We were talking about metropolitan governments this week in my State and Local politics class and education on the blog. I’ve got a post that combines both topics.
When Ian was two and a half, he was diagnosed with a severe speech delay. He had a few months of the state’s Early Intervention program, which was a disaster.
When he turned three, the town was given the responsibility for his education. The town had a special education pre-school where they dumped all the kids with special needs. The problem was that each kid had something different and needed their own particular type of help. Ian was especially odd, since he couldn’t talk at all, but could read. The teacher hadn’t encountered anyone like Ian before. For two years, he did not receive appropriate treatment.
Then it was time for Kindergarten. A sympathetic administrator put him into a special program outside the district. It’s a regional special education program that deals with kids who are just like Ian. It’s within the public school system, but it collects the one kid in town A with Ian’s issues and another kid in town B with Ian’s issues and puts them all in one classroom.
After two weeks in the new school, we noticed improvements in Ian’s speech. His handwriting was outstanding. He was happier. He was doing so well that by November, we had revised his IEP.
What are they doing differently? Well, the program is geared toward kids with speech problems. The teacher and I correspond daily about his progress. They focus on social skills and keep the academic goals high. If he gets upset, they write down what they want him to do, since his readings skills are much higher than his audio-processing skills. They have highly trained assistants in the room. His classmates are more like him. His classroom is in a regular school, so he plays with regular kids at recess. The teacher is trained to deal specifically with kids like Ian and not kids with the range of other special education problems. He’s doing more challenging academic work than Jonah did in Kindergarten. We want to keep Ian in this program for as long as possible.
Despite the wonderfulness of this regional program, there are a lot of forces that prevent more programs like this from starting up. Our town isn’t all that thrilled about its tax money traveling outside the town. Well, that’s the biggest problem and the only one worth talking about. It’s money. People want the money kept local.
We’re in the midst of a horrid budget problem in New Jersey. Corzine has been floating one proposal after another to deal with the upcoming doom. One proposal that went no where was to increase the tolls on the local highways.
Another proposal was to consolidate services among the ridiculous amount of small towns in New Jersey. Does each town really need its own police department and its own school district? No. It would be much more efficient to merge the administration of those programs. And, judging from Ian’s experience, it would have much better outcomes. But this proposal hasn’t gone anywhere either, because of the entrenched interests in local towns and the localist political culture in New Jersey.
Ian’s school model could be expanded to meet the needs of all sorts of kids — the highly gifted, athletic, artistic. Schools could be set up to attract parents who want a traditional education versus those who want a more progressive agenda. Too bad there are so many forces working against this system.
Apt. 11d 
I’m frankly really impressed with Ian’s program. I have little exposure to specialized special ed.
What you are asking for is school choice, and doesn’t that exist with charter schools, magnet schools and focus schools?
Besides two local charter schools, we have a math and science school, a highly gifted and talented, a couple of international baccalaureate programs, a Japanese and Spanish focus, one that is similar to a Montessori, and a classical school. Neighboring districts have an arts school, medical and technology schools.
From what I know of other towns in other parts of the countries have similar make-ups.
Isn’t what you are asking for already going on ?
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Lisa V,
That’s a pretty good range, but I don’t think it covers all the bases. Also, I think transparency is an important issue. I think school websites should explain the curriculum and philosophy favored (as many do), and it should be possible to flip through all the textbooks online, just as you can (to a limited extent) on Amazon. As I’ve learned from reading Kitchen Table Math, a lot of textbooks and other educational resources currently cannot be ordered or accessed by parents. If parents are going to be partners with schools at home (teaching the $#@)%$@ multiplication table), as well as paying taxes to support schools, schools need to provide generous access to instructional materials. There should be weekly classroom bulletins for parents, or maybe classroom blogs. Without that kind of transparency (and with the school rating system still in its infancy), families are buying a pig in a poke when they enroll a child. There can’t be real school choice unless it is clear what the choices are.
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The variety of schools Lisa V mentions does exist in major metropolitan areas, but there’s a lot less diversity elsewhere, even in mid-size cities. To take a very extreme example, I think my home town in Washington state only has the one public elementary, the one public middle school, the one public high school, one public alternative school, and a Seventh Day Adventist school, the next high school being probably sixty miles away. That next town over (which you may even have heard of) has only one standard public high school plus an alternative school, but it has a bunch of different elementary and middle schools both public and private, plus a decent community college where high school students can take classes. (They also offer some community college classes in my home town, but the course selection is naturally limited.) Anyway, my point is that there are large areas of the country where there aren’t multiple competing schools (at least within the public system), and where curriculum diversity might have to be within a single school. There’s also the already available option of distance learning charter programs for home schoolers, but that may never be a viable option for many families.
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Amy, I live in Idaho.
I think there is more school choice than most people realize in all sorts of places. My best friend lives in a very small town in Oregon, her child is in a public Japanese immersion school.
And like Laura was maybe pointing out, different districts can come together and offer regional choice, when a town or district is too small.
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I still don’t know–how far are we talking about moving kids around? By the way, I’ve heard that there are issues with immersion schools as commonly practiced. At least from what I was reading a while back, they tend to produce fluent but super-ungrammatical speakers, perhaps because the kids are surrounded and influenced by dozens of fellow non-native speakers and have at best limited access to a handful of natives.
