As he speaks, one of his classmates vocalizes too, her hum rising and falling, a classroom soundtrack of sorts.
Jasper, the other third graders and Fuller are undisturbed. Two-thirds of the way through the school year, they’re used to her background vocals.
In a different school, or even at Sitton a year or two earlier, the child, who is nonverbal and has autism, wouldn’t have been in a room with typically developing students. Her needs are complex enough that she would have been in one of Portland Public Schools’ 36 specialized classrooms for elementary and K-8 students who need intensive support, which are housed inside roughly half the district’s school serving elementary pupils.
Such rooms are typically staffed with one special education teacher for about a dozen children plus three full-time paraeducators, with support from others, including occupational therapists, speech language pathologists and school psychologists.
In case you ever wondered where most of the money in public education goes. We’re bankrupting education to provide these services, mainstreaming kids who are highly disruptive, and doing all this to the detriment of regular students. I don’t think any of these arguments are particularly disputable, either.
No one I know believes that public education is adequately funded. While some may argue (correctly I think) that too much is spent on worthless district administrative bloat, the vast majority of the problem is resources spent special needs students who have been mainstreamed. Public education is a bulk process, an effort to relay information to as many as possible, as efficiently as possible. We do not have the money to educate students one-by-one, yet that is exactly what special education is.
Even this article’s lead example—“as he speaks, one of his classmates vocalizes too, her hum rising and falling, a classroom soundtrack of sorts”—uses the most benign language to describe disruptive behavior. Have you ever tried talking when someone else is vocalizing and humming? Can you imagine having to do that all the time? I’m afraid it’s quite a leap to for the author to say the other kids are “undisturbed” and “used to” the background vocals. (And even if they are, they shouldn’t have to be.) And this is, by appearances, a low-maintenance, relatively well-self-regulated child. Many are not.
How are students in the US doing? Poorly. In Oregon, an extraordinarily high number cannot pass grade level reading or math tests. (This is not unique to Oregon, but Oregon seems to be particularly bad at education.) I’m not sure how much this is driving by disruptive special needs students who have been mainstreamed, but I know of multiple, regularly incidents where classrooms have to be cleared of students and staff because a special needs kids can’t self-regulate. I think we can agree this doesn’t help.
Just as importantly, though, I’m not sure we have any evidence that mainstreaming helps the special needs kids. If the rationale is that we don’t want the special needs kids to feel different, then we’re proceeding based on a falsity: They are different, and both they and we need to accept that, and figure out ways to help them without destroying public education.