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Comment by Bratmon | Hacker News Reader

I think the answer to this is that schooling/care for people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school should be a totally different budget with different success criteria than the budget for normal school.

There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.

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"people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school" is not a clearly divisible population from the regular student population though. Many (but not all) districts deal with disabilities via IEPs, or Individual Education Plans. They are tailored to particular students, and can be fairly common. They make things less of a clear binary than 2 separate school systems would really need.

It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to partition the school system into a lesser system for students with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very difficult.

Yep, the abuse is happening over here in slovenia too, you get some diagnosis for the kid, you get 50% more test-taking time, extra help in school, extra accomodations for other stuff, and in the end, your grade is worth the same (for grade averages and high school or college acceptance) as someone elses who finished in regular amount of time. No remarks anywhere saying "while student A and B have the same point average, student B had 50% more time on the test".

So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for their kids, but the system is unfair.

Giving accomodations during a test kind of invalidates the test as a measurement of relative ability, or aptitude for further studies, so perhaps the solution is to stop doing that

In my experience ( to be fair which was a while ago ) things like that just end up making things worse trapping people and leading to a lot of lashing out

Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy

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I just don't see how it's possible to construct a classroom environment that can simultaneously serve an 8th grader who's ready to start learning algebra and an 8th grader with dyscalculia who struggles with basic arithmetic. (I'd be sympathetic to "let's try our best", except that people often propose to try our best by declaring that first kid isn't actually ready.)

I've always thought we should get rid of grades altogether. There should be curricula that builds upward but if a kid masters 4th grade math, they should move on up right then, not wait for half a year to join 5th grade or have to retake 4th grade. Obviously there are operational challenges with this but it's got to be better than having bored advanced kids, the shame of being "left behind", etc. The kid with dyscalculia should be able to move at their own pace.

But maybe they don't need to attend completely different schools, either.

I agree, but I don't think that's what's being proposed. Many special ed programs today work on that principle: try to mainstream everyone in the classes they can be, run separate classes for the cases where that won't work, and everyone kinda understands that the participants in special ed aren't expected to be as successful in their educational pursuits.

As a parent of a kid that has special needs (at a minor level), there really is a separate set of skills needed to teach to these kids, as well as needing a better student teacher ratio. It made a huge difference for my kid.

> What sad place do you come from?

Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.

Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster, and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution for violating the constitution.

> Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.

Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die

> What sad place do you come from?

The American public education system

Do you want to get rid of "advanced" course options and push every student into the same bucket?

I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich kids

Just FYI I was dirt poor and from a crap neighborhood and qualified for and benefited from these AP classes. Not all kids who succeed only succeed because of their background.

Similar.. not dirt poor, but bottom 1/3.

I am from the same situation. I speak from experience: social mobility in public school is the exception. I would have done just fine without AP classes at all, as I am sure you would have. It's the kids who need help that benefit from school.

AP classes exist to pad the resumes of rich kids and justify their being propelled into academic situations that should rightfully belong to others. Prove me wrong

So because you weren’t personally benefitted as much as others no one should benefit from them.

One of my AP classes taught us how to spot logical fallacies. Seems to have benefitted me well enough.

No, I believe this caste system should be abolished because I can personally attest to how much it benefits people and how irrationally/inconsistently it is applied to us. We must have good education for all

AP classes allow those who are capable of working ahead of the general students to do so. It has zero to do with wealth. What others are hurt by you being able to take an AP class? Nobody is saying to remove remedial classes for those who have trouble keeping up.. but you shouldn't punish those capable of working ahead by putting everyone in the same class.

Your tirade sounds more like neo-communist garbage from someone who has never experienced communism. See the Yugoslavian comment in this thread for a counter example... where in actual communism, you emphatically push the capable ahead and allow success.

I don't have to prove you wrong as your assertions are wrong on their face and you have not said anything to backup your own assertions. I don't know how old you are, but you seem to have been dropped in the modern "equity" rabbit hole.

That's horrible. Smarter kids could get a better education, but they can't, because the teachers have to deal with illiterate kids that don't want to learn in the first place.

Maybe if we tried to educate all our kids instead of just the rich ones they wouldn't be illiterate

We do... The VAST majority of kids go through public education... It's mostly a matter of effort, and that comes down to mostly parent pressure on having their kids do the work.

Maybe if we actually held kids that can't do the work back, they wouldn't be illiterate. Let social pressure do the work it's meant to. For that matter, let parents do the work they're supposed to.

Some kids are just stupid, and it doesn't matter if they're rich or poor, there's nothing you can do about it. No need to keep everyone at the stupidest kids level.

Half of them are in AP classes. let's not pretend our methods of sorting kids into castes makes any sense. Let's be honest: this is about money and attention, and you want to grind the poor kids into dust

It's not about money, you're the one who just thinks about money. Maybe, by your logic, if someone gave you $100 now, you'd become smarter and look wider... but probably not.

Sorting into better highschools and worse ones, and better classes and worse was done even back in my times, in what used to be yugoslavia, with communism, red stars and a dictator. You want better kids to excell as much as they can, and you want the stupid kids to at least learn to read and write for their boring communist factory jobs for the next 40 years, even if they never get to learn how to solve differential eqations... if you keep the kids together, the stupid ones still won't be able to do basic math and there would be no time left over for the smarter ones to learn more. There was no correlation between money and stupidity of kids.

Some kids are smart enough to become engineers, some can barely read, there's no need for them to be in the same classroom.

The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level. Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.

Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.

> The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level.

Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers.

> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.

What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago.

I said specifically "advance humanity" ... simple labor doesn't advance humanity. It's absolutely necessary, but it also doesn't require a college education.

Advancing humanity is coming up with cures for disease, or inventing useful things. We manage to feed the world with a fraction of the labor it once took to do so. It wasn't the common laborer that came up with solutions that effectively eliminated food scarcity.

I'm not a big fan of the myth of progress, so your pleas are falling on deaf ears. I see no reason to prioritize the education of the rich in our public schools

You have provided no evidence that wealth is a driving factor in any given public school. For that matter, progress is not a myth.. again, we literally eliminated food scarcity through industrialization. That's not a myth. Try again.

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