House of Eratosthenes

Three weeks ago an expose appeared in Pajamas Media about the bounty on special education students. The point of the article: There are “lump sum” districts in which the funding for special ed programs is kept independent from the number of students enrolled, and there are “bounty” districts in which there’s money to be made per pelt, just like hunting beavers or mice. Bottom lining it: Since the special education law went into effect in 1976, the increases in number of children enrolled in these programs, have been registering at different rates. The bounty districts have the faster-growing enrollments.

Three days later, Laura McKenna writes in to say,

We live on a cozy dead-end street in suburban New Jersey with 13 school aged kids. Of those 13 kids, six qualify for special services and have IEPs, including my son.
:
These diagnoses cause real problems in education. Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and remember the kids who were ostracized, lonely, strange, smelly, weird, hyper, and angry. Today, those kids have a much better shot at life, and at an education because they are getting appropriate services. With help, they are more likely to finish high school and even attend college. They will be able to more fully function in society and provide for themselves, rather than spend a lifetime on welfare.

Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a single kid in my kid’s special needs classrooms that I thought should not be there. [emphasis mine]

Holy crap!

So what Laura McKenna is saying, is half the kids on this cozy dead-end street would have dead-end lives and end up on welfare if it weren’t for special education programs. Right?

Call Erin Brockovich. Look for power lines, chemicals in the water, barbiturates in the asphalt, whatever. Something’s wrong.

The Pajamas columnists respond:

McKenna’s responses to our evidence fall into four categories:

Appeals to emotion and superior personal experience…

Misunderstanding of the issue…

Appeals to improved diagnosis…

Appeals to the awfulness of the system…

Tell me about it. I’ve been having this argument with people like McKenna, many times.

These people demonstrate intelligence, and yet they do not argue the issue rationally. I’ve noticed one pattern that occurs over and over again, that disturbs me more than anything else, is this: If you have the audacity to argue “Child X does not have Disability Y” (or may not) you will find yourself embroiled — in the blink of an eye — in a red-hot back-and-forth about whether “Disability Y exists” even though this is not what you called into question. I’ve seen it with ADD. I’ve seen it with dyslexia. I’ve seen it with hyperactivity. And then the anecdotes come out: This one kid, he had such a bad case…blah blah blah blah blah. And then you ask, what does that have to do with this borderline case that is the subject of our disagreement? And you get back this deer-in-the-headlights stare, and, uh, gee, well I dunno…I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same stuff.

Horsepuckey. They’re just being drama queens.

And when they demonstrate the capacity to pursue a disagreement logically, but not the willingness to do so — that screams money, to me. That’s the way people behave when they’re motivated by money.

Not all of them though. Some of them are parents. Parents aren’t all the same, it turns out; some of them want their children to be strong, and others want their children to be weak.

I think that’s why they don’t argue these things logically. If you argue something like this logically, you identify the areas of disagreement — this child cannot make it without specialized help, and if he gets the specialized help it will help him more than it will hurt him — and you make the dialog about those points of disagreement. That is not what these people do.

They presume this is “The Help That He Needs”; they go through the motions of leaving this open to question, but they don’t. They settle on it, and then they monologue outward from there, that of course he needs the help, I just pulled that one outta my ass. They won’t allow any debate about it, even though any disagreement confronted is supposed to be about that and very little else.

“Kids” who get put on this stuff, are overwhelmingly boys. The “parents” who want them on it, are overwhelmingly the mothers. Why do we need special ed? A lot of the time, it’s because the “parent” feels like she should be able to relate to the “kid” emotionally in every single way, and she simply isn’t going to be able to. And if McKenna thinks those kids belong exactly where they are, in a special ed program, well then she’s quite plain and simply wrong.

Thing I Know #179. Children seem to be “diagnosed” with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow “enthusiastic” about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks.

Thing I Know About People Minus What I Was Told When I Was A child #23. People who are lazy when it comes to teaching their sons to be men, don’t want masculinity to be appreciated by anyone else either.

It’s 1959, I’m in kindergarten and I’m having trouble learning how to read (whole word method). So Mom (taught high school English as a substitute) gives me a quick assessment at home and discovers I’m dyslexic. So she teaches me to read using phonics. Not that pop phonics crap either. I head back to school and I’m reading like a champ.

A problem to be overcome, not a chronic condition to be fussed over endlessly, That’s how my mother saw it, and other than the rare occasion when I’m tired and/or depressed, I’ve no problem with it.

These days the problem is not with the children, the problem is with the authoritarians who hate them. It’s with the people who don’t know children, who don’t understand children, and don’t want to know or understand children. People who want children to conform to some mythical standard established by fellow control freaks with no knowledge or understanding of children. The same sort of people who made childbirth and adolescence into such a time of crisis because they will not know and understand those events, and so fear them.

Here’s a clue for certain people; every normal pregnancy ends in childbirth. This is normal. It’s supposed to happen, and strictly speaking you’re not absolutely necessary.

Here’s another clue for you all, kids act out. Kids are excitable, kids get physical. It’s not a crime against humanity. Stop being such drama queens.

We need to start putting flibbertigibbets in conservatorships and removing them from positions of responsibility.
- mythusmage | 07/06/2008 @ 12:59
6 out of 13 children being in special education sounds like a lot in 1 location but distribution of anything tends to be uneven. Clusters happen for everything. I would expect that if you looked at a larger population such as the school system those children attend that the amount of children in special ed would be close to normal. If a whole town had a higher than normal special ed population then maybe there might be environmental issues but a street end doesn’t qualify as abnormal.

I once found myself in a group of 12 unrelated people where 10 were left handed which seemed statistically strange. The chance of a particular couple having 6 boys or 6 girls is small but some couples will have 6 boys or 6 girls. Clusters do happen all the time.
- hayesatlbch | 07/07/2008 @ 03:56
Yes, like they say about people who are selected for jury duty four times in five years, who have neighbors that’ve never been picked once: “That’s what the word ‘random’ MEANS.”

But if that is the case, you should find the adults to be subjecting the process to greater scrutiny, especially as they are told about each new child “I think xxx has special needs and may need some specialized education.” In localities like this, where everyone knows someone who needs some special ed, what you find instead is complacency. The system isn’t challenged. You see it in the arguments used by the bureaucrats to keep it propped up: “Since xxx has been placed in this program, he has been helped so much!” Well, that isn’t really the litmus test, now is it?
- mkfreeberg | 07/07/2008 @ 07:48
I’ve been an elementary public school teacher for the past 19 years. One of the things teachers do when they can’t figure out why a student isn’t learning even though they’ve done everything they’ve been trained to do, is suggest a learning disability. I used to do that too. After I finally got frustrated enough to know I couldn’t spend the rest of my teaching career in this kind of “can’t do” situation, I did some research into phonics. I found out that the phonics programs that really work, and the teachers who have found their way past what we learned in teachers’ colleges spoke of teaching disabilities. Teachers aren’t trained to teach in the ways that some students learn.

How about that?

The program I use is put out by the Riggs Institute at http://www.riggsinst.org (if anyone is interested.) It works and there’s a huge amount of information . . . if anyone is interested.
- sonofsheldon | 07/07/2008 @ 13:57
Teachers aren’t trained to teach in the ways that some students learn. How about that?

I think we may have candidate for another “Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately” (BSIHORL) award.
- mkfreeberg | 07/07/2008 @ 16:14
Hey, thanks. I only wish it hadn’t taken me so long to learn that.
- sonofsheldon | 07/08/2008 @ 12:21

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Saturday, July 5th, 2008