The society used to care a lot less about special needs people.

There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.

Number that would be interesting to have:

In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):

1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?

Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...

and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:

https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...

What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?

Yes, disabilities are expensive to accommodate. That’s why we have laws like the ADA. Because when given the option to disregard the disabled, many will choose do so.

This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.

"expensive" but everything has a limit. Even losing a limb or an eye has a dollar cost associated with it, if you look in the right tables. Pretending that there is no limit, or that the choice is a binary "no limit" vs. "don't give a shit" is just not responsible.

I agree. The standard is not infinite accommodation but reasonable accommodations.

>discarded

If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.

>That’s why we have laws like the ADA

The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.

[0] https://economics.mit.edu/files/17

An equal monetary investment for disabled children would mean they don’t have a teacher. You might be able to teach 50 non-disabled children with 2 teachers that costs $100K each to employ.

An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.

You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.

If the school can't or won't educate the student with his/her equal allotment, then the school needs to return the monetary allotment to the parents for parental discretion on how to educate the child. If the state fails to provide the service with the allotment available, you don't just start taking from the other kids' pie.

>An equal $4000/student/year

You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.

I like this, because it would probably be better both for society and for the kids.

Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."

The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.

Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.

The $4000/student/year wasn’t a real figure, nor was it a reference to total costs per student (obviously schools have more than payroll costs)… it is the result of the two hypothetical numbers I gave when divided. Use whatever numbers you want, caring for special needs groups always costs way more per student than for others.

I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.

You see systematic discrimination as spending roughly the same amount on each child. I see systematic discrimination as spending disproportionately much more public money on some children at the cost of others. We both find systematic discrimination of public education funds as unethical, but draw different conclusions on who is being discriminated against. I don't see our difference of opinion as an ethical deficiency in either of our persons.

It's not just the money. The attitude to special needs children (and disabilities in general) was a lot worse.

Agreed. We also have to consider the comparative ROI.

This data is REALLY hard to get. For me to do it, I had to go line by line through the budget.

For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.

Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...

It IS hard to get, and that's why the former school board member's estimate is valuable.

The benefits to disability accommodation are primarily non-monetary, which is why market forces do an awful job of providing them.

Education and social services are one of the areas where we really shouldn't be leaning that hard on ROI. The return is a well taken care of populace. Yes, it may cost, but we pay that cost because we're not assholes.

I would argue that ROI is extremely important in education. It's just that the "return" on our investment is not purely financial. Producing students who will be competent to effectively participate in and wisely run the society of tomorrow is a large part of the return that we seek. So, to that extent it may be that high special needs costs are worth it if they demonstrably help students become self-sufficient instead of dependent wards of the state. I can't say for sure that they are worth it, I'm saying that the mere fact that they're expensive doesn't mean they aren't cost-effective in the greater sense.

Those are still returns, just not monetary ones. You can get plenty of buy in that educational outcomes are good in themselves, but schools fail at that basic metric.

On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.

Are you saying "whatever it costs, it doesn't matter"? Because I can't agree with that. Nor is it good public policy to just be "not assholes."

The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.