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Then they should get pushed through just like any normal kid would be. Why would a spec ed student be more deserving of a greater effort than someone who will be expected to be a tax paying citizen living on their own as an adult?
Plenty of disabled people grow up to hold jobs, live independently, pay taxes.
My apologies for calling you a lier[sic]; I was unaware that the two kids of YOUR brother,who can be a stay at home mom [sic], constitute "every kid that is classified as ADD, ADHD, autism, ect [sic]".
Since in your mind, your brother's two kids are in essence every kid that is classified as LD, what's the big deal about government contributing to their care and education?
If you work in education, then I hope it's behind the scenes and not interacting with kids. The fact that your attempt to justify your all-encompassing swipe at the parents of every LD child consists of one personal anecdotal incident just proves my earlier point - and for that I must actually thank you. Bravo! It sure makes it easier to see the intellectual failings of those who argue against children with learning disabilities receiving an education.
You claim that you stand by the "fact" that the parents should pay for their own kids, not the government. I have a feeling you need to research the meaning of "fact", and check it against the words "personal opinion". While you're at it, maybe you can read up on the "law", and see how it compares to "personal opinion" as well. Incidentally, have you demanded that your own family stop taking advantage of the government? And if you yourself were to become disabled, you would of course not request any state disabilty benefits, correct? Because that, of course, would be hypocrisy....
humm, never said anything about the education part. I am actually for that .
I don't think they should be allowed to get SSI monies.
Before I begin this thread, please don't label me a bigot or a hatemonger. I'm not. I'm simply asking reasonable questions that I have gathered over a long period of time- questions that are legitimate and ones that need to be answered regarding the state of special education today.
The major push in K-12 education today is inclusion, which means including special education students in regular classes. To do this, millions of dollars are being spent to educate regular ed teachers on how to incorporate these students.
Meanwhile, many workshops, seminars, and conferences about for teachers attempting to become more proficient in special education. Conversely, there are an extremely limited number of workshops/conferences for meeting the needs of gifted students.
What gives? It's highly plausible to say that the gifted students will be entrepreneurs, college-bound, and innovative makers of new technology that will drive our economy, not the other way around. Is too much focus being given to the lower-end group?
Not to mention that for every kid that is classified as ADD, ADHD, autism, ect the family's are receiving SSI and medicare for them regardless of the amount of money the family makes.
I feel that if you decide to have a child and it is born with problems that was your choice to have them and the tax payers should not have to foot the bill for them. just my opinion!
This is surely the most offensive comment out of several offensive comments that I've seen on this thread. People have and always have had children and some of those children will have handicaps. It's the way the world has always worked. If you find out that your child is going to be handicapped before it's born, and you decide not to have it, I believe they call that abortion. I consider myself pro-choice and I'm still totally offended by this comment. However, I'm going to pretend that you didn't really mean it that way and move on to give you guys some perspective.
I got my figures from this website: Raven's Guide to Special Education: Disabilities The numbers jibe with what I had to learn to pass my sped praxis so I used them. Here's some of the breakdown: Sped has about 5-8% of the student population. Of those kids, about half of them are learning disabled. That means that their intelligence is normal to superior, but for whatever reason, they have problems with reading, writing, and/or math. Another 18.6% are speech/language difficulties, and about 10% of sped kids have mental retardation. After that the percentages drop off quite a lot, but remember that you have deaf/hard of hearing kids and those with visual problems. Of course there is probably crossover--some LD kids also use speech language services, etc.
I work in a high school with a total student population of around 2000 and out of all of those students, maybe 10 at the most will never be able to do anything beyond shelter workshop. Most of those kids who qualify as having retardation will be able to get a job b/c many of our resources go towards ensuring that and their retardation is not at all obvious. Believe me, this will save society money later on. Oh yes, and there are exactly 8 teacher assistants to be with these students--the whole sped program I mean--not just the lowest IQ students. There's not nearly enough of us to go around.
As for the learning disabled kids--remember, I said they have normal to superior intelligence. One could very well ask: why are so many kids LD? Maybe there is nothing whatever the matter with their intelligence, but there is something wrong with a society that requires them to perform work that they're not suited for. Many of them are extremely superior in visualization skills for instance, or they're philosophically inclined and can think of things that us mere average mortals can never imagine, but the schools insist on fitting the square peg into the round hole and then must spend inordinate amounts of money to pound them into that hole.
Now we could take sped supports away from those students w/o actually changing anything about the school systems, but I'm old enough to remember the bad old days of no sped, and it wasn't pretty. The day to day grind of these kids trying to hide the fact that they couldn't read from their classmates and teachers just wore many of them down and their self esteem plummeted to zero. Suicides were rampant.
My brother had many of these problems and one day when we were kids I called him retarded--not b/c I thought he was, but b/c I'm a big sis and that's what we do. He went ballistic on me and I never called him that again, and recently he brought it up again and I realized that he'd carried that all of those years and it broke my heart. He is a very successful pilot and jet mechanic now, so apparently those reading and writing and spelling skills that he was so poor at, just weren't as important to him in his career as they were to the school, b/c believe me, he never got much better at doing those things, unless he just happened to be particularly interested, like it was a jet engine repair manual or something.
Also, consider this, you smug people who worked so hard: the sped kids are working just as hard if not harder than you ever did--sped services are meant to level the playing field, not give them an unfair advantage. And society is moving on--those skills that are so important in school now may not be in a few years. Society may have a great need for the visualization skills that many sped kids excel at and you may be the new learning disabled. Some techie companies are actively recruiting people with autism and those with AD/HD are generally your entrepreneurs. Those big picture thinkers need to be in more positions of authority.