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This is topic is very current for Pittsburgh. Just yesterday, we got another report urging the consolidation of local government services. Everybody who has studied the issue has been pushing for consolidation for at least a dozen years, but only the smallest steps have been taken.
Pittsburgh doesn’t have the tax base to play its role as the central core of a successful region and doesn’t have much ability to tax people who work in the city but live outside of the city. The more solvent suburbs fight any attempt to merge or pay taxes to the city. Their argument is that Pittsburgh is broke because Pittsburgh’s governing model comes from Tammany Hall except with less fiscal prudence (and to be fair, probably less outright theft). Giving Pittsburgh more money without substantial political reform is, in this view (my view), just prolonging the life of the machine that bankrupted the city while over-taxing its residents and cutting services to residents without actually reducing the number of people it employs.
And, substantial political reform isn’t going to happen because the Democratic machine is too powerful to lose an election and completely unable to support any real consolidation. It doesn’t take a genius to see that consolidating governments only achieves greater efficiency if you eliminate redundant positions after the consolidation. Since the machine’s core is public sector unions, supporting real reform is one of the few ways it could actually lose an election.
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Jersey’s – and Pittsburgh’s – problems remind me of my time in Massachusetts. Political leaders are short-timers, interested only in getting things solved for their time in office and how they will look in the newspapers the next week. Public employee union leaders have interests extending decades into the future. So it is always tempting to the politico to kick the can down the road – concede huge pension increases, etc., e.g. – while getting near-term peace and the subway running next week.
As Nixon’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, put it: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” Laura, you smart political scientist you, how could we have aligned the short-term interests of Jersey politicos with the long-term interests of its citizens?
I will say that in my community, Arlington VA, we have been able to provide a lot of the special-needs stuff, and it seems to me partly because the boundaries of the polity include most of the players and partly because the community has only recently become very prosperous, so we don’t have so many carelessly-given promises from decades ago coming due (this does not stop our current crop of politicos from carelessly giving promise which will shackle us in the easily foreseeable future, mind you).
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New York has something similar to the regional program you describe, but it started as early as preschool. I worked in a preschool in the program for 2 summers. I hated the idea of those little 3 year olds coming in on the bus from all over Long Island, but they really did seem to have a good program. I was the summer secretary, so I was able to wander the halls when I felt like it.
Here is a link for Nassau BOCES. My MIL worked in the Adult Ed part. I also temped in the business office a few times. I had only positive experiences with the org.
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I am truly happy that Ian is doing so well. Placing a child with special needs is hard work. As budgets get tighter and taxes go up – we all have to worry about how it will affect special ed programs or even educaton in general.
NYC’s special education system is the pits. At least out in the burbs, you have programs to chose from. In NYC – you have to sue to get reimbursement even when the schools agree that they can’t handle your chld. We just settled with the Board of Ed for my son’s tuition at a special ed school for children with neurobiological disorders. They are known for helping kid’s with severe ADHD. And by the way, you pay the tuition until the proverbial check comes in the mail (and we filed in September – and probably won’t see it until next fall). This process is repeated every year until the child graduates or is mainstreamed. The tuition is about 50K per year. Add other 10K if you have a 12 month IEP and want to send your kid to the summer program. The only private school on the state approved list that could have met his needs is 8X harder to get into than Harvard (they rarely have an opening). Basically they accept you before they even let you take a peek – supply and demand at its finest.
The latest school they want us to look at (and you have to go to see it – it’s in the settlement) is a non-sectarian religious school that caters to children who have been abused/and have incarcerated parents, and are academically far below their peers. My son is two years ahead of grade level. They have newsletters preaching the glory of God – we on the other hand are far more taboo about religion than sex in this household. As far as my kids are concerned, we will discuss God when they can read Kirkegaard. The classes are non-graded (which means that they can put kids together that are up to three years older than your own) and the good old MR is on the NYS website (MR is mentally retarded and borderline is not referring to a personality disorder). My son has a 150 IQ and is happily reading George Orwell at the age of 9. I can just imagine how he is going to be able to relate to these children. Luckily, the law provides that I don’t have to accept a program where any child has more than 3 standard deviants – so can usually nullify the Board’s school choices with a class profile. In his current school they just upped him a grade level – easy solution. Some special ed children who do not have learning problems, and are highly intelligent, and should be educated as well as their gifted, non-disabaled peers. I truly am sorry that his mind works like an overexcited pinball machine at times – but it is also the mind that packs psychiatric residents into tiny rooms behind one way glass to see how it works.
Only last month he amazed us all when he was yellig at all of us very stupid adults (two medical doctors in the immediate family included) that grandma wasn’t depressed (because she would still hug and kiss him even if she was sad) and that something was wrong with her brain and she was dying. He lept asking why don’t her hands work anymore. Grandma used to knit all day long. Whoever that was – it wasn’t his grandma. He was hysterical – but like a modern day Cassandra we ignored him for months. He kept telling us to fix her because she was dying. After all, why listen, the medical tests showed nothing. He was right and the two doctors, the psychiatrist and neurologist were wrong. We had her doctor order up an MRI. Last week, she had brain surgery to correct the problem and Grandma is back to normal again. The doctors said we were lucky that we caught it so early (which is pretty rare) or Grandma would have been the state vegetable of NY. Sam just rolled his eyes at us and said – “I told you so.”
Special needs, sure – but he can give Dr. House a run for his money.
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