Using Students with Special Needs to Privatize Public Schools
Education Week came out with an article pondering a serious question. How can you have special education charter schools and still call it inclusion? HERE.
I wondered, were the school reformers going to do the following:
- Return or ramp-up the old model of resource and self-contained classes within the traditional public school system?
- Pull together counselors, school psychologists, special ed. teachers, regular ed. teachers, district SPED staffing specialists, and other specialists, all who understand and have studied and earned degrees in those areas, to guide decisions to assist individual children with special needs?
- Renew the importance of the IEP, bypassing Common Core State Standards?
- Give parents inclusion as an option on a continuum of services?
No! Just kidding! This isn’t about that at all!
There are no plans anywhere to revitalize special education in America’s public schools. Quite the contrary, for the last 30 years the quest has been to get rid of public schools and special education.
But the reformists have a problem with all their quasi-private charter schools. Kids with disabilities have not been allowed in—no inclusion. But they have been pushing inclusion in traditional public schools for years. The reality, however, is if the charter schools were to pull together all the professionals I noted above, it would be costly. It would dip into their profits.
So they are opening cheap special education charter schools. In the Ed Week example it is one run by a parent (a well-meaning parent). They will throw in some behavior specialists in these schools, probably to guide all the Teach for America types, to show they care about the students who aren’t allowed into the elite charters.
And so now you hear a phony argument about the pros and cons of inclusion, by, just Using Students with Special Needs to Privatize Public Schools: