For a long time Special Education hasn’t been easily classified. It has been a catch all. It’s a little like round pegs being fit into square holes. Its range can be vast: borderline personalities, limited cognitive ability, attention deficit disorder, antisocial emotional detachment, bipolar, autism, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive, kids physically sick in wheelchairs who need breathing tubes to survive. Another wards, everything.
The standards movement sometimes seems an effort to pretend that kids like this don’t exist. The special education law was passed in 1975 but it wasn’t funded as the entire cost fell back on the cities and towns. The inconsistency of the special education law is that kids have the right to be educated at their own level; but if they don’t pass a regular ed. test they will never get a diploma. To get around this inconsistency the education’s “supposed” greatest minds have to build up the image of the special education teachers as contortionists, who can’t dumb down the content, but have to somehow be miracle workers capable of solving puzzles that they can’t. Some of the people who, don’t really understand the law or necessarily back it, have to pretend that they do. Many have no personal connection to special needs children. Instead they shuffle these kids off into collaboratives which will keep them hidden in plain site.
On Thursday the Massachusetts Special Education system appeared to implode. There has been about $30 million in misappropriated funds from the Merrimack Collaborative alone as well as two other collaboratives that have come under the microscope from misappropriating funds. Full Story: http://articles.boston.com/2011-09-01/news/30102133_1_state-funds-taxpayer-money-public-money
Is this blow up surprising? Hardly. I could have predicted years ago to anyone who’d listen. Many of these collaboratives operate outside the purview of the general public. It is assumed they are run by do-gooders who only have the best interest of the children at heart. The administrators help foster this view.
Everything I needed to know about do-gooder privatizers I learned while working in a residential home for troubled youth. Back then, there was a flyer of our CEO having a heart to heart with a kid who I worked with and he wouldn’t have known if he fell over him. Instead the company hid behind phrases like caring, safe, compassionate. Some outsiders would have described the CEO and those who ran the company as bleeding heart liberals…but in truth they were merely crooks disguised as bleeding heart liberals. The hard core republicans didn’t have to worry about these places because they had already paid good money to ignore the kids and everything that went on in places like this.
Secretary Duncan pretending he knows this kid
The trouble is that a good deal of what these collaboratives have done in the past is to take care of the sickest kids, in a fashion, and to actually make them disappear. The only reason the collaboration story is even becoming an issue is that it now appears that some of these collaboratives have begun using the same stealth measures that they’ve used to hide the kids to defraud the tax payers of millions of dollars, and suddenly everyone is up in arms. And unfortunately, if the papers are any indication, half of these people are as angry at the special education clients who can’t defend themselves as they are at those who actually stole their money. It’s typical. After all, the special education students often make for slower and easier targets.
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