22 thoughts on “K-12 Spending and Children with Special Needs”

1. There is also, of course, a Mancur Olson concentrated benefit/diffuse cost thing going on here.

   Note too that this is a significant source of opposition to school choice: the fear that charter schools, or private schools that get voucher money, will exclude special needs kids to avoid taking on all the bureaucracy and cost. This is both a plausible and a sympathetic fear, but it highlights a clash of values between those who believe only enforced equality is fair, and those who believe experimentation, innovation, and respect for diversity require that not all types of schools should have to take all comers, even if this increases inequality. I don’t know what reconciliation or compromise can work to address that clash of values, but it’s worth considering.

2. Well, with a special needs children in California, I recommend that the system is not great but I don’t trust the private sector on this one second. (I have seen the schools and tuition around here. It is not pleasant.) The fact he has done very well in his first year High School makes it hard for myself to turn against the public school system here.

   The only advise I can parent of special needs, is don’t have one. Sorry for the cynical opinion but let us just say my retirement should be a lot more here.

3. Being involved in my church group you find nearly all the women are of the caring and nurturing type. I’d say easily 90%+ are directly employed in providing some kind of medicare or educational assistance to a hard luck case of some kind. They certainly do really care, and I don’t detect any desire to scam. The living paid can sometimes be decent, though its never much compared to the educational level of the women.

   One day at a party one of them noted that they worked on getting particularly dim young adults high school degrees. Apparently they had recently succeed in getting a high school degree to an illiterate. It seemed there was an official process for this, with many salaried care givers doing their jobs along the way to make it happen.

   On hearing this my rather practical STEM wife asked something along the lines of, “well whats the point of giving someone a high school degree if they can’t read.” She didn’t mean to be that blunt, she is a major people pleaser too, but it was just such an obvious thought and she blurted it out.

   It is amazing how many of these bright sunny women spend their whole lives doing these things that, technically, aren’t really accomplishing much, but are in line with their caregiver instincts and you do get a paycheck. If their work is particularly hard though you sometimes see them burn out. I think a lot of them are hoping to transition to mother/housewife if they can find a suitable provider husband at church.

   • Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic are all very well, but the modern kid mostly needs a high school degree to demonstrate something like sobriety and steady attendance behavior to employers. The higher skills are of use to some folks, no doubt, but many many people get through life by watching TV for entertainment and news rather than reading novels and papers. Driving a car to work doesn’t take a college degree, fourth grade arithmetic is sufficient for grocery shopping, getting to a Facebook page is sufficient for computer skills.

     You might not want such people as friends or neighbors, and you might sneer while observing them dropping hamburger patties on the grill at McDonalds or shoving boxes around at Walmart, but as a taxpayer, wouldn’t you rather have them doing minimum wage jobs rather than rely on public support all their lives or starve on the streets?

     • “You might not want such people as friends or neighbors”

       Who said they were rapists?

     • I question why we are having professionals provide them expensive “education” through their early 20s if the best hope for them is burger flipper. What was served by having someone sit with them all day pretending to teach them how to read (and I don’t mean illiterate as an exaggeration, the person literally could not read at all and apparently there was no hope of them doing so).

       It’s kind of demeaning to the person doing it to. They eventually catch on that they aren’t accomplishing much. Your taking a caring person and having them burn out that sensitivity banging their head against a brick wall. Watching these young women burn out in these professions through their 20s is really hard to watch.

       • I question why we are having professionals provide them expensive “education” through their early 20s if the best hope for them is burger flipper.

         Probably because there is no future for burger flippers long term and for a lot of people with issues the range they can achieve is wide. Maybe my autistic son won’t just be a burger flipper (or institutionalized) but develop a decent paying career for himself. Not a great one but a decent one. I don’t want to go to my grave if this son achieve the highest point for his ability.

4. Why aren’t students assigned to help?

   • Because students are there to study? (!!!) Parents do not send children to school so they can be coerced (without pay) to nursemaid handicapped kids!

     • Kids who desire to go into special ed?

       • Also, teaching is the best way to learn.

         • Teaching someone at a roughly similar level of intelligence is a good way to round out concepts, connect ideas, and drill specifics.

           Trying to teach someone at a significant lower level of intelligence (say 2 IQ SDs) is a train wreck.

           That’s from a gifted student that was occasionally caught in the gears of the ‘mixing gifted and normal kids is good for both’ stupidity.

5. I attended my son’s IEP meeting yesterday. While I do not care for the paperwork, my belief is that without IDEA it will take about 1 year for all efforts to help educate my son to vanish. I base this on the indifference of Catholic parochial school education towards this, which does not need to meet IDEA and therefore almost invariably points towards the public school and FAPE. The routine exhortation about the “value of a Catholic education” ought to be qualified with a very direct “for some Catholics and not others” and clearly the idea of a spiritual foundation to education does not extend to higher fees for parents so that all Catholics might benefit. The fiscal nightmare is nearly on public districts now as evidence is building quite rapidly that for a good portion of their special ed population even more expensive teaching methods actually will work. What will a guy like Kling say if there is evidence that spending 50% more actually will give notably better results? Get ready for Rapid Prompt Method explosion with plenty of lawsuits. It works for a lot of IDEA eligible children and is very intensive and requires very highly trained people to do properly. Is Kling going to say ‘well provided it works, okay’?

   • In other words, you want “other people” to provide an extremely costly subsidy to you and your son, sacrificing the development of their own offspring.

