I was struck by one line in the article: “In our town, nearly half of the local school budget is devoted to special education.”
There are quite a few ways to take this. If the author’s cul-de-sac is representative, with 6 out of 13 kids having IEP’s, wouldn’t this just be saying that spending is alloted proportionately? In the same paragraph as the “nearly half” figure, the author notes that 17% of the “special ed” costs are picked up by the Feds. Wouldn’t this end up as a subsidy for classifying kids?
And wouldn’t this amount to an indictment of the “conventional” school program, in that it couldn’t work appropriately with nearly 50% of its students?
I suspect that there’s not enough of the picture being presented in the article to gain a full appreciation of the situation. And, what’s more, I’d suspect that this is true for every piece of writing regarding this subject — people tend to come at it with their own agendas.
So, because most people detect that presentations may be slanted or facts are being omitted before they can detect what the actual point to the presentations or relevent facts are, the public is unlikely to broadly push for reform in this area. The arguments are too complicated, the information too closely held, the equity of the matter too well obscured. One of the benefits of the testing regime from NCLB is that there is a single set of well-defined numbers that can be argued about.
I would only hope that this transparency could spread further through our murky public education system.
