Sure, although I imagine there will be some exceptions. Partly because the less academic students may be more “cool”.

The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.

Unfortunately yes, even though it’s supposed to be exclusively based on merit.

However, if a non-disruptive student or their parent really wants to be in a class above their level, I think it should happen. If they struggle, some of their assignments should be replaced with those from their actual level and between, to try to prevent them from falling behind, but if they continue to insist they can stay. That may slightly alleviate complaints, because the students in the lower sections are there partly by choice (albeit partly by encouraged default).

I also support allocating extra resources to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, especially those in upper-level classes.

exclusively based on merit.

Merit is just very limited when it comes to kids. They don't have as much agency as adults, so their abilities are often a reflection of how involved their parents are. If my parents help me with my homework and feed me healthy meals, I will obviously have a natural advantage over kids for whom this isn't the case. It seems really hard to solve this with extra funding. Sure you can provide free meals and expertly educated teachers to level the playing field. But good parents is not something that you reasonably buy with money.

So I think any kind of merit based education will run into complains about it favoring kids from good socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, these children are just going to do better, so granting merit-based benefits will in a way always be a "rich get richer" policy.

Not that this is necessarily disqualifying though. I personally believe that society should encourage skills and hard work in children more than it currently does, so to some extent I am very much in favor of incentives to support these values.

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I do like the ideal that the opportunity of education is meant to be for everyone. But we lack the resources to sustainably achieve that ideal. When we made that educational promise, it was probably assumed that these children were relatively able-bodied. Children with extreme disabilities simply didn't survive previously as the medical tech and knowledge didn't exist. Children with behavioral problems were easier to separate from the group, because we were willing to enforce prosocial behavioral norms. We made that promise for education, and it is time to break that promise because the commitment is greater than our ability. It's not wrong to admit mistakes (just political suicide).

What the ideal should be changed to is, "education funding will be equally split among everyone". We would be tightening up the meaning of reasonable accommodation to be much stricter. So we can redirect funds spent on special education into job training programs and healthier school lunches. We will have better chances of generating healthier and more productive members of society. Decades later we may even generate a surplus with these early childhood educational investments, and we can reevaluate spending more on special education at that time.

My suggestion would have the families shoulder the cost, likely very high, of taking care of their own special-needs children. Will one parent need to quit their job to become a full time caretaker? Yes, that is likely unless their job pays more than enough to hire a caretaker in their place. Is that harsh? Yes, but only from the perspective of a currently-unachievable ideal, which is free public education for all no matter the cost. Perhaps those families should have a federal tax break as a refund of their taxes they paid into education that excludes them from the public system. Essentially a forced public education system opt-out with refund.

Is this politically realistic - no way it's just not happening. But I'm just tossing some ideas up on how we should approach this to maximize educational outcomes (as a society, unfortunately not on an individual basis) in a sustainable way. The result of my exclusion-approach would be that we would have more functionally illiterate, barely hanging to life children. But they were probably going to be a net drain of society anyway, even though we hired multiple full-time servants (special needs educators) to keep them minimally educated.

It's harsh in the same way not having insurance is harsh - people are terrified of being the one to hold the bag. Having a severely disabled child is bad enough with help, let alone when it completely wrecks your life. A lot of people fundamentally shoulder tax as a form of insurance, paying for the (sometimes fictional) feeling of safety that comes from knowing the state will step in if things ever get really, really bad.

I guess my proposed tax refund is like the home insurance company telling you - sorry because of (wildfire, flood, etc) risk your home is uninsurable and we are refunding the balance of your policy. I have no doubt many lives will be ruined by the high costs of caring for severely disabled children. But having children comes with risk, and that risk was an individual choice unless a woman was raped and she was unable to access abortion. We spread the increasingly higher cost of special needs children over society instead of the primary responsibility which should be the parents.

Is this politically realistic - no way it's just not happening.

I'm sorry, I didn't read your full post properly. My point was broadly that I think the number of takers for this policy would be very low even among the normal audience for 'callous but effective' policy. It would likely also further drive down birth rates - the modal outcomes are much more salient to people than the median.

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I'm guessing it would never happen.

Something that's one step more reasonable but would also never happen is kicking them out of public school (one at a time, if necessary) if they can't meet the standards of conduct. That wouldn't necessarily reduce the expenses any, but it would at least let the rest of the kids learn in school.

It would reduce the expense by a lot. A huge part of the reason mainline public school performance per dollar looks bad is because of the immense cost of dealing with special ed kids, which private and charter schools get to avoid. Worse, the additional funding schools receive does not really cover the additional cost of special ed kids, so it also sucks resources away from mainstream. Even worse, the ubiquity of special ed has led to the toxic equilibrium of helicopter parents inventing reasons for their perfectly normal kids to receive accomodations (mostly special treatment like extra time on tests).

The contemporary interpretation of special ed law mandating schools do almost whatever it takes to put students in mainline classrooms is a really big problem.

Yes, many schools have something like a 20% IEP rate.

I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around. Not providing them with a chance for an education at all due to factors outside their control (mental disabilities, parental neglect, etc.) seems contrary to modern values.

I guess you could maybe do it when they are older though. Expelling a teenager is very different than expelling a 6-year-old. An argument could be made that if a kid is still unwilling to put in effort and constantly disruptive by around age 14 or so, society has done all that could reasonably be expected of it, and from now on the duty is on the parent.

I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around.

I would expect it to be cheaper to move the unteachable kids to a separate classroom and not bother try to teach them what the normal kids are learning than to keep them in the regular classroom, attempting to teach them, and allowing parents to exploit the system by pretending their ordinarily dull kids are special ed, driving costs up for all.

You need a special ed teacher for the special ed kids. If you pretend that no kids are special ed, you only need the normal teacher and no extra help for all the normal kids. In other words, you save money on the teacher but sacrifice the quality of education that the majority of the class receives. This is bad for the kids and society, but seems good for the school budget in the short term.

I obviously don't know if there are additional costs to having difficult children in a normal classroom. But it seems logical to me that mixing all the kids together lets you save on teachers, meaning that having separate classes for special ed kids would be more expensive.

Why do you expect it to be cheaper?

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