Unfortunately, I also have heard that our traditional public school which has high test scores also pushes kids out. They use the excuse that they don't have special programs for what the kid needs and recommend that people go to a different school in the area that specializes in "those kind of kids."
Maybe it's not an excuse; maybe it's just an honest description of the situation.
Our school system is a huge mess in many ways, and this is one of them. I expect that testing mania is influencing this problem. Schools under threat of losing funding would understandably react to the threat. So it's likely that reforming the testing mania would alleviate this problem.
Even so, IMO it seems financially wasteful to implement programs for a range of disabilities in every school. In a perfect world, everyone would get an appropriate education at the closest public school. But the world isn't perfect and I honestly don't think it's reasonable to expect
every school to set up an expensive program that benefits a few students, especially if it comes at the expense of other students.
Remember that special ed spending in this country is
huge.
Look at the last graph on this page to see how federal grants for special ed have climbed in the last 15 years. The
Wikipedia says that special ed funding in the US was over 21% of the total education budget 12 years ago. Given the trend in the graph I mentioned, it's reasonable to expect that special ed spending as a proportion of the total has gone up since then. At the time, special ed expenditures per student were roughly twice the expenditures on other students. And as HowlerKarma pointed out, how do we know that the interventions being used are useful? As someone who has reviewed education grant applications, I can attest to the validity of her question.
