I don’t think the autistic student should have been mainstreamed, but there are very few special education teachers out there so adequate resources are sometimes not available. One disruptive student can destroy everyone’s learning.

Younger kids are also more likely to be misdiagnosed for autism. I have seen fairly talkative children being diagnosed for autism probably by a parent’s insistence. Autism can also vary greatly to high or low functioning ability which increases the difficulty of detection.

Growing up I have had mean teachers, nice teachers, etc. Teachers are human and parents and society expect them to be perfect. I have had teachers blow up on me but most times they were very supportive. Teachers make mistakes. Parents make mistakes. We all make mistakes. I think the teacher had a impossible task. Low functioning autistic children generally can not listen or live in their own world.

But I see a lot more children now that do not know what no means.

Two quick examples. A friend of mine, said his son wanted to buy the latest video game for $10. Turns out a neighbor had a copy of a video for sale for $10, retailed for $69.95. The neighbors mom, when informed, said my son would not do that. End of story.

At a boy scout meeting, a cub scout hit a girl for no reason. His mother said, now you know better than that. Ten minutes later when he did it again, his mother said, now _____, don’t do that again or I will get mad!

Another special needs student!

He is actually a special needs student, because of dysfunctional parents that cannot teach their children about boundaries.

Given that special ed in public schools has problems (tell me about it!) that doesn’t, in my opinion, justify a teacher singling out a particular child for contempt and mockery by the other students and having them vote him out of the class. I don’t care how disruptive, or troublesome the kid might have been, or how stressed out the teacher was. It’s inexcusable.

Parents aren’t perfect. Teachers aren’t perfect either, and the current break-down in our educational system isn’t due only to the presence of special ed students in it. Our schools aren’t doing much better at teaching the bright or average kids either, and bullying, and incidents of teacher/student abuse, is getting worse and worse.

We need to quit looking for a handy scapegoat on which to blame everything.

I teach an inclusion class that works fairly well — students with special needs get extra help from a special ed teacher who is with me every other day, and she makes sure that their testing needs are met.

But special ed in general is often abused. A couple of children at my school have “opposition disorder”, which basically means that they are unruly and disobedient. So when one of them curses at me, it’s just part of her “disability”. She is in a class with only 3 other students, and she has a paraprofessional who is required to escort her around campus to help control her behavior and stop her from instigating fights. When you also calculate the time spent by the school’s special ed coordinator, the extra time from our principal and dean of students, the school district altogether spends about 6-7 times as much to try to educate her as it would a regular student (about $30,000 extra by my rough guess) — and of course, she absolutely refuses to do any schoolwork or learn anything.

I want to help those with real disabilities, but we have to find ways to stop the abuse of the system.

On the other hand, there are many poor teachers. In fact, these poor students are stuck with the worst teachers their entire lives. Because the teachers’ unions want all teachers to be paid the same, teachers naturally want to teach at the suburban schools where kids behave better and are willing to learn and where parents care. So schools like mine get the leftovers and rejects (and a few who genuinely want to help poor kids). There were four math teaching vacancies at the beginning of the school year at the “worst” middle school in our district, so those students were “taught” by subs for weeks until teachers were found who would work there.

A long-term teacher at my school was dismissed for throwing things at students (a year after he was sued by another student for assault). He was put on paid administrative leave for four months while this incident was investigated, and he immediately got another job in an adjacent school district.

Parent involvement in their children’s schools go a long way to keep their children from being bullied by teachers.

Also, please realize I was mortified to hear that my eccentric and artistic — but utterly non-aggressive — little kid went bonkers and KICKED a teacher. When the story unfolded, however, my horror shifted to rage. Naturally, I had to teach my son the lesson that no matter was egregious act is done to us, we cannot resort to violence…unless it is in self-defense.

There is more to the story I wrote, of course. This was a private school in Westchester and after this incident, I was told that my son could only stay if I put him on Ritalin. Because he was not REMOTELY hyperactive, I saw this as insane. In response, I took my kid to the top child psychiatrist in the county who, after evaluating my son, told me that there was not a blessed thing wrong with him and that perhaps, I ought to change schools as kids like Adam thrived in a more flexible environment.

Guess what? I did just that a few years later and my son went on to a competitive private high school in NYC and Columbia U. He NEVER had an outburst like that again.

And yes, we did sent him to therapy in kindgergarten. After a while, I also started. When I look back, I see that the prime purpose of the therapy for BOTH of us was to vent our frustration at a school environment that was often toxic to a sensitive, sweet and artistic little boy.

In order to get any sort of help for your autistic kid, and keep them from being mainstreamed, you usually have to fight your local school’s administration like a tiger to get them to listen to you. Otherwise, your child will be mainstreamed—against your will—or shuffled off to some institution-style school, where they’ll just keep him locked up for a few hours, and won’t interact with him, or teach him a thing.

It would be nice if, say, some private enterprise would create special schools for special kids, but, whenever the subject is brought up, somebody will coo, “Oh, but the public schools are taking care of that.” (Yeah. Right.) In California, home schooling is slowly, but very surely, being cut off as an escape for anybody who wants to get their kid out of the school system, whether said kid is special needs or not.

And, as you point out, parents of special ed kids pay taxes too. And abuse of all kids in the school system appears to be becoming worse and worse.

It’s not the kids who are the problem. It’s the adults.

By the way, I like Xanthippe’s suggestion; all those in favor of beating and humiliating kids to make them mind will, of course, agree that putting adults into the stocks when they’re “difficult”, pelting them with mud and rotten tomatoes, humiliating them and beating them when they act up or make a mistake would be a fine and salutory way indeed to run society.