Dude, who even knows.
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One thing growing up with a school district lawyer taught me was that “good schools” have fuck all to do with parents or community spirit, they come out of real estate conspiracies to invest in development.
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So with the DeVos nomination hearings people are talking about public education mandates regarding disabled kids, which has gotta be the best news hook I’m ever gonna get for this, so let’s go.
My lawyer father did work for the local school district. A lot of that was labor stuff, or land acquisition, or construction contracting, but special education stuff was big in there too, and I picked a bit of it up, from overhearing him with his dictaphone, or reading the little yellow “recent developments in Pennsylvania education law” pamphlets, because the internet wasn’t a thing yet and I had to read something.
Anyway, there’s a shit-ton of details and they vary from place to place, but since the 1970s the dominant national legal framework has revolved around the “Individualized Education Program”. Notion being that schools should evaluate students! Determine what program would best fit their needs! Provide them with that program! At no expense to them!
Like so much American policy of the 1970s, this was the result of looking at some field of government endeavor, declaring “this doesn’t even seem to be trying to live up to our nominal highest ideals”, solving the problem by mandating that the system in fact implement said nominal highest ideals, and then once the ideals prove ruinously unworkable, going through a tortuous decades-long process of kludging and caveating your way back towards the previous system which at least did do whatever it was that it did.
In practice things would work out like this: our district, which was one of the larger and better-resourced in the state, would be able to handle say Downs or MS kids on-site, with educational aides and special classes, past that there was the “intermediate unit” where a bunch of regional districts pooled resources for things like this. There’d be some kid everyone agreed wouldn’t work in the mainstream, so the district would work up an IEP that would have him using some IU program, and then the parents would be like “oh, but there’s this special program I heard of for blind synaesthetic autists*, that’s the best option for my child, he would thrive most there, it is, to use the magic words, most ‘appropriate to his needs’!”
And honestly, that was maybe even true, but the program charged $250k/year and it was down by Princeton so she was demanding the district provide a driver and an aide every day from 5-7AM and 4-6PM and the total cost was like 50 times average per-pupil spending while the intermediate unit was maybe 5. So the district’s role was to say “lady, no”, and then go to lawfare - lining up motions, experts, evaluators that could be trusted to affirm the district’s position to counter the plaintiff’s experts chosen for reliably affirming hers - to make it stick.
So that’s a dramatic example, though the stuff worth enough and with good enough prospects to fight through to the end tended to be. I’m sure more common were cases of holding the line at a lower level against more sympathetic claims, stuff where the district looks more like the baddies and the cost of resisting starts to approach the cost of giving in if you judged on a case-by-case basis.
Which you couldn’t, because you had to factor in that if your district got a reputation as a pushover word would get out, through whatever listservs or nonprofits or network of professional providers, and you’d start to attract more supplicants.
If you put together an A-1 no-expenses-spared autism program, the whole puzzle piece bumper sticker set from your entire metropolitan commuting zone just ~happens~ to make their next move into your district. Or maybe you shell out for a local kid with a rare condition because you want to do right by your community, be nice, and three families in the same position up sticks and move across the country to your town - what’s the cost of a move compared to millions in effective subsidies - and use the precedent to demand the same. And congratulations, you just niced $12 million of your community’s money away - out of taxes or classrooms - for the benefit of people they don’t know from Adam.
And that’s a thing - these cases that districts really worry about, we’re talking about upper-middle class families. They’re the people that can move at will, they’re the people who even think to wield administrative law against the government, they’re the ones that can match the districts at lawfare, the ones who can afford evaluations by independent experts, lawyers - these things don’t resolve as monetary awards and it’s not like they’re taking cases on contingency and accepting two years of speech pathology sessions in payment, so we’re talking cash-on-the-barrelhead here, lawyer cash.
(Oh, that reminds me of something. “Gifted” programs? Are special education operating under the same IEP framework. Which means they often represent the success of the professional class at extracting resources from the general population and dedicating them towards preparing their scions for the elite.
I remember in 1st and 2nd grade our program was… me, cause they didn’t know what else to do with me [dead certain my dad knowing the system helped tho, for sure], by 6th grade it was maybe 1/5 our year and included a bunch of guys who were above average sure, but mostly their dad owned a dealership.
Actually I’d say the ability to fit into the IEP framework has something to do with the success of the notion of the “gifted child” [which when it caught on in the crystal-dippy New Age ‘70s had elements of the contemporary woo-woo “indigo child”] - not just smart as an adjective, like tall, but a type, with needs who could suffer if they go unmet.)
So that’s something to keep in mind, maybe when you, or the general public, thinks of “disabled student seeking public education services” you’re picturing sympathetic little Tiny Tims. But when actual institutions of public education - and we’re not talking ogrish conservatives, school districts like education spending, they hold this stance lest they be shaken down and shattered - do the same they’re picturing an attacking wave of vampiric Can-I-Speak-To-The-Manager-Moms from hell who have to be fought off lest they suck millions from taxpayer pockets, lest they suck whole classes worth of resources from the schools - and our suburban district could bear this fine, it’s the poor rural “tsk, don’t they know they need education for the future” districts where this can really fuck stuff up - and pour it straight down a hole with a gold-plated nameplate reading “My Wittle Snookums”.
I don’t have a solution. (Wellll, maybe reencoding the disabled as shameful and disposable and consigning whole swaths to low-cost warehousing in accordance with their instrumental potential, because I’m one of those coldly logical male types who prefers solving things to wallowing in ~feelings~ and ~care of persons~.)
To the extent we’re going to ration resources here, and we are, rationing-by-ability-to-work-the-system is a perverse way to do it that routes resources to the already resourced, but under the current system of due process in administrative law (more curse of the 70s) it’s hard to do otherwise.
* this was a throwaway example but now I notice there are some amazing “on the spectrum” jokes here