“Attention students, m’kay. There will be a presentation by the special education department in the gymnasium Friday during lunch and recess, m’kay.” – South Park
If they make a show about the Biden Administration, will it be titled “House of Tards”?
In what will probably be one of the more controversial posts I put up, I figured it’s time to discuss the boat anchor on Western Civilization: the bottom 20%. It’s in response to seeing the X® up above, because it got me thinking of just how right the author is.
Let’s look at high schools, for instance. When I was in high school, there was a room for the special ed kids (we called them speds) so impacted by genetic or environmental trauma that they were effectively never going to do much in society. Think Down’s syndrome. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with those kids, because they were so far down the rabbit hole of human cognition that they were operating, on their best day, at the level of a four- to eight-year-old.
The second set of low achievers were tossed into the school’s “alternative” program. This, as far as I could see, consisted of coming to school and smoking cigarettes outside the alternative building. I recall my AP Chemistry teacher glancing out the window and remarking to the eight students in class, “Oh, look, the alternative kids are out playing advanced volleyball.”
I recall this really cracking me up.
How does the Spanish Dr. Who greet people? Buenos TARDIS.
When I was in high school, this wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. To be a sped was a social stigma. Not that we treated them poorly – far from it. But the cheerleaders weren’t going to date the dude who was 4’2” and communicated in a series of grunts and hoots.
Today, there are roughly 7.5 million kids with learning disabilities so profound that they are required by federal law to have an Individual Education Plan, so, per one article that’s 15% of kids in schools (school being between the ages of 5 and 18 for most kids). Most of these IEPs are not for gifted kids, rather they’re for people who can demonstrate disabilities.
I hear Michael J. Fox and his kids set up a parking lot just for disabled people. Park n’ Sons.
Parents, especially low-income urban parents, love having their children on IEPs. Why? Having an IEP does quite a few things:
- Bulletproofs the child from being flunked. It can be done, but it requires more paperwork than would be required to launch the Boeing® Starliner™ again.
- Bulletproofs the child (mostly) from being suspended for behavior. Until they curb-stomp a teacher for taking away their Nintendo Switch® and are charged with a felony. But, hey, the parents say, “He’s a good boy, he was on an IEP.”
- Depending on the IEP, the current trend is to require that they be placed in classrooms with “normal” children, becoming a boat anchor on the rest of the class, dragging down progress. Think about having a class with Whoopi Goldberg in it. But she’s violent. It would be like that.
- Depending on income, an IEP may make the family eligible for up to an extra $943 a month – tax free. We give parents incentives to have children that have the impulse control of Diddy at an Epstein party.
- Depending on the IEP, the school district may need to provide what counts as essentially free day care until the age of 22, thus providing an environment where free-range 22-year-olds can stalk kids as young as 13. Thankfully, I think most of the 22-year-olds are out killing people rather than stalking 13-year-olds.
- Using Pennsylvania as a guide, having a student with an IEP costs between $5,000 and $77,000 more per year than having a “normal” kid.
- Children with IEPs are often given more time for things like tests, and are excused from things like deadlines. This one ropes in the parents of low-performing children of GloboLeftist parents who want Rachel to get into Harvard®.
Yeah, you can see just this one program from just one federal law (the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with the horrible acronym IDEA) has spawned trillions of dollars in direct spending, but has also destroyed the educational experiences for those left in the normie-tier classrooms.
If you win a pumpkin carving contest, is it a hollow victory?
In my experience, after I was out of the general education part of high school (think P.E. and Earth Science) I was in very few classes with any Special Ed kids – it’s not like they were going to sign up for Physics or Advanced Algebra. I guess in 2024, Rachel might try to do that and her parents would berate the teacher with all of Rachel’s special needs, “Oh, did she not get a Hostess® Cupcake™ and an extra two hours to take the test? She must have had a low blood sugar and been under stress that’s why she got 40% on the test, you monster!”
But in the classes I did share with special ed kids (P.E.), they were horribly disruptive. In one case, one of the students – Down’s syndrome – managed to lock himself in an unused gym locker. These lockers were big enough to hold a 4’2” kid if they hunkered down, since they were designed to hold football gear. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure that coach went home that night going, “They don’t pay me enough to do this job.”
What would happen if we didn’t spend these misplaced compassion dollars into society? First, the parents would have to foot the bill.
Tough, right?
Well, that’s life.
I’m oddly proud of that one.
Second, classrooms could eliminate students who wouldn’t or couldn’t behave. Having a child lacking that much in control indicates that structured education won’t help them at all unless it’s enforced with an electric cattle prod. That horrible law, IDEA, just turns school into a holding pen for unsocialized brutes.
Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn. And, perhaps, just a few of those disruptive students with poor self-control with appropriate and judicious use of cattle prods might just learn some self-control.
Again, the parents could and should be held responsible, and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours. Oh, and unless the child is profoundly (Down’s syndrome or worse) disabled? No SSI benefits. Did I say parents? Yeah, let’s be real. 90% of these kids don’t have parents, just a parent.
This one misguided GloboLeftist program, IDEA, has probably cost the United States between $1.5 trillion (low end) to $3.3 trillion (median) over the last 20 years. The result?
What’s the difference between a Taliban outpost and a Pakistani wedding? I don’t know, man, I just fly the drone.
Our schools are in shambles, and our test scores are dropping, and the environment makes The Road Warrior look like a conversation between reasonable people. All of this is for the lowest 20%. Imagine how bad it would be if we had spent double that.
Certainly, there are kids that can do wonders with a little bit of additional help. Dyslexia, for instance, is very treatable. I mean, what would happen if famous dyslexics Whoopi Goldberg or Alyssa Milano could actually read? They might not be the grifters that they are today.
But we can probably do that for less than $4,000 a year per kid.
This is only one example where the lowest 20% sets the rules for everyone.
- Who are the people doing the crimes on the subways? I assure you, these are the crimes of the lowest 20%. Why do we not have clean and affordable public transportation? The lowest 20%.
- Who are consuming the most public services? Yup, the same, and the perverse nature of our welfare system provides incentives for these people to have lots of children, which they often do via a revolving carousel of gene donors, who are also of the lowest 20%.
- Who are doing the vast majority of murders? Eliminate the lowest 20% of the population from the statistics, and the United States would be the very safest nation on the planet.
- The kid who shot up Parkland High School? I’ll bet a No Prize that he had an IEP, and was of the lowest 20%.
The solution is glaringly simple.
We have to stop coddling and funding the lowest 20%. Period. Social Darwinism only works if those who are exhibiting negative qualities face negative consequences. People respond to incentives, and if your incentive is to produce a never-ending stream of children that get rewarded for having no impulse control, well, you’ll get what we see in the cities.
Did Darwin tell his children that they were adapted?
The good news is the same as I have been preaching forever: bad times will winnow out this most artificial construction. A society cannot long produce a feral fraction that creates a low-trust society.
This particular boat anchor won’t cause society to fail, but the anchor will surely be surprised when it is cut loose.
When I read that X about the bottom quintile, ‘special needs’ kids was the last thing that sprang to mind. What screamed out to me instead was this: It’s not 20%. It’s 13%. You know, and I know, and everyone knows WHO that 13% consists of.
Those who are truly ‘special needs’ by the 1975 definition of the phrase are not so numerous or costly as one might imagine. That troublesome bottom quintile is overwhelmingly populated by average members of a single demographic which has proven again and again that it cannot adapt under any circumstances to life in a civilized society.
We used to separate out the adult incorrigibles (those not already in jail) by placing the obviously mentally ill in institutions and keeping them loaded up with Thorazine. It was the only merciful thing to do for the sake of the rest of the population. Similarly, special needs kids were herded into specialized classes in schools, as their presence in mainstream classes was too disruptive and prevented anyone learning. We used to know that separation was the answer. The ONLY answer.
We seem to have forgotten this in modern times, and look at what a mess we are in. We are long overdue for a return to tough love and sanity, starting with recognition that we most definitely are NOT all alike.
There is a great deal of “drag” on our situation to such bs as the ADA act, and other nonsense. Oregon spent hundreds of millions to put into ADA sidewalk ramps in little towns with one or none wheelchair riders. and in the big shitties too of course. why? ask a bunch of tort lawyer scum. the same arsewhypes who put little businesses out of business cause of non-compliance with the ADA shyte. politicians are mostly scumbag lawyers as well. a fine situation, eh ollie? i was hoping to see it all burn before i died, but the inertia just keeps this monstrous thing going. see you all in hell. oh wait, we are there.
Come on, MAN, be cool – I like the big shitties. Those “handicapped” stalls give me the room I need to drop a deuce without playing footsies with the guy in the next stall. Put me in a regular stall and I get all claustrophobic. Eliminate the ramps if you must, but leave the big shitties.
Ah shit, I guess you meant big cities. Dang. Still like “big shitties” for the handicapped stalls, though.
Minimum standards and no financing solve 95% of our problems. Very quickly.
