How sad. What to do?
Special ed is expensive if you get credentialed people, because the staffing ratio often has to be very high. The private schools I am aware of are extremely costly as well. There's no cheap way to educate the disabled, or warehouse the profoundly disabled (the uneducable).
Even in good districts it's difficult to comply with the layers upon layers of regulations for IEPs. My son had one, so I know how complex they are. His teachers were always screwing up and having to have me back date things in order to keep them compliant with the law. My son had pretty good teachers, after we got him out of special ed, so it's not like IEP issues were a problem, but it must be a nightmare in urban schools where no one is functional- not the parents, not the teachers, not the health workers- no one.
But Americans don't even want to really focus on the regular kids in the urban poor areas- so I'm not sure why it's a surprise there is a mess in special education. The wingnuts will tell you the answer is privatizing- but I think we've seen how well "privatizing" works, in everything from prisons to war. Once the big companies get latched on to the government tit, it's never a cost savings, and the rip offs can be extreme. I've no doubt "private" school funded with taxpayer dollars would go the blackwater route. Of course the wingnuts wouldn't notice until we'd done years of damage (as they are just now waking up to the lunacy of the Iraq war).
I say we cull the special ed rolls. Throw out the uneducable students, and let them stay home with their parents- or a caregiver their parents find. Focus on the educable and give them trained staff- lifeskills for the lowest, trade school for the middle, and try to get the rest to mainstream to regular ed, if possible. Some people would find that cruel, but there are always people who think money is inexhaustible. And it isn't. |
