Providing Services for Children in Special Education: what should they be?

Handicapped kids and those who care for them have pretty consistently ended up losers in the public schools. Neglect didn’t work. Special education didn’t work, either. Will our efforts to fully include special children in regular classes do any better, given our insatiable desire to raise achievement and measure it by test scores?

Working with less-fortunate kids in academic classes might help the “included” kids a bit, and it will undoubtedly make the “including” kids better people. But let’s also admit that it will take time away from kids’ test preparation, and we all know damn well what really counts.

Teachers all know what suffering we create when we neglect the needy. But we should also consider the grief that follows when overzealous service is provided. Maybe it’s time to explore alternatives when public providers are not satisfactory, for example, private, even religion-based experts, more aggressively ...but with more care than enthusiasm.

To examine these issues further, see Special Education: misgivings and reconsiderations

-- WAC

Destroying “Middle Class” Education

… how many times can a man turn his head
pretending he just doesn’t see?...
… how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
-- Bob Dylan

It’s all too easy to make kids hate school. Cutting back on music, art and recess, and drilling incessantly for special examinations will more than suffice. Inflicting boredom on the naturally curious and open minds of children is cruelty, and worse.

But which children have been singled out for this treatment? Public school children. The children of those who aspire to upward social mobility but who lack the money for private schooling. Perhaps they expect too much from the schools, but they support them nonetheless. Getting their kids to hate school will definitely undermine their expectations and support.

Our legislators and political leaders have long pushed the idea that public schools can provide a “thorough and efficient education” for every child. This is a pipe-dream. This is a damned, blatant lie. Public schools do a passable job in neighborhoods where parents have the wherewithal to prepare their tots for kindergarten, to clothe and feed them adequately, to socialize them out of random aggression, to engage them in group activities, to support their older kids in their studies and to give them the love they need.

Public schools can’t do much with the severely disabled, the abandoned, the underfed, the abused and the perpetually impoverished. This is not to say that these kids should be thrown away. But pretending that public schools are the institutions that can address social, psychological and growth impediments is to throw those children away. And it is to inculcate in “normal” kids a blindness to suffering right under their noses and an easy hypocrisy in believing that mere declarations of sympathy and concern count as real help.

Do public schools cost too much? Pare them back to doing what they can do reasonably well. Get rid of the sham of a universally applicable, “thorough and efficient” education. Public schools, for social purposes,  could continue to admit all kinds of children. But it is to everyone's disadvantage to hold them accountable for universal academic achievement.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Cutting Public School Costs . . . Intelligently. Can It Be Done?


Cordially
--- EGR

What is Special Education Supposed to Accomplish? Are Our Expectations Reasonable?

Let’s consider two forms, extreme, no doubt, of state sponsored education:

Type A: every person gets exactly, precisely, the same education; they are treated as if they were in no way different; or,
Type B.Every single person is treated as if he or she were in all aspects different from all others -- educational plans would individualized down to the individual.

Some further explanation:

1. Type A will provide 10,000 (or, whatever) hours of a fixed curriculum to the student, irregardless of that student’s age, sex, religion, physical condition, or social background.
2. Type B would consider all the things disregarded by Type A and include also so things as student likes, dislikes, desires, preferences, moods, memory, inclinations, knacks, whims, etc.

Note the following things:

a. for neither type of education would there be “special education.”; type A rules it out; type B goes far beyond what special education would do.
b. Type A would probably be quite cheaper than Type B.
Type B would not only be very expensive but it is far from clear where the instructional services would come from or what would count as a curriculum.
c. People would probably reject both types as undesirable but for very different reasons.

What would some of those reasons be? Could you flesh out these two types so as to make it more obvious what their good or bad points are?

What is so good about our schools now that type A or B would be unacceptable? What is so bad about them that special education is necessary?

To examine these issues further, see Special Education: misgivings and reconsiderations


Cordially
--- EGR