     Nearly all parents are pleased to pay “their share” for schools from which their children take “their share” of participation. The children share teachers and classrooms, gyms, libraries, theatres, field trips, etc. A certain amount of flexibility in the system is acceptable. Some kids are more academic, or more musical, or more athletic (or even bettter-behaved) than others. But the law of large numbers means you can run a school for a bunch of normal children which suits nearly all of them for a reasonable average cost, which can be divvied up among the parents. Parents can pay average cost without rancor, since that minimizes transaction costs and gives nearly all of them an acceptable deal (in fact, the more kids each parent has, the more reasonable this arrangement is).

     However, when the parents of some abnormal child show up (abnormal on the costly side– gifted children don’t add many costs) asking for lots of non-shareable resources, they wreck the system. One seriously abnormal child might consume, for example, as many resources as thirty normal children. (And those resources might be wasted– educating normal children yields more productive adults.) If the abnormal child’s parents don’t pay extra, then adding the cost of their child to the school’s budget means either parents of normal children pay more but don’t get more (so those parents can no longer afford extra-curricular activities for their children, like summer classes), or else resources for normal children are cut to avoid an increase in school cost (so parents have to inefficiently buy their children extra lessons outside of school). What parent of a normal child wants to hear “the high school administration fired the music teachers to divert their salaries to babysitters for teenage retards”?

     All that is why private schools, such as the parochial schools you mentioned, quite reasonably don’t want to take care of very abnormal children.

     As for public schools, it is reasonable for taxpayers to subsidize costly educations for abnormal children when the lifetime statistical expected return is positive. I had blind schoolmates who needed extra help but went on to full adult careers. However, some children can never earn back the outsized costs of the services their parents want taxpayers to buy for them.

     You don’t say exactly how your son is disabled, so we don’t know whether you and he are seeking a serious education versus fifteen years of daycare.

     So let’s look at the combination of the attitude you expressed with the case of a child who is not capable of absorbing even a halfway-normal education. Parents naturally seek the best for their children and are quite willing to place long-shot bets for them. That is evolution in action, but just because we understand the frantic behavior of parents with difficult children doesn’t mean we have to subsidize it. Desperately fantasizing that their little angel will turn out to be “the next Helen Keller” in some way, those parents transmute their fear and disappointment into anger– at everyone else who does not share their fantasy. They demand that other people pay for those long-shot bets by sacrificing normal childrens’ educations to provide wasteful services to abnormal children. We need to tell such parents “no.”

     I think society (taxpayers) should subsidize reasonable care for very difficult children. I don’t think that extends to statistically-worthless (long-shot) pseudo-educational interventions.

     • Kling I think believes that there is a null hypothesis for the process of educating children. This might be close to accurate for neurotypical children but is not so for atypical neurologic types as a whole. Education is a strange beast here because for the group of children that the null hypothesis seems most plausible the education industry is not excited in acknowledging this. For a group of students were it is least plausible (neuroatypical with poorly understood neuorlogies) many districts would like it to be true. Take Rapid Prompt Method. This is proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that many children previously considered uneducable and noncommunicative are anything but. It is not surprising at all that when dealing with people with poorly understood neurological and sensory states that as these get better understood new methods of education will arise that will demonstrate that the null hypothesis for many such people is not even close to being accurate yet. This does not mean that 20 years from now considerably more resources will go towards their education, but while new techniques are developed and employed there is likely a period where ineffective techniques are not discarded at the same pace. As for what parents expect, they expect that a society that has assumed public responsibility for primary education do a complete job of it. If the costs are too onerous then why not a simple randomly generated admission system where children are denied an education in numbers sufficient to hit a district’s cost target? Sure “regular” kids would bear the brunt as they are in greater numbers and the savings from not educating them add up slower, but saving money is the important thing here. Further, upon the tragic death of a high schooler, shall a district invoice the grieving parents for their prior education that was just as wasted as you assume it would be for many other children?

6. Let’s cut the nonsense. Explain Helen Keller. There a wealthy family did not give up on a child who 99% of the world considered to be uneducable and provided a level of dedicated service that worked. When every special ed child gets his or her Anne Sullivan for years on end with no results I guess I may think their potential is very limited. But FAPE is still light-years from getting to the levels of service that can make a difference in many cases. Call for a Manhattan Project effort if the slow gains are too onerous tied to paperwork and legal jousting then.

7. My wife works for K-12 education. She has to defend against lawsuits from parents with special needs children. She was stunned when I read this and told her that in California, the state uses taxpayer money to pay lawyers to legally prosecute the taxpayer funded schools and pay people like her taxpayer money to defend.

   In Austin, Texas, the city just approved $200,000 of tax payer emergency funds for legal services to help illegal immigrants legally fight federal immigration enforcement who are paid tax payer funds to deport certain illegal immigrants:

   http://www.statesman.com/news/local-govt–politics/first-look-after-emotional-dispute-austin-funds-aid-for-immigrants/5qN9Ib6KAPCItN7JMbrz4J/

8. Hey, Arnold. Thanks for linking it in. I’m hoping that the responses show you that when Betsy DeVos (ignorantly) said “leave sped to the states”, she put a whole lot of parents on red alert. If a blog like yours can get parents demanding the tons of extra money the federal law mandates we spend on their kids, I trust you can see what it would be like if we ever got serious about it.

   • Sounds like an argument for vouchers. Let schools specialize for specific populations.

     • No. The issue is whether public dollars should be used for pretending to educate. Vouchers won’t do any better job at it.

9. Yes, special education spending is about showing that you care, and it is expensive. Although the paragraph you quote is about mild learning disabilities, the same considerations apply with still more force to severe learning disabilities. I am confident that Education Realist and many economists such as you are human enough to understand that trying to educate children with learning disabilities is among those endeavors that are worthwhile even though they are mostly consumption and not investment.

   • What is it Arnold calls this? Hansonian?

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