Can we still afford special education

 Can we still afford special education?

 

As more children qualify for special education, more school systems are deciding the provision of special education is a hill too high to climb.

In the 22-23 school year a record 7.5 million students accessed special education services in the United States.

Several factors are playing into the increase.  The pandemic left many kids at home with parents.  Sometimes the parents were doing school lessons and were discovering that the issues in learning their kids had were very real; they weren't all the teacher's or school's fault.   Secondly, the stigma for some disabilities is going down.   Autism spectrum disabilities are on the rise as are people on the spectrum being shown as very smart and maybe just a bit quirky so what’s so bad about that. 

Schools don’t have the money to provide the services and when they do, they can’t find the teachers.   Three in five special ed teachers leave in the first five years.   Then there is the issue of all those wonderful federal pandemic funds that are going away.

In Maryland the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is pumping lots of new state money into local school systems.  But that is not a free lunch.  The new money may only be spent in specific areas for the purposes of legislation.   And money begets money so, the local jurisdictions are required to increase their spending in those areas beyond the Maintenance of Effort amounts already established.

There is only so much money to go around.  Somethings are happening in Maryland that have seldom happened before.  Teachers are being laid off.  From the smaller systems such as Cecil County to the largest one, Montgomery county.  Programs are being cut; positions are eliminated in the Baltimore metro area as well.  All of this means involuntary teacher transfers  if teachers want to keep their jobs.  

Money being pumped into school systems is being allocated on a per pupil basis and that money goes to the schools where the kids are.  The money is not for general overhead to run the district.

Special education is more expensive than general ed.  Now that there is less money all around, the hard question of can we still afford special education has left the whisper stage and is being asked out loud.

We can end dropouts right now

 We can end dropouts right now

 

All men are not created equally.  And neither are students.  So why is it that we insist on pushing every child through the same knot holes in order to get a high school diploma?

Baltimore City has been working very hard to get students  who have dropped out during the pandemic and the virtual not instruction to return to school.   It is sending folks to homes and to student workplaces trying to convince them it is worth their time and energy to come back to school.

But is it really?   What will they get in high school that will change their lives besides a high school diploma.   For a teenager, a high school diploma is in never never land and now they can get $15 an hour in the service sector and that looks like big time earning.

If they return to school, they can get algebra 1, Shakespeare, and another foreign language.  What exactly are they going to do with that?  How will that make their lives better?

We talk a good game about college and career readiness.  In reality all we are preparing students for is college and there are lots of kids whose abilities and interests do not require college.

We need to drop many of the academic classes that we currently require kids to take.  Students need to learn to read and write grammatically correct English, would be good if they could speak it too.  They need some heavy coursework in financial literacy and civics so they can learn how the government is run and how to avoid being scammed by bad actors who want their money.  Current history would be valuable as well. Some science in how to manage and take care of the body that they live in.  Beyond that we need to start training kids for the jobs that are out there right now.   For some those jobs require college.  But for lots of other jobs, no college required.

Look around at the jobs that are going begging.  Georgia has an entire training program to prepare kids for the TV production industry.   Georgia is about to outpace California in that field.  Why, because they have skilled labor and they are preparing more and better skilled support staff for all of the theatre union performers.  

Maryland has huge vacancies in the construction trades and in commercial drivers.  We should be teaching students those skills and they might see some purpose in coming back to school.

We could eliminate dropouts in just a few years if we made school relevant to the students and to their interests and skill set instead of pandering to the politicians who are in white collar jobs that don’t require dirty hands.  Let’s take a giant step backwards to the olden days when there were academic (heading to college), commercial (heading to the business world) and vocational-technical (heading to skilled employment) diplomas.  More students finished high school because it was worth their time.

What's the Goldilocks Spot?

 What’s the Goldilocks Spot

 

Teachers are not paid nearly enough!  Teachers are paid way too much for the 190 days a year they work when the rest of us work a lot longer.   The average American works 260 days.  Teachers get great benefits.  They are very seldom fired.  They work a 6 ½ hour day and regularly have to take work home.  They get at least one free period during the school day to do lesson planning.  Some teachers get more than that.  They also receive fund to earn an advanced degree which will further increase their salaries.

The average teacher’s salary in Washington DC is $84,882.  It is among the top five in the country.   In Maryland, the average salary isn’t that far behind at $79,420.  In Montgomery County Maryland adjacent to Washington DC the average salary is $83,266.  Yet there are vacancies in all of these jurisdictions.  Maryland has a plan to start all beginning teachers at $60,000.  The idea is that this will attract more teachers and help to fill the vacancies that exist all year long.  People will tell you teachers are burned out.  They just have too much to do.  The question is, will more money make them less burned out?  Or are there other issues at play that we need to face.

Money doesn’t seem to be doing its job of attracting teachers.   But politicians have never been known to look at the data, so their answer to vacancies is to increase salaries. 

Part of the problem is there is a finite amount of money available to school systems.    So, if school districts are required to increase salaries, they only have a couple of options if they can’t get more money from county government.  They can decrease the number of teachers or they can reduce spending in other areas.  When they reduce the number of teachers, that means more students in each class or a reduction in course offerings.  Two school districts in Maryland have already canceled all virtual learning because of budget issues.  

Ideally school systems could engage unions in this discussion.  Sadly, unions only seem to be interested in increasing salaries not serving the needs of the students.

What is the Goldilocks sweet spot?   How much salary is not too hot and how much is not too cool.  When are we paying teachers an appropriate respectful amount representative of the importance of their jobs and when are we paying them too much so that it is impacting the rest of the system.   Where is Goldilocks when we need her?