Missing context, she had severe dyslexia, wasn’t diagnosed til her final year of high school. Honors student who was able to use text to speech and record lessons to study them relentlessly after school. She cared about her studies. This is more of an indictment of our social system as a whole - teachers are overworked to squeeze out performance for the 90%, and cases like hers are the ones that fall through the cracks.
> teachers are overworked to squeeze out performance for the 90%, and cases like hers are the ones that fall through the cracks.
However, the opposite is true, at least in California. Special needs students receive exceptional attention, often double that given to others. Each has a tailored written plan, unique to their needs, along with a detailed report reviewed by a team of specialists at the end of every trimester, significantly adding to the workload.
Meanwhile, exceptionally bright students receive no extra focus whatsoever.
The plans you are referring to (which from the fairly loose description could be either IEPs or 504s) are a matter of conpliance with federal law, specifically (for IEPs) the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 and (for 504s) the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, not something particular to California. And plenty of students who have either are, in fact, exceptionally bright, because both have standards that are not simply the absence of brightness.
I simply clarified the current state of affairs without saying a single negative word about it. Still, you rushed to defend it. It appears (just my guess) that you recognize flaws in the situation and feel compelled to justify it to yourself, don’t you?
As an engineer, I see both the advantages and drawbacks in what I described. The benefit is greater comfort and improved socialization for those who need it. The downside—and perhaps a critical one—is that a country neglecting its brightest students with no state support risks falling behind globally. That might not matter if we had no international rivals. But do we truly lack them?
> I simply clarified the current state of affairs without saying a single negative word about it.
It's awfully grandiose to present your experiences as a parent as the "current state of affairs" and a summary of all of California's approach to school psychology.
> Still, you rushed to defend it. It appears (just my guess) that you recognize flaws in the situation and feel compelled to justify it to yourself, don’t you?
I haven't defended it - I stated that the worldview you described makes me sad, and that I feel bad for the faculty and staff (treading water in this system that I agree is broken!) that I fear you are making it worse for. Do you psychoanalyze them with extreme confidence, also?
> As an engineer,
This was already very clear.
> that a country neglecting its brightest students
Ah - you've conveniently moved the goalposts: until now you were talking about teachers not providing "extra focus" or "exceptional" attention to the "exceptionally bright" students, and now it's "neglect." But the assertion here is that the bright students are still receiving the _required_ amount of attention, but someone else is receiving "extra," which is neglect (somehow). We're back at zero-sumness! This is what bums me out!
> That might not matter if we had no international rivals. But do we truly lack them?
what are you even talking about man how did you get here
> teachers are overworked to squeeze out performance for the 90%, and cases like hers are the ones that fall through the cracks.
Hartford public schools spends about ~30% of its budget on the ~15% of special education students; basically 2x more money per student than non-special ed students. Nominally that's actually one of the highest percentages on special education in the nation, though that might have to do with how they've structured their programs.
For a variety of reasons, special education is a money pit. Your returns on investment quickly diminish, yet its easy to drum up outrage when programs fall short. Just like in medicine, specialists cost way more than regular staff, yet you need a lower ratio of students to specialists. The economics are brutal. And there are federal requirements regarding mandatory funding of special education, so parents and education lobbyists manipulate the system to get their student or preferred program under the special ed umbrella so school districts are forced to prioritize funding, removing funding from regular education programs. Over the past couple of decades special education has eaten up the lion's share of increases in K-12 public education spending in many states (especially left leaning ones like Connecticut, California, New York, etc).
Finding the right balance is really hard. You can easily find yourself in a situation like SF wrt homeless and addicted, where you can spend insane amounts of money per person yet barely move the needle.
There's a huge gap between hiring specialists and not caring at all, and this sounds more like the latter:
> They would just either tell me to stay in a corner and sleep or just draw pictures, flowers for them
It doesn't take a specialist to recognize something's off (the fundamental assumption is that, barring a diagnosed learning disability, everyone is able to learn to read and write), and you don't need a full time specialist to do a one-off diagnosis. Whether they had the budget for continued full-time support after that (ex: preparing accessible teaching materials) is a separate question.
TFA is light on details, but it's hard to imagine everyone was doing the best with what they had here.
I think we need more competent school psychologists. The field is niche and many who work in the profession don’t fully understand the platonic idea of their job.
Making the profession better paid and more well respected — both more respected for its societal necessity and the job’s rigor exceeding most other psychological/educational professions — would make the field less niche, more competitive, and more attractive to bright students choosing a career. I think school psychologists should be paid as well — if not better — than school principals. Problems like the one this article describes would be a lot less frequent if we make school psychology a more attractive profession.
No, that's the sad thing. She has NOT been diagnosed with neurological dyslexia. The school never evaluated her. As near as her family can tell, she was simply never properly taught to read. That's what all the fuss is about.
Also it wasn't clear for how many years she had actually been in Hartford. I am not as familair with dyslexia treatment, in severe cases, what tools do school districts have to teach children to read and write?
Nothing missing here. It should be impossible for a student to stay illiterate past the primary school without being diverted into special needs programs.
It is amazing how much people can mask, both from others and from themselves. One of my cousins is color blind (not sure which kind) and it wasn't diagnosed until he joined the navy as an electrician tech. He was utterly unable to read resistor color codes. I'm not sure how he made it that far in life without noticing; I'm guessing he implicitly was relying heavily on context cues (eg, the green stoplight is at the bottom).
Yeah I'm colorblind myself and usually it's not a big deal until I try to play a boardgame or tell good values from bad on random powerpoints at work. Every once in a while I'll pass a little regional airport with a "free flying lessons" sign and get excited before I remember that being colorblind precludes me from flying.
>A 2019 report from EdBuild, which promotes equity in public schools, found that majority non-white school districts get $23 billion less than districts that serve mostly white students.Minority enrollment in Hartford’s public schools is at about 90%.
A much more useful stat from that report is here:
>For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district," the report says.
If a child is not meeting the requirements, they use to be kept back. But there have been times where school systems have been sued and had to make a payout, never mind legal fees.
Private Schools can just expel the student, but if the parents are very wealthy, that can make a "donation" to avoid this.
In reality the school system is in a tough bind. The honors thing is odd, but not the first time I have heard about this. I wonder if honors placement is based upon a curve and/or an average of all classes.
Fun fact: If a student in my state is handed a diploma, they've effectively been kicked out of the educational system and aren't eligible for remedial assistance. Context: Tried helping someone not dissimilar to the person in the article.
