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I thought I would bring up a subject I've been thinking about lately. We spend a lot of money per pupil in the USA and we don't see good results. Obviously, we need education reform. We spend even more per pupil when it comes to special education. Is this something you agree with. Is it fair to other students who don't have disabilities? What should we do differently?
Every student is taught math, special education or regular education.
Yes but SPED kids have their own math. They are not mainstreamed in the core classes.
I had a SPED student in my remedial class last year.
6th grade but he was at 3rd grade learning capability. I just had to provide him separate worksheets appropriate to his grade level skill. Sometimes I included him with the rest of the class because I knew he could keep up...multiplication drills but other times I had to let him work by himself because he hadn't learned the topic yet (LCD, GCF).
I had no problem with it and enjoyed having him and thought it helped him.
Was a bit extra work but I didn't mind doing it.
The entire system needs reform but I don't see that happening anytime in the future as no one high up in education is even admitting that our previous reform (what we have today) didn't' work.
The big push these days is for more technology.
More technology will solve our problems in K-12.
Give every student a scientific calculator, a kindle and a chrome book and watch scores soar to the sky.
Meanwhile back at the ranch....7 chrome books "lost" after 3 weeks and 15 are "broke". None seem to realize they must be charged and there are not 20 electrical outlets in each classroom.
We spend even more per pupil when it comes to special education. Is this something you agree with. Is it fair to other students who don't have disabilities? What should we do differently?
The amount spent on special education students is mainly for the 1-1 help that each receives. Think about it, SpEd students have much smaller classes, 1-1 paraprofessional that assists them during the day. Plus all of the therapy sessions that each child receives, speech, physical, etc... There is additional equipment that the students need as well, special desks, items that assist them in writing, etc...
Those students without disabilities do deserve to have an appropriate amount of funding as well. But, it will never equal the amount spent for those who desperately need it. Especially, when one considers that a regular classroom can have 24-35 students in it, that makes the per pupil expenditure go down drastically because the salary of the teacher is divided by those 30 some odd students rather than ten students "paying" for the one teacher.
I thought I would bring up a subject I've been thinking about lately. We spend a lot of money per pupil in the USA and we don't see good results. Obviously, we need education reform. We spend even more per pupil when it comes to special education. Is this something you agree with. Is it fair to other students who don't have disabilities? What should we do differently?
As a teacher I feel that that money isn't spent efficiently. I have worked at 2 schools and my experience has been that many of the parapros that get paid to work one on one with the students often do a poor job. I once had 3 special ed teachers/parapros in my classroom and 2 of them would almost always be on their laptops surfing the web - on ebay, amazon, checking out yahoo news etc...
I have heard several general education teachers complain about the same things and claim that they often leave the classroom to socialize in the teacher's workroom.
When a student with an IEP has the accommodation of having a test read aloud, the parapro will insist on having the answer key before reading the test aloud...the student gets an A, but can not suspiciously recall much or most of the info later that day.
I could go on...
Granted, my experience might be localized at my district.
P.S. Some are very good and will work with the students.
We spend a lot of money per pupil in the USA and we don't see good results. Obviously, we need education reform. We spend even more per pupil when it comes to special education. Is this something you agree with. Is it fair to other students who don't have disabilities? What should we do differently?
The problem is not so much that it isn't fair to other students without disabilities, the real problem is that when you spend the most resources on students with mental and physical disabilities, the societal "payback" on your tax investment is by definition very limited. Spend $10,000 per year educating a promising student with a high IQ, and in the end society gets a doctor or engineer. But say you have a mentally retarded or severely autistic student, which will cost somewhere on the order of 5 to 10 times as much money every year, and what does society get for it's educational investment? Will this person benefit society 5 to 10 times as much as the doctor or engineer? Obviously not. Can we at least say that the disabled person somehow gains enough from the additional education money required to minimize their future costs to society? If so, I've never seen it happen, and I know several people with autistic and severely retarded offspring (now young adults). Generally, "special needs" do not go away, even with one-on-one teachers and full-time personal aides.
Unfortunately, no matter how much money we spend on a student with mental retardation or even no motivation, we will never be able to "even the field" and make every student equal. Consequently, special education is a black hole that can and will consume as much funding as soft-hearted voters and fiscally irresponsible politicians send it--with little or no change in outcome. I really don't believe it is in the best interest of society to spend millions of tax dollars trying to "educate" someone who is not going to be getting a job based on academic achievement in the future: this is NOT an "investment" in our future.
Not to say that special needs students should be ignored, but should they consume the majority of our education dollars? I can't think of any way to justify that.
A secondary problem with our education system is that far too much money is spent on things that don't contribute to academic achievement at all (i.e., sports programs, over-paid non-teaching staff in the education system, fancy buildings and campuses, politically-motivated requirements for "diversity appreciation" classes). This is money not only wasted, but against the interests of parents who do not want their children indoctrinated into the progressive liberal agenda. And while property tax rates are skyrocketing in many areas (largely thanks to education, which is typically more than all other government services put together), retirees and those on fixed incomes will increasingly be forced out of their paid-for homes.
Let us remember that the goal of education is to produce young adults ready and well-equipped to enter the labor market and take on adult responsibilities. But today we have a global job market that offers the best employment opportunities to (generally) to the best students in the most demanding fields of study (STEM). At the same time, and unlike previous generations, changes in our economy have resulted in less and less demand for labor, accompanied by more and more workers flooding the market thanks to both population growth and immigration.
Does our public education system serve the goal above? Hardly. It largely serves Federal mandates, in order to get the Federal tax dollars that now constitute about 8% of education spending. What does the Federal Government want? Large expenditures in Special Education (which minimize the "return" on the investment of education dollars). Also to serve "No Child Left Behind" objectives of lowering the achievement gap (minimizing any disparity in test scores between racial groups), and maximizing graduation rates.
Unfortunately, the easiest (and sometimes the only) way to make significant progress toward these last goals is to lower standards so that virtually everybody graduates, and virtually every student can pass the standardized tests. Consequently, students can graduate high school regardless of whether they can read, write and do simple math. So what do modern employers do when filling jobs that really don't require college degrees? They require college degrees anyway, to "weed out the field" and make the number of job applications more manageable. In the past, the high school diploma had already screened out those who couldn't master basic english and math skills, or had no motivation or work ethic to go to class and do the work. Now, the student's family must fork over $40,000 or so for a college degree that means the same thing a (free) high school diploma used to mean.
In short, we spend far too much money on education in this country, and we spend far too much on the students with the least potential.
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