This is probably just parroting some dubious blogger or website.
My daughter was pretty seriously on the autism spectrum. She attended a combined middle and high school (6-12th grade) that sends 95+ of the kids to college/university. The only electives were art or music, orchestra or choir. She spent most of the time in the resource room getting one to few instruction. Her general grade level was elementary. She also mainstreamed in French, choir and PE accompanied by a para. She repeated French multiple times and was in French 3 her senior year, whilst her peers were in French 7.
Net net, a combination of special needs instruction, and limited mainstream classes. She wasn’t in AP or college prep classes. I’m 99% sure this is generally the case, so she wasn’t keeping back the college bound kids.
Please bring some cites for your ascertations. Fighting ignorance around here, which requires more than simply an opinion. Thanks for playing.
The OP is not simply complaining about widespread inappropriate mainstreaming, and focusing on correcting that exaggerated claim is missing a far more insidious point: they are advocating that any student who cannot function at an “acceptable” level be abandoned by the educational system.
Society should not be abandoning our weakest citizens. Removing the disabled from the education system is basically doing that. It takes them from potentially being a safe, secure, functioning member of society to what exactly? What’s the alternative? It’s an ethically and morally disgusting idea.
And what the OP describes does not comport with reality.
You call that drawing a line? It’s nowhere near exact. Deciding who can or can’t “meaningfully participate in education” is completely arbitrary and subjective. And making independent living and learning the threshold to qualify for education is way too high a bar.
No. Everybody needs education. If you want to call some of that education for children with severe learning disability “therapy” instead of “education” and fund it out of a different bundle of public money, then fine, whatever. But simply depriving those children of all such support out of a biased contemptuous assumption that they can’t “benefit” from it is not what a decent society does.
If we as a society want to spend more money on educating non-disabled kids, then we should sack up and allocate additional resources for that. Not selfishly and greedily rob the funds for special ed, while sneering that “eh those [ableist slurs] are too dumb to appreciate it anyway.” That’s vile.
If (a big “if”) I understand the OP correctly, your value as a citizen is based on what you pay INTO society, or at least your Potential to pay, and if your potential is low, the resources allowed to you should be smaller.
Which I strongly disagree with, and find the argument exactly backward. We have a very limited “duty” to the government, and we’re the one paying for it all. The government has a duty to take care of us. Different governments are more or less good at fulfilling their obligations. But despite it’s near-constant staggering in the last decade plus, the United States Government was structured around a degree of responsibility to the whole “We the People”, or at least, as much as any other representative government has.
Will not speak for current administration that is all about Power without any sense of Responsibility however.
Thanks, I had missed that response. And I agree with you. The OP’s attitude is mercenary, transactional, and inhumane. But it does typify the attitudes towards health and mental care in today’s America, with all the attendant consequences.
And what % of education funding going to special needs would be ‘enormous’ in your opinion?
50%? 75%?
Are you comparing special needs kids to anti-vaxxers?!
Like Beckdawrek, I was special needs. I have Asperger’s Syndrome (undiagnosed until I was in my fifties), plus I am very short-sighted and have mild epilepsy.
In the 1960’s, this was not diagnosed. So I went through school without any assistance.
Thankfully I had wonderful parents who encouraged me.
I’m now retired with decent pensions, own my own house and have won a World Championship chess title.
I shudder to think what my life would be like if your policies were impelemnted.
Your story, like mine posted earlier, (except I’m bad at chess) is of someone who would have an IEP and accommodations today but provably did not need it. Or do I misread your post?
With the OP proposal, those who really need special education would be short-changed. And even more resources would be poured into unnecessarily treating and accommodating personality variations.
I had a miserable time at school. i was regularly bullied (my Asperger’s meant I had very low social skills) and the teachers made no allowances for my difficulties.
However I joined a chess club aged 13 and this was a life-saver. I got respect from adults and my self-esteem was boosted enormously.
My previous post was trying to show how abhorrent Truthuwontsay’s suggestion was. I (and other special needs pupils) would have been discarded and treated as a burden on society.
I think this is going to be the main legacy of the Trump era. They’ve made it ok to be unkind and just plain mean. Unfortunately, younger politicians will have grown up with this and think it normal.
When I was a teacher I worked with special education students a lot, but I was not a specialist in the area. My main criticism of special ed was that they always seemed to trying to do the minimum. They would say they were making sure they were delivering the required services, but in practice I felt that often meant doing no more than what was strictly required. There were times I felt we should be doing much more for our special ed students.
The problem is that you’re looking at it as question of outcome for money, setting a universal bar, and then deciding that because SPED often isn’t successful at educating students to some minimum bar, that it’s ineffective and a huge money hole.
Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to meet some arbitrary universal standard, but rather to educate ALL students to the best of their abilities? Of course, that would require funding both SPED and G&T classes (which are even more criminally underfunded than SPED…) dramatically more than they already are.
And by that yardstick, teaching a profoundly disabled kid to walk, use the toilet, etc… is a huge win, just like it would be to have a G&T high school kid learning differential equations.
Exactly. The OP is choosing an erroneously narrow definition of “societal benefit". Our society benefits from treating everyone with dignity and a modicum of respect, the lack of which we are disastrously seeing now from our President and his acolytes.
Yeah, there’s a hell of a gap between “luckily managed to claw my way to functional adulthood without any special-ed support thanks to caring parents and serendipitous circumstances” and “did not actually need special-ed support”.
(Speaking from experience and the experiences of many other parents). The districts will generally try to do the minimum, but will relent if the student has strong advocates who have some understanding of the system. Being willing to fight rather than accept the minimum that is offered - up to and including hiring legal counsel. Unfortunately this takes time and money that many parents don’t have, so there ends up being a disparity between the educational services of students whose parents have means versus those who don’t.