Contributors

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Robbing Peter to Teach Paul

There's a kid, call him Thomas, that costs a Minnesota school district $100,000 a year to educate. That's twice what it costs to go to Harvard. This kid is so violent that he has to be driven to school in his own personal bus, attended by an aide during the ride, and then he has to tutored by a teacher one-on-one, often assisted by another aide. And he needs a special classroom, all to himself, with a swing in it because he goes nuts if things are too still.

Special ed kids cost the states a ton of money. Because the laws mandate kids get the education they deserve, but don't give the schools enough funding to provide it, that means the money to teach special ed kids reduces the amount of money for other kids. That means schools have to fire tutors for kids who are less disabled but could do well with instruction in small groups, who would then have much higher chances of making it than the $100K kid. It also means increased class sizes for regular kids, perhaps making it less likely that they'll get into the college of their choice. That means librarians have to be fired. That means, frankly, that the majority of kids will suffer so that a tiny minority of kids like Thomas will a receive an education that will almost certainly fail to prepare them for anything resembling a normal and productive life.

Then there are charter schools, the darlings of the right. They often have special purposes (science, art, etc.) and receive special dispensations, so they often expel kids that cause trouble or aren't performing. This has been a problem around the country, including Washington D.C. and Minneapolis. Many of these charter schools are a haven from the mayhem that rules in many public schools, which have become dumping grounds for problem kids. That's great for the kids who can get into the charters. But again, it benefits a few kids at the expense of the majority.

It's good that we try to give kids like Thomas who got a bum deal some help. But at some point we have to perform some triage. Special ed is crushing many school districts. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Minnesota kids with autism spectrum disorders rose from 3,800 to 15,000. We're turning our schools into psychiatric care facilities, and it's just plain wrong.

Who's to blame? Liberals, for insisting that all kids get the education they need? Or conservatives, by making it harder for women to have access to birth control and abortion, and insisting that women on welfare get a job so they can't stay home and take care of their kids themselves? How much do the barriers conservatives erect for women's reproductive services increase the number of special-needs kids who suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, drug addiction at birth, and severe birth defects?

The right is constantly hacking away at school budgets, interfering with the way schools are run, insisting on standardized tests that make schools facing massive challenges waste even more time teaching kids to pass the stupid tests, and No Child Left Behind constantly threatening to shut down these schools because so many of the kids dumped there by the charters are too hungry or too poor or too afflicted by ADHD and autism to pass those standardized tests.

And now they want to divert billions of dollars from real education by turning all our schools into armed camps to protect them from a few crazed gunmen who have easy access to guns because the NRA doesn't want to be burdened by universal background checks or magazine size limits.

Forcing one crack-addicted woman to bear a child that she doesn't want can wind up costing the welfare and education system literally millions of dollars over the child's school-age years, and then, when that kid "graduates" he'll go on public assistance and cost millions of dollars more.

I'm not suggesting some eugenics program to clean up the human race. I'm suggesting that the right get off its high horse and stop interfering with people's most intimate decisions, let women have unimpeded access to birth control and abortion, stop trying to stifle the free speech rights of doctors advising their patients of all their options, and let women decide the most responsible course for themselves and their families.

We should make sure that all pregnant women have access to prenatal health care, especially in the early stages, to prevent birth defects and other developmental disorders that cost so much later in life. That means money for women's health clinics like Planned Parenthood, who lost funding in Oklahoma for nutritional programs for pregnant women because of politics.

We should have preschool programs that identify and help kids with problems early on, perhaps saving millions of dollars in the long run.

Once kids are born we all have a moral obligation to help them. It's crazy to force a woman to bear a child and then throw them out on the street when she can't support the kid she never wanted.

All too often the right's ideological social dogmas run completely counter to their ideological budgetary dogmas. If we got rid of all the dogma we'd earn a lot more karma.

1 comment:

Juris Imprudent said...

It wasn't conservatives or moderates or libertarians that insisted on mainstreaming and keeping disruptive kids in the public schools.

You can eat that pile of shit all on your own thank you very much.