http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/yes-virginia-there-is-a-special-ed-bounty/

Many thanks to PJM for giving us the opportunity to post a full-length response, since the issues here deserve a serious discussion.

Well, if I didn’t HEAR something as a child, my parents promptly made sure I was LISTENING. They weren’t trying to understand my sensibilities or make buddy-buddy with me with the myriad of little things in life children are often not interested in. They owned me and the home I lived in, and I surely was reminded regularly. Parents these days are so used to blaming every single problem they have on something other then themselves, SURELY their child must be a victim of something.

Jeez! Aren’t you angry, James! Here, have a hug. Have a Bex and a good lie down. Nothing wrong with you, eh?

Did that little outburst make you feel better?!

If 1/6 special ed alarms you, it should – and eventually it will affect you. Sterilization won’t help – but a smarter medical community might. Since we’ve “improved” medication so much with a vaccine for everything, our children have become autistic, diabetic and asthmatic. Our children have more chronic disorders than any other generation.

If you don’t want your government to pay for all this, demand they get some answers.

In some districts, they call juvinile delinquency special needs.

The not-special are getting tired of paying the price for the “special” in all aspects of life. From special ed to affirmative action to minority criminality to illegal aliens. When the heck are we paying enough of a penalty for being normal?

There’s nothing wrong with life-skills curriculum when it’s appropriate, but not because we can’t bother to fully educate everyone.

As far as the “everyone else” you talk about – 1/6 of our children are in special education – that would be a huge portion to leave behind.

My wife teaches kids in a neighboring low income, low performing district. She teaches kids that are identified as being well under grade level in reading and writing. They are not identified as special needs per se. They spend most the day in their regular classroom. These are kids the district is trying to get up to grade level and depend on grants for paying people like my wife (non union, 1/5 of the all-in cost of tenured teachers.) No grant, no program. If there were magic funding for just designating kids ADD or something, the schools would be milking it. It isn’t happening and the author’s explanation makes some sense.

My wife has taught kids with much more severe, categorized disabilities in more affluent districts. She quit doing this due to the constant conflict between parents pushing for “mainstreaming” in impossible situations that left entire classrooms of kids falling behind or being disrupted. The majority of funding for formally categorized disabilities was provided by the district so the financial pressure was to mainstream if possible.

I think some of the confusion about “incentives” for designation of some sort comes from anecdotal evidence many people come across or hear from their kids and other parents. In our district, the number of kids that are allowed to have minders and special testing accommodation has exploded in the past several years. If there is evidence of true need, no case has been presented and instead there is an assumption that there is a good deal of abuse originating with parents pushing for unwarranted help for their children. Unless a district addresses situations like this with facts and more open discussion, the suspicions grow and rumors spread.

There is nothing wrong with focusing on life skills. A retarded person needs to know about clock reading, responsibility, how to add and subtract, and how to read a bus schedule more than he needs the sesame street version of mitosis.

You can play liberal word games all day long, but special ed in America means putting kids into classes that they cannot handle, throwing aids at them, extra teacher time that detracts from the rest, and often separate lesson plans. Frustrate them with material over their heads, and end up having their peers resent them, or just get tired of them.

And yes, social promotion is used constantly with kids, regardless of special ed status, although that helps push it. Get someone to put into their IEP that it would be helpful for the child to stay with their peer group, and presto, instant social promotion, regardless of teacher input.