child with Fragile X takes 45 minute bus ride to school

[HiPointDem]

46. How about looking at 3+ years of funding cuts, the loss of over 100 positions, sports, arts and

music, activity buses, etc, plus the myriad new & idiotic unfunded mandates deriving from Bush's NCLB and Obama's RFTT?

These posts typically go something like this: Horror story + blame the teachers and principals, impute their character and intelligence, etc on the basis of 6 paragraphs in a newspaper.

And this thread is no exception.

The teachers and principals of individual schools have no power over budgets, how many buses are available, how they're routed, etc. That's central district administration, and above them state administrators, and above them federal administrators.

You're absolutely right; parents are being pitted against each other and against educators, by tight money -- and I add DELIBERATELY SO, in order to destroy public education. That's the big picture.

But you're wrong; it's *not* the public school system doing this pitting of people against each other -- it's the politicians and the Wall Street types who fund them, the money who incidentally owns the media that chooses to highlight such stories v. other stories. And in some cases creates such stories or distorts them.

I said if I had a four year old, let alone a SPECIAL NEEDS FOUR YEAR OLD, I'd drive them to their PRE-SCHOOL ten minutes away rather than have them ride a bus alone. Yes.

I don't know those parents' situation, maybe they don't have a car, or two cars, but they apparently do have the freedom to be with their child until he gets on the bus to ride to the school ten minutes away.


Special education is the biggest and fastest increasing part of education aside from college/university, and it's next on the hit list, mark my words: The Fordham Institute is a big player in education deform.

In an editorial this week, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute argue that special education’s insulation from most spending reductions is a mistake.

They maintain that the assurance of funding built into federal education law through the “maintenance of effort” or MOE requirement “handcuffs states and districts by requiring that special-ed spending never decline from one year to the next. In times of plenty, this mandate discourages efforts to make productivity gains; when revenues shrink, it means that special-education spending will consume an ever-growing an ever-growing slice of school budgets.”

I’m sure that special ed advocates will find much to discuss in the editorial, but I found one line surprising: In explaining why U.S. Ed Secretary Arne Duncan backed away from undoing the MOE requirement, Finn and Petrilli blame “the powerful special-education lobby, which refused to accept anything other than expenditures escalating into perpetuity.”

http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/09/07/has-special-ed-become-the-sacred-cow-of-education-funding/