Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

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My son and daughter both went to the same elementary school, but at different times. We chose this school in particular because was well-funded (for a public school anyway), had a good reputation, and was diverse. My daughter is now a teenager and is an A and B student. Zero problems academically, other than constantly forgetting to turn in already-completed assignments. Despite going to the same school and having the same teachers, parents, and home life, etc my son is really struggling, though. They're both bright kids, but what changed for him?

Two things that I can see. One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety, set most kids back developmentally at least a year, often two. It was far worse for younger kids than older kids because Kindergarten through 2nd grade are absolutely foundational points in their education. Kids who don't get a solid grasp of reading, spelling, and arithmetic at this point sometimes never catch up to where they should be. Hopefully my son will.

The other is that around the time my son started at the school, they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers, and put the students in regular classes instead. This is going about as well as you'd think.

The kids with emotional issues do not get the special attention and resources that they need, and the rest of the class is severely disrupted to the point that almost no learning gets done. According to my wife who works at the school, his class this year had four special-needs students in it. My son says that these students were constantly disrupting the classroom. They bullied the other students, they verbally and physically fought with everyone (including teachers), they scream when they don't get their way. The teacher is not allowed to send them to the office or another room. The whole class didn't get recess for over half the year because the teacher couldn't handle the kids outside. (One of them would just run right off the school grounds every time, apparently.)

The school used to have a strong positivity vibe and a zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy. Now, when an emotionally-troubled child draws blood on my child (which happened), the response from the faculty and staff is so silent it's deafening.

Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy, even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.

Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?

Not OP but if you're in the Bay Area a lot of that was because sales tax revenue collapsed during COVID.

School district budgets are heavily dependent on local taxes, which in turn are heavily dependent on sales tax.

Some districts have larger pockets than others due to a diverse tax base and thus were able to keep paying for those services in each school (eg. Palo Alto, Cupertino, MTV, the Tri-Valley districts) but others didn't have as deep pockets and as such had to cut down on programs and merge them.

Looks like the start of a doom loop.

> ?? > No money in jurisdiction > Cut special Ed > Education quality takes a hit for all families > Some families move, taking their tax dollars with them > No money in jurisdiction

...

Not really.

Sales Tax and Property Taxes recovered by 2022-23 in most counties within the Bay Area (excluding SF county which only represents 9-10% of the Bay's population) as RTO began being enforced, Asian and South American tourists returned (with some new countries now - lots of Thai and Argentine tourists now beyond the traditional SK/PRC/IN/HK tourists), and the spike in high value property sales refilled coffers.

That said, the 1-2 school years spent remotely will continue to have a statistical impact in the coming years.

This is common in Seattle schools also: integrate special ed kids in normal classrooms to promote equity...and goes as well as you would expect.

> they got rid of the special education (or whatever is the correct phrase) classrooms, laid off those teachers

How did they lay off special education teachers?

Special Education is funded via the Federal DoE because of a mix of requirements from the ADA and NCLB.

Unless you mean low severity student cases which might not be classified as SpED.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be dependent on your school district and state's fiscal condition too. There might have been a reclassification done by the school district as a personnel cutting measure

Source: Mom's a Special Education teacher.

In NJ, there is a severe deficiency in this in many schools, and federal funding does not come into play directly. Here, when your school can’t provide services, they can be forced to pay for another school that offers those services. Our district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying for out of district schooling because they don’t have the resources themselves.

That makes sense. How is the fiscal health of school districts in NJ? I'd assume they aren't the greatest because of how Balkanized NJ local govt seems to be, but you guys also have variable property taxes and that might make it better than a lot of those in CA.

It is all over the place. Some districts are great, some are terrible. There is a theoretical framework of accountability at the County and State level, but it is not enforced hardly at all.

So it is up to local school boards and superintendents, and the local municipal tax levy. Most medium and small districts’ BOE members are regular citizens who are elected with no qualifications at all, and lean on the Superintendent for everything. So if you get a bad one (and it is common), your district is screwed for many years.

One thing I notice that you do not take in account nor do the child comments is that you are comparing your daughter to your son.

Boys have more challenges with academics starting in late elementary school up to high school. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...

This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real attention.

>This has been known for a while yet does not receive any real attention.

because school teachers are overwhelmingly female, and overwhelming biased against male students? And there's a political/cultural movement built around promoting female academic advancement, while no such movement exists for male students?

>Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it.

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...

https://economics.uq.edu.au/article/2021/12/teacher-gender-b...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2022.21...

I remember in my high (private, religious) school social justice class talking about this. The teacher's contention was that this was a form of patriarchy: that boys were held to higher standards because more was expected of them.

I wish I had asked the teacher what he'd have thought had the shoe been on the other foot and girls were receiving lower grades for the same competence.

Why are you still sending your kid there? Those are atrocious conditions. Complain, loudly, to your school board and vote with your feet.

Since those kids have IEPs the main recourse you have will be lawyering up because there are a bunch of backwards incentives if someone at the top thinks they can excessively mainstream self contained needing kids.

The saying, "Every idea contains the seeds of its own destruction" keeps popping into my head.

The notion that children shouldnt be excluded for their differences is laudable, and led to IEPs, mainstreaming, and lots of progress. And then calcified into dogma that no child should be excluded no matter how disruptive they were.

Anti-bullying and "empower yourself to solve your problems" became the dogma of zero-tolerance and non-intervention. Children and staff are attacked in school and the administration doesn't do a thing.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but as a left leaning kind of person it is obvious now how calcification of some progressive ideas into rigid dogma is sending people screaming into the arms of the authoritarian right. Religious schools, charter schools, andnthe right wing etc are going to win because the combination of entitled parents, frustrated teachers, weakened administration and a educational academic establishment that has had essentially no intellectual rigor while still being able to suggest pedagogical approaches that affect millions of children are busy policing one another's adherence to dogma.

> One is that the COVID quarantine, while necessary for public safety

No. It didn't help in the slightest. See Sweden. See the Armish

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