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.