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Jay Green on special ed teachers

By John Lloyd on Jan. 5, 2009.

Over on his blog, Jay P. Greene has a post entitled “Blaming special ed” that makes a host of important points.

It’s all too common but also completely mistaken to blame special education for the shortcomings of the public k-12 system. If you point out that per pupil spending has more than doubled in the last three decades (adjusting for inflation) while student outcomes have remained unchanged, people blame the rising costs of special education. (See for example Richard Rothstein on this). If you point out that the teaching workforce has increased by about 40% in the last three decades (adjusted for changes in student population), people blame special education (see below). If budgets are tight and programs get cut, people blame special education for draining money from general education.

Read Professor Greene’s Blaming special ed.

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