Hacker News Reader

Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more.

Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.

Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.

Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners.

This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.

She deals with other 22 kids.

Pay is crap.

That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita.

A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.

Somehow, in the US government it's only "benefits" that are considered. "Cost" never is.

As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?

Why don't you find out and share with us rather than just asking questions and having others do the work for you. If Finland is really significant to this debate then share some data.

> Why don't you find out and share with us

because it's hard to get, poopy. Even for the US.

I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.

> If Finland is really significant to this debate

If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.

I read a book a while back whose main argument was that we spend so much on the bottom 1% (special ed), why aren't we spending an equal amount on the top 1%? Why don't the smartest kids get one on one instruction and special resources that no one else gets?

To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.

But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?

Some of it may be crab mentality. No matter how much you spend on some (but not all) special ed kids, there's no worry they will academically surpass the majority of students. So there's no fear from parents that the spending will mean their own kid gets dragged further down the pecking order.

Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?

I taught in Oakland, CA thirty years ago as a substitute, so I saw a variety of schools.

I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.

And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.

Good data, but it's static. How has it changed over the last, say, 30 years?

I'm guessing "special ed" costs have increased the most. Why is that?

The society used to care a lot less about special needs people.

There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.

Agreed. We also have to consider the comparative ROI.

This data is REALLY hard to get. For me to do it, I had to go line by line through the budget.

For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.

Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...

It IS hard to get, and that's why the former school board member's estimate is valuable.

Education and social services are one of the areas where we really shouldn't be leaning that hard on ROI. The return is a well taken care of populace. Yes, it may cost, but we pay that cost because we're not assholes.

Are you saying "whatever it costs, it doesn't matter"? Because I can't agree with that. Nor is it good public policy to just be "not assholes."

The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.

Those are still returns, just not monetary ones. You can get plenty of buy in that educational outcomes are good in themselves, but schools fail at that basic metric.

On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.

I would argue that ROI is extremely important in education. It's just that the "return" on our investment is not purely financial. Producing students who will be competent to effectively participate in and wisely run the society of tomorrow is a large part of the return that we seek. So, to that extent it may be that high special needs costs are worth it if they demonstrably help students become self-sufficient instead of dependent wards of the state. I can't say for sure that they are worth it, I'm saying that the mere fact that they're expensive doesn't mean they aren't cost-effective in the greater sense.

The benefits to disability accommodation are primarily non-monetary, which is why market forces do an awful job of providing them.

It's not just the money. The attitude to special needs children (and disabilities in general) was a lot worse.

Number that would be interesting to have:

In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):

1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?

Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...

and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:

https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...

What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?

Yes, disabilities are expensive to accommodate. That’s why we have laws like the ADA. Because when given the option to disregard the disabled, many will choose do so.

This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.

"expensive" but everything has a limit. Even losing a limb or an eye has a dollar cost associated with it, if you look in the right tables. Pretending that there is no limit, or that the choice is a binary "no limit" vs. "don't give a shit" is just not responsible.

I agree. The standard is not infinite accommodation but reasonable accommodations.

>discarded

If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.

>That’s why we have laws like the ADA

The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.

[0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/17

An equal monetary investment for disabled children would mean they don’t have a teacher. You might be able to teach 50 non-disabled children with 2 teachers that costs $100K each to employ.

An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.

You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.

If the school can't or won't educate the student with his/her equal allotment, then the school needs to return the monetary allotment to the parents for parental discretion on how to educate the child. If the state fails to provide the service with the allotment available, you don't just start taking from the other kids' pie.

>An equal $4000/student/year

You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.

I like this, because it would probably be better both for society and for the kids.

Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."

The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.

Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.

The $4000/student/year wasn’t a real figure, nor was it a reference to total costs per student (obviously schools have more than payroll costs)… it is the result of the two hypothetical numbers I gave when divided. Use whatever numbers you want, caring for special needs groups always costs way more per student than for others.

I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.

You see systematic discrimination as spending roughly the same amount on each child. I see systematic discrimination as spending disproportionately much more public money on some children at the cost of others. We both find systematic discrimination of public education funds as unethical, but draw different conclusions on who is being discriminated against. I don't see our difference of opinion as an ethical deficiency in either of our persons.

You say that like we’re overspending on spending ed. I don’t understand that position. Of course they require more resources than the average student - they’re special cases, literally! To take that away would be devastating for society’s most vulnerable, as most parents aren’t equipped with the skills or resources to be able to do any different with their children. Some cases are extreme. Should we just let them either fail regular classes many years over or become extremely disruptive? How is that good for anyone?

It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?

Speculation: Maybe they aren't funded from a distinct resource pool and are instead assumed to be a percentage of the whole that is too small to care about. However over the years the number or cost of providing service has gone up to the point where the current expectations are an undue burden on the rest of the group. If that is the case then the funding should be split off at the source into it's own portion and receive clearer representation in funding deciding bodies.

It's said without (much) judgement. In the abstract, it seems exactly right to spend on it.

But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.

We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.

There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.

I do think that the special ed model is completely broken. I think public schools overspend on special ed, and a lot of that funding is about getting special ed kids into the same classrooms as other kids and reducing the disruptions that they cause.

Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.

Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.

I think you are assuming special ed kids are academically slower and I have to push back on that. Special Ed encompasses students of all types. Some are mentally handicap, some have physical disabilities. One of my friends was wheelchair bound and had to leave class 5 minutes before the bell in order not to get stuck in the hallway. Others have respiratory issues that require classrooms with special equipment, special buses, etc. And then you have the deaf and blind students, hardly slower than anyone else, but they still require additional help that has nothing to do with being disruptive. Most of them weren't disruptive, just students trying to get a solid education like everyone else, and as guaranteed by the Supreme Court.

My understanding is that special ed money is distributed according to a power law: most kids classified as "special ed" actually need very little help (and very little money), and don't disrupt things for other students. I had a friend in my middle school Latin classes who was blind, and while he needed special written materials and some private tutoring, he didn't need any other help. The same is true of people with dyslexia, people who are wheelchair-bound, etc. They need some accommodations, but they are not where most of the money is spent.

Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.

I think your response reveals how accustomed you have become to the luxury of having plentiful resources. You ask how it is good for anyone to not spend substantially more on students with special needs, but in many of the poorer countries of the world this attitude would be baffling. In many cases these students will never be able to contribute enough to society to recover what was invested in them. Hard choices have to be made that cause sadness, but unfortunately that's the way it is. If your country becomes less anomalously wealthy in the future, you may also have to make such decisions.

The article was about the US. My response is about the US. I believe in a more just American society that takes care of the most vulnerable, not just those that contribute the most.

Which 1/3rd pays for textbooks (curriculum) and testing?

Both are total grifts. I'd rather that money went to teachers.