May it be soon…
Misplaced compassion provides its own self-correction mechanism – but it’s not pretty.
I suspect that while the bottom 20% cause a lot of social problems for the rest of us, it’s nothing like the problems caused by the top 2%. The bottom quintile is an expensive and inconvenient drag and sometimes dangerous individually, but the top 2% are a sociopathic predatory class that are a more existential threat to the average person.
The bottom 20% doesn’t think they can tell me how I should live my life or think that they know better than me.
The GloboLeftElite is a HUGE problem. But they are the ones that saddled us with the 20%. On purpose?
Most of the kids with IEPs are not “learning disabled” or whatever they call it today. They are behavioral monsters who are called “disabled” because they won’t behave, their parent will take their side and screech if they are punished so the school gets stuck with out of control animals.
And the incentive is for them to be horrible for fun and prizes for the parents.
Like Doc said…a reckoning. It is coming and it’s going to hurt.
It will. It always does.
Hmmmm … that bottom 20%? Wonder what the race distribution in that group might be?
Well, let’s not Notice too much. It’s okay to Notice just a bit, but you don’t want to go too far.
Meanwhile, Picture may be Unrelated, but relatedness isn’t everything. Feel free to throw in as many such unrelated pictures as you please.
Actually, the racial split of IDEA students is not as lopsided as you might think. See Figure 3.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgg/students-with-disabilities
However, the racial split of among ALL American high schools student has definitely undergone a radical sea change.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_219.30.asp
How do you “fix” the current mess that is publicly funded education in America? I have absolutely no idea.
Proportions are still a thing, and with Whites making up less than 50% of students now, the future looks retarded.
Unless the dollar goes Mad Max and the undeserving are eaten by their cohorts.
Flunking and expulsions are a start.
Also, some groups are statistically very under and over represented.
What you described is also why I am no longer a supporter of school vouchers. At one time, I thought it was a good idea to help parents get their kids out of bad school systems. But let’s face it, if Shaniqua from the hood starts sending her kids to private school, she isn’t going to stop doing meth and/or screwing new baby daddies because she wants to go to PTA meetings. She will remain just as uninvolved in her kid’s education as before, so her kids will likely be just as unruly at private school as they were in public school.
So vouchers will just transfer all of the problems of public school over to private school and eventually there is nowhere left for kids to get a good education (outside of homeschooling).
Private schools can kick them out. And fail them. And they don’t have to take problems.
Like Doc said…a reckoning. It is coming and it is going to hurt.
Just turn off the EBT and it begins.
That 20% (and I think the percentage was about 2% originally) is a lucrative endeavor for some doctors, a huge percentage of the pharmaceutical industry, and over 50% of politicians. Cut that money source away, and the optics will change.
Exactly.
Dated a woman who taught Special Ed. in an elementary school. Her stories were nightmarish. If a student literally couldn’t wipe his/her a**, he/she would have a full-time attendant that you & I pay for at $50K/yr. Although she only would have 8-10 in a class, keeping some manner of control was impossible most of the time.
She got in her 20 years and quit. She was an independently wealthy widow but wanted the health insurance, that you & I pay for, again.
I used to work as a math teacher at a long term inpatient residential treatment center for teen girls. We specifically targeted clients with high IQs but low self control and a lot of emotional problems. Here are some fun statistics for you:
95% of our students had IQs above 110
About 70% had an IEP
Roughly 80% came from upper middle class or upper class families
About 40% were being funded at the RTC by their public school because of their IEP and some of those were children of multimillionaires that attended public school before coming to us (the other 60% had all attended private schools before coming to us or didn’t have an IEP
Our tuition was $15,000 per MONTH
100% of our students had taken full IQ tests that were broken down into 4 categories. To get an IEP, there needed to be either a specific learning disorder (e.g. dyslexia) OR a 15 point spread between any two categories on the IQ test.
I remember one girl came in and was tested with a full IQ of over 140 and 3 of the categories were hovering near her full score. The 4th category she scored about 120, causing over a 20 point spread between two categories. She was given an IEP and, because she went to public school before coming to us, her parents sued her home school district, that then ended up paying for her stay despite the fact that her WEALTHY parents could afford to pay CASH for her entire stay.
Funny thing, the students that actually improved in our program were the ones that learned how to do hard things without having a bad attitude about it (maybe 30%). About half of these successful ones came from less wealthy backgrounds (do the math, that’s 15% of the total school population while I was there, or about 3/4 of the less wealthy kids in our school were successful in improving themselves and their behavior). For the rest, this was mostly wasted expenses.