Anyway, I would hope that some of you on here spouting off about how we shouldn't spend any money on somebody else's problem child would do research and read some books--start with first person accounts of what it's like to go thru school with no sped. One that I recently read was Embracing the Monster by Veronica Crawford. She had multiple disabilities and her book is heartbreaking but she went on to get her master's degree (with support) and owns her own company now. Another good book that I'm reading right now is In the Mind's Eye: visual thinkers, gifted people with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, computer images and the ironies of creativity by Thomas G. West. Remember, those who won't read books are as bad off as those who can't read them.
Not to mention that for every kid that is classified as ADD, ADHD, autism, ect the family's are receiving SSI and medicare for them regardless of the amount of money the family makes.
Oh yes, and I meant to ask you where you got that about the AD/HD kids getting SSI and medicare? I've never heard of such a thing--most of them don't even get sped services--not unless it's really impacting their education, and then usually it's just extended testing time and putting their next near the teacher's or b/c the AD/HD is co-existent with LD or other disabilities. Why don't you post the source for that statement? I'd love to see it.
Oh yes, and I meant to ask you where you got that about the AD/HD kids getting SSI and medicare? I've never heard of such a thing--most of them don't even get sped services--not unless it's really impacting their education, and then usually it's just extended testing time and putting their next near the teacher's or b/c the AD/HD is co-existent with LD or other disabilities. Why don't you post the source for that statement? I'd love to see it.
I did, just go into the SSI website.
1.1 million children under the age of 18 get SSI benefits.
I know my husband teaches these children and I sub This Population.
1.1 million children under the age of 18 get SSI benefits.
I know my husband teaches these children and I sub This Population.
According to the Raven website Stepka posted, approximately 12.1% of the school age population receives Special Education services -- a total of ~5.9 million students. That means the total school age population is approximately 48.5 million students. If you're correct that 1.1 million students are receiving SSI benefits, that's only 2.2% of the entire school age population in the United States.
That's hardly the every child that you claimed in your earlier post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by spotrod
Not to mention that for every kid that is classified as ADD, ADHD, autism, ect the family's are receiving SSI and medicare for them regardless of the amount of money the family makes.
It's always clear and easy to identify those on the receiving end of all our school taxes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rayneinspain
Is it now.
I find your statement to be wrong at best, highly offensive at worst.
My daughter is brilliant in English...yet has Dyscalculia (math dyslexia). Since all of my attempts at getting her tested for math disability were ignored by school administrators until last year (her Junior year of HS), she is still trying to pass Algebra I and maybe graduate by the age of 19. Her school is not prepared to help her, but at this point I don't know what to do to help her.
Are you saying you'd be able to pick her out of a crowd of kids?
Since she's a posting member here, I'm sure she'd love to read your response.
Point made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DontH8Me
Wow, you found one misplaced letter in the hundreds of words I've written in this thread. Commendable. Please try to contribute something to the actual subject of the thread, instead of focusing on your fellow posters. It's a shame you apparently can't tell the difference between a typo, and three errors that the other author had no clue were erroneous. It makes your post look disingenuous and petty.
When someone has no actual rebuttal, they turn the subject of discussion into the other poster instead of the thread. Apparently your choice to point out my typo and the sharing of your opinion of my character (which, incidentally, I don't give a faint frog's fart about) with no valid point or argument is all you've got to counter all the pertinent information I provided in making my points. Do you care to discuss those?
So what is THIS rant??? Huh? You accuse me then do the same thing.
It's really amusing that YOUR mistakes are typos and someone else's are ignorance. You're funny. And I'm sure there are more, I was only referring to that one post. I haven't read any of your others.
I fail to see how parents can take so much from a school district that is suppose to be for the education of ALL students, not just theirs, and think it's ok. What kind of conscience do they have and how can they look the parents of all the other kids in the face or even show their faces at school? I'd be so ashamed if my child had trouble taking notes and have my parent demand a private teacher for each subject to take notes for him, or be the parent who is expecting that from a school.
They are dismantling entire programs due to cutbacks in schools (They eliminated foreign language here for the lower grades, for example.) yet they are hiring personal secretaries for certain students. That's enough to make anyone's blood boil.
My child could benefit greatly from the cut program, but she loses because someone else needs a private secretary. MAKES ME SICK.
Last edited by NoExcuses; 03-23-2010 at 09:10 AM..
Now we could take sped supports away from those students w/o actually changing anything about the school systems, but I'm old enough to remember the bad old days of no sped, and it wasn't pretty. The day to day grind of these kids trying to hide the fact that they couldn't read from their classmates and teachers just wore many of them down and their self esteem plummeted to zero. Suicides were rampant.
My brother had many of these problems and one day when we were kids I called him retarded--not b/c I thought he was, but b/c I'm a big sis and that's what we do. He went ballistic on me and I never called him that again, and recently he brought it up again and I realized that he'd carried that all of those years and it broke my heart. He is a very successful pilot and jet mechanic now, so apparently those reading and writing and spelling skills that he was so poor at, just weren't as important to him in his career as they were to the school, b/c believe me, he never got much better at doing those things, unless he just happened to be particularly interested, like it was a jet engine repair manual or something.
I remember those days as well, yet don't remember even one suicide. Hmm Rampant? I think not. In all the years I was in school and all the years since, I have never heard of a suicide in our district, or even in any neighboring districts. Not even in any area I have ever lived. Hmmm. How do you qualify 'rampant'???
In fact, I don't recall any of those kids being treated any differently in school than anyone else. It has been only in the last years that suicide has become a serious problem, and mostly because kids aren't raised to be strong.
Your brother must have been extremely sensitive if that one time you called him a name that every kid gets called at least once in his/her life affected him to the point of nearly ruining his life.
Last edited by NoExcuses; 03-23-2010 at 09:06 AM..
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