A common complaint I hear about public education is the huge amount of money spent per child versus the incredibly poor quality of the education they receive. Kids are routinely allowed to “graduate” (I guess they still use that term) without basic reading or math skills. Fortunately, those who are motivated to better themselves still have an option in the form of community colleges. Many of the students enrolled at community colleg are there to get basic literacy and numeracy. It may be a form of the dumbing down of education, but college is becoming the new high elementary school.
I was shocked to learn recently than in the local school system here in the Ann Arbor area, a full 17% of the kids are legally classified as “disabled.” It shows how that word has evolved. Your typical ordinary taxpayer is still clueless enough to think “disabled” means kids in wheelchairs, blind kids, mentally retarded kids (although that’s probably a forbidden phrase), deaf kids, etc.
17% is a huge number, and it is why the school districts have to spend fantastic amounts of money on “special needs” kids. The school districts have no choice in the matter, as these things are mandated.
Not being a parent, I normally wouldn’t write about this topic, but an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Wave of New Disabilities Swamps School Budgets“) just had to rub my nose in it.
Nate Levenson, former superintendent of the Arlington, Mass., school district and founder of the consulting firm District Management Council, said special education’s share of school budgets has jumped to an average of 21% in 2005, from just 4% in 1970. His firm, citing 2005-2006 data, estimates that the average expenditure for special-education students is over $17,500, roughly double the figure for other pupils.
Much of that cost is borne by local districts, according to District Management’s research. Although school officials generally want to do the right thing, Mr. Levenson said, as budgets tighten, they are more aggressively scrutinizing doctors’ diagnoses that call for costly accommodations such as home tutoring.
Last year, for example, the school district in Middleboro, Mass., got in a disagreement with the father of a 16-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with a number of disorders, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and bipolar disorder. The dispute ended up being heard by the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals, which didn’t disclose the name of the boy or his father.
The boy often got dressed for school then refused to leave the house, or wouldn’t get out of the car once his father arrived at school, according to the hearing record. From September 2009 through January 2010, he attended school only 13 days.
Let me interrupt here to point out that I had I dared to try something like that at age 16, it would not have lasted one day. Such misbehavior was simply not an option. (Well, I guess if I really wanted to, I could have acted out to the point of getting myself kicked out of school, then been kicked all the way home and sent to a severe military school by my father, but as I say, having my “special needs” met that way was not an option I would have considered at the time.) Have times so changed that simple misbehavior has become a disease?
Apparently so. There are so many Wiki entries for these “disorders” that I couldn’t begin to address them in a single post, but here’s just a sampling from the entry for “ADHD“:
Inattention and “hyperactive” behavior are not the only problems in children with ADHD. ADHD exists alone in only about 1/3 of the children diagnosed with it. Many co-existing conditions require other courses of treatment and should be diagnosed separately instead of being grouped in the ADHD diagnosis. Some of the associated conditions are:
Oppositional defiant disorder (35%) and conduct disorder (26%) which both are characterized by antisocial behaviors such as stubbornness, aggression, frequent temper tantrums, deceitfulness, lying, or stealing,[34] inevitably linking these comorbid disorders with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD); about half of those with hyperactivity and ODD or CD develop ASPD in adulthood.[35]
Etc.
So…. if some brat is out of control, distracting other students, starting fights and generally running amok, he is “disabled” and no expense can be spared in accommodating his “needs.” Back to the WSJ:
…students diagnosed with various chronic health impairments that sap their energy and hurt school attendance are one of the fastest-growing groups of special-education students. Their numbers have more than doubled since 2004, to 689,000 out of the nation’s 6.48 million special-education students. Only the autism category has grown faster, the report found.
The sharp rise in such diagnoses has strained the special-education resources of school districts, which are legally prohibited from factoring in cost when deciding how to address a student’s special needs.
Where’s the Tea Party when we need it? Didn’t some famous economist say that if something can’t go on, it won’t?
So how long will we be locked in to this insanity?
MORE: This is a silly hypothetical afterthought, but can anyone imagine what would happen if a system analogous to what is used in schools were applied to the workplace? Refusing to follow the employer’s instructions and do the job properly or starting fights with other employees would become a “disability” which the employer would have to “accommodate”?
We should be glad we still live in a free country, and not a world where everything is destroyed in the name of fairness and social justice!
Comments
7 responses to “You get what you pay for
(It’s just not what you think you’re getting….)”
A LOT of these disorders (at least in the milder forms) amount to “does not act like a female”.
Many of them are real. They’re also ridiculously over-diagnosed.
The difference? The child whose parents are doing everything right and who is still insanely impulsive and uncontrollable is probably going to benefit from medication that settles down what is to him an overload of incoming stimuli.
The child who’s just bored and acting out isn’t going to benefit from that – that kid is best served by being able to get out regularly and run around and be active for a few hours each day.
It’s easier for a teacher to insist that both cases are ADD or one of the other behavioral disorders. Sadly, it’s probably a good thing that more of them aren’t doing that.
And yet another reason for instantly eliminating the federal Dept of Education. To paraphrase what Branch Rickey said to Ralph Kiner, We have a deplorable educational system WITH the Dept of Education, and we can have just as deplorable a system WITHOUT the Dept of Education (and save billions of dolalrs in the process).
I’ve recently hired two young men, one with a college degree, one with two years of college. The first endeavoured to persevere in the face of a degree curriculum that presented him with choices of outlook we was told he must be able to parrot, in order to succeed. The second faced the reality of the imposition of a system of thought that had no relationship to the ideas he found himself holding, as a result of his interior taxonomy.
In my conversations with these young men, as a part of my training sessions, I get the sense that they are beginning to see that there are natural occurrences that lead to natural conclusions, that aren’t consistent to the set of beliefs that they had been subject to as students. The first of these being, that being successful is a reward in itself.
You’ve probably seen the results of SAT scores, having been recently reported. I can’t say I blame young men for “acting up” when the system of education is focused on making boys adopt systems of thought and behaviour that simply runs counter to the process of thought and behaviour that come naturally to boys. You can’t legislate character or characteristics, even if you think it is a good idea.
So, more and more boys find themselves uninterested in education, since the process itself runs counter to the natural impulses to define one’s self as the result of one’s own set of apprehensions and comprehensions. You can, say, tell me over and over again that girls are the same as boys. And ding me if I fail to parrot those beliefs, just as you can tell an automobile driver that talking on one’s cellphone puts his life to risk.
If only we would adopt these systems into our criminal justice system; rates of recidivism would decline drastically.
.
years past, in the philipines crazy people
were holy, they could stand in the middle of a street and block traffic and nothing would be done.
after the Japanese invaded, when a crazy
stood in the middle of a street blocking
traffic
without ado a solder just shot the crazy
very quickly this stopped
Ugh. Thanks for pointing this out. This is interesting because I wonder if this is so much the government’s fault for dishing out education money to misdiagnosed kids, or more our culture’s fault for misdiagnosing kids and that affecting the government’s disabled policies… When I was growing up I used to see things through the lens of society values (“moral decay” etc), and lately I’ve been seeing things more through the lens of economics (how is government affecting incentives, etc.) I wonder if this kind of issue falls more back into the cultural camp… If I write about this as I ponder some more I’ll be sure to reference this.
Applying the school remedy for troublemaking to the workplace – amphetamines for all, at company expense!