As for racial statistics: we usually had 1% to 2% black. 1 black girl flunked out of our program, 1 incredibly intelligent black girl aced it and went onto a college program (she didn’t have an IEP and had millionaire parents), 1 other girl that was mixed race (both parents were mulato, one grandparent was hereditary British peerage) also did well. 1 half Indian half African girl was smart enough to do well but so violent she was kicked out for attacking other students. 30% to 40% of our students were Jewish. About 50% were white. The rest were mostly Asian. All of the last 3 groups had students that varied wildly in successfullness.
Yup, we pay for it all.
The abilities and behaviors of SPED kids varies. The highest functioning/minimal support kids SHOULD have access to regular classes.
The policy on behaviorally disturbed should be changed. If the kid represents a credible threat to other people around them, they need to be taken out of regular classes for at least one year. IF the kid no longer is violent, they may return under supervision, in smaller classes.
Agreed – but only to the extent that they can perform within standards.
Harboring the bottom 20% elsewhere will require repealing 19. You know that, right? As to natural selection? The GAE has been getting in Darwin’s way since Wilson. Nations, too, need to benefit from Darwin – and Ukraine, for example, has been prevented from doing so.
GAE?
I believe “Global American Empire”
I’m up for repealing 19. Yup.
That may all be true but…
Mind the slippery slope.
It’s a short slide from declaring an arbitrary population the untermenschen to putting up Arbeit Macht Frei signs over the gates on the walk to the ovens.
You are correct. But the globohomos will have no use for no skill problem people. If gh plans succeed, there will be bottom end people.
What’s your point?
This all ends in blood. The only choice is whose.
One is retribution.
The other is a monstrosity.
Becoming the very thing you hate and excoriate is akin to burning down a village to “save” it.
How’d that plan work out for us the last time we tried it?
I’m not in favor of action against them, I’m for setting standards and not subsidizing the fuckery that we incentivize.
Nothing wrong with that.
Just be prepared to find that the actual bottom 20% is more like 49.5%.
Just keep paring off the bottom 20%, repeatedly – until results improve. It won’t take too many times…
Let’s un-subsidize that, too.
There will always be a bottom 20% Let’s try to avoid the horrid error of eugenics. The plausible, yet unlikely end to this idea? There will be 4 extraordinary people deciding the 5th isn’t worth their weight. No thanks.
Here’s a thought question….Is it eugenics if the government requires a new mom to get her tubes tied in order to receive welfare support for the baby?
You are giving the woman the choice to either be accountable for her own actions (in which she can breed all she wants) or live on the government dole…. but only for that one child.
That being said, we all know that such a policy would dramatically reduce the 20% problem described in the article, but it would also tend to impact one racial group more than others. So is that eugenics? Are we as taxpayers ethically obligated to financially support the bad behaviors of another group, particularly if not doing so would cause that group to dwindle in size?
That’s a false dichotomy.
We could end welfare tomorrow without instituting a eugenic Final Solution.
♫One of these things is not like the other one.♫
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
There is no such thing as stasis for humans, either society is eugenic or dysgenic. If we don’t shift things in the eugenic range, by however much, a long downward slide is inevitable. Not just inevitable, but currently in progress.
Again, I’m in favor of standards and consequences for actions (flunking and expelling) and elimination of tax subsidy for creating a stream of monsters. Private charities could still help whoever they wanted.
In my neighborhood, it’s the 50% non-native speakers of English who have their own Spanish-speaking subculture in the elementary school, who are hard to teach and don’t see the value of the course material been shoved at them. And they might be right. We’ll still need laborers and tradesmen who can get by with basic 6th-grade skills. (6th-grade, that is, if the actually master that material.)
20 years ago, when my younger son was in school, we noticed that the same lesson material came around year after year. The first time, it was “exposure”. The second time “familiarization”. The third time “you should learn this”, and the fourth time “remediation”. If a student didn’t get frustrated by not learning it the first time (when no one really expected them to), they were bored with it by the 3rd time, and knew that the adults weren’t really serious about anything by the fourth time.
Lathechuck
They’re right if the goal is to re-create Mexico. But we already have a Mexico, and real diversity would require we don’t make a new one.
Yup on the classwork. Teaching to the lowest common denominator.
Calling it “teaching” borders on rape of the English language.
And a better approach would be to simply incarcerate them all at age 5, and only parole the ones who pass at grade level.
It would cut to the chase, prepare them for the rest of their lives seamlessly, and simplify what’s really going on.
Follow me for more educational reform tips.
Ohhh, I like that. Spartan.