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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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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?

You need a special ed teacher for the special ed kids.

Schools already have special ed teachers, even when the kids are put in mainstream classes, but the win I'd expect is the drop in the number of special ed kids -- once you start segregating them and not trying to teach them the regular stuff, you end the phenomenon of parents of ordinary kids getting a leg up by claiming their kid is special ed. In fact, they'll be incentivized to keep their kids OUT of the special ed system.

You're conflating two completely different issues.

'My Kid has X condition so they get more time on exams' and 'My Kid has X conditions so they go in the special ed class and learn nothing' are two totally different things. Most of the educational accommodation gaming is more of the former element where something mild is claimed and then leveraged in order to extract extra time, translators, notes, using computers during exams or anything else they possibly can. No sane parent wants to send their kid to the actual special education class if they're not special education.