As to whether "too much" is being spent on special ed--what is the right amount? I can't claim to know, but shall we go back to warehousing these kids in insitutions or deeming them uneducable? I dare say not.
Hmm. The Times article said that New York spends 6% of its budget on
one pre-K program for students with disabilities. That's over
a billion dollars a year and $40,000 per child. In my opinion, this is
way too much money --- especially when other schools in New York can't even make basic repairs and teachers are being laid off, not to mention what parents go through to get their gifted kids into one of the very few slots in the public gifted programs.
Worse, the contractors who run the city programs were stealing some of this money and using it to buy jewelry and take fancy vacations. This is what happens when you provide too much money and too little oversight (happens too often in public school systems).
Unfortunately, if someone says, "Maybe we're spending too much on these programs," people react viscerally. It's as though suggesting that special ed spending is too lavish is really a ploy to send disabled kids to a damp, unheated, dungeon of a boarding "school" where everyone eats gruel and sleeps on bedbug-ridden straw mattresses. Maybe you weren't trying to say just that, but it kind of sounded that way.
I'm curious as to why people are so willing to sacrifice an appropriate education and/or good environment for other kids so that special ed kids can have a billion-dollar program. I'm not saying that disabled pre-K kids don't need something extra. They do. But a billion dollars? Why do we bend over backwards to do as much as possible for them while basically ignoring everyone who's above average? Why do only special ed preschoolers deserve an appropriate education In NYC?
As for the OP, I can see Bostonian's point. I also see your point about a need to be honest. I also think it's possible that the situation is more complicated than charter schools just not "wanting" disabled students. Maybe they didn't know they were disabled and when they found out, they realized that they didn't have the resources to help a kid appropriately. If a school doesn't have a system in place for a disabled student, setting one up would be very expensive and would probably require that the school remove other programs that would benefit dozens or more kids. This seems like a waste of money when the public schools already have these systems in place. Not to mention a duplication of effort.
