"}So with the DeVos nomination hearings people are talking about public education mandates regarding disabled kids, which has gotta be the best news hook I\u2019m ever gonna get for this, so let\u2019s go.\n
\nMy lawyer father did work for the local school district. A lot of that was labor stuff, or land acquisition, or construction contracting, but special education stuff was big in there too, and I picked a bit of it up, from overhearing him with his dictaphone, or reading the little yellow \u201crecent developments in Pennsylvania education law\u201d pamphlets, because the internet wasn\u2019t a thing yet and I had to read something.\n
\nAnyway, there\u2019s a shit-ton of details and they vary from place to place, but since the 1970s the dominant national legal framework has revolved around the \u201cIndividualized Education Program\u201d. Notion being that schools should evaluate students! Determine what program would best fit their needs! Provide them with that program! At no expense to them!\n
\nLike so much American policy of the 1970s, this was the result of looking at some field of government endeavor, declaring \u201cthis doesn\u2019t even seem to be trying to live up to our nominal highest ideals\u201d, solving the problem by mandating that the system in fact implement said nominal highest ideals, and then once the ideals prove ruinously unworkable, going through a tortuous decades-long process of kludging and caveating your way back towards the previous system which at least did do whatever it was that it did.\n
\nIn practice things would work out like this: our district, which was one of the larger and better-resourced in the state, would be able to handle say Downs or MS kids on-site, with educational aides and special classes, past that there was the \u201cintermediate unit\u201d where a bunch of regional districts pooled resources for things like this. There\u2019d be some kid everyone agreed wouldn\u2019t work in the mainstream, so the district would work up an IEP that would have him using some IU program, and then the parents would be like \u201coh, but there\u2019s this special program I heard of for blind synaesthetic autists*, that\u2019s the best option for my child, he would thrive most there, it is, to use the magic words, most \u2018appropriate to his needs\u2019!\u201d\n
\nAnd honestly, that was maybe even true, but the program charged $250k/year and it was down by Princeton so she was demanding the district provide a driver and an aide every day from 5-7AM and 4-6PM and the total cost was like 50 times average per-pupil spending while the intermediate unit was maybe 5. So the district\u2019s role was to say \u201clady, no\u201d, and then go to lawfare - lining up motions, experts, evaluators that could be trusted to affirm the district\u2019s position to counter the plaintiff\u2019s experts chosen for reliably affirming hers - to make it stick.\n
\nSo that\u2019s a dramatic example, though the stuff worth enough and with good enough prospects to fight through to the end tended to be. I\u2019m sure more common were cases of holding the line at a lower level against more sympathetic claims, stuff where the district looks more like the baddies and the cost of resisting starts to approach the cost of giving in if you judged on a case-by-case basis.\n
\nWhich you couldn\u2019t, because you had to factor in that if your district got a reputation as a pushover word would get out, through whatever listservs or nonprofits or network of professional providers, and you\u2019d start to attract more supplicants.\n
\nIf you put together an A-1 no-expenses-spared autism program, the whole puzzle piece bumper sticker set from your entire metropolitan commuting zone just ~happens~ to make their next move into your district. Or maybe you shell out for a local kid with a rare condition because you want to do right by your community, be nice, and three families in the same position up sticks and move across the country to your town - what\u2019s the cost of a move compared to millions in effective subsidies - and use the precedent to demand the same. And congratulations, you just niced $12 million of your community\u2019s money away - out of taxes or classrooms - for the benefit of people they don\u2019t know from Adam.\n
\nAnd that\u2019s a thing - these cases that districts really worry about, we\u2019re talking about upper-middle class families. They\u2019re the people that can move at will, they\u2019re the people who even think to wield administrative law against the government, they\u2019re the ones that can match the districts at lawfare, the ones who can afford evaluations by independent experts, lawyers - these things don\u2019t resolve as monetary awards and it\u2019s not like they\u2019re taking cases on contingency and accepting two years of speech pathology sessions in payment, so we\u2019re talking cash-on-the-barrelhead here, lawyer cash.\n
\n(Oh, that reminds me of something. \u201cGifted\u201d programs? Are special education operating under the same IEP framework. Which means they often represent the success of the professional class at extracting resources from the general population and dedicating them towards preparing their scions for the elite.\n
\nI remember in 1st and 2nd grade our program was\u2026 me, cause they didn\u2019t know what else to do with me [dead certain my dad knowing the system helped tho, for sure], by 6th grade it was maybe 1/5 our year and included a bunch of guys who were above average sure, but mostly their dad owned a dealership.\n
\nActually I\u2019d say the ability to fit into the IEP framework has something to do with the success of the notion of the \u201cgifted child\u201d [which when it caught on in the crystal-dippy New Age \u201870s had elements of the contemporary woo-woo \u201cindigo child\u201d] - not just smart as an adjective, like tall, but a type, with needs who could suffer if they go unmet.)\n
\n\nSo that\u2019s something to keep in mind, maybe when you, or the general public, thinks of \u201cdisabled student seeking public education services\u201d you\u2019re picturing sympathetic little Tiny Tims. But when actual institutions of public education - and we\u2019re not talking ogrish conservatives, school districts like education spending, they hold this stance lest they be shaken down and shattered - do the same they\u2019re picturing an attacking wave of vampiric Can-I-Speak-To-The-Manager-Moms from hell who have to be fought off lest they suck millions from taxpayer pockets, lest they suck whole classes worth of resources from the schools - and our suburban district could bear this fine, it\u2019s the poor rural \u201ctsk, don\u2019t they know they need education for the future\u201d districts where this can really fuck stuff up - and pour it straight down a hole with a gold-plated nameplate reading \u201cMy Wittle Snookums\u201d.
\n\nI don\u2019t have a solution. (Wellll, maybe reencoding the disabled as shameful and disposable and consigning whole swaths to low-cost warehousing in accordance with their instrumental potential, because I\u2019m one of those coldly logical male types who prefers solving things to wallowing in ~feelings~ and ~care of persons~.)\n
\nTo the extent we\u2019re going to ration resources here, and we are, rationing-by-ability-to-work-the-system is a perverse way to do it that routes resources to the already resourced, but under the current system of due process in administrative law (more curse of the 70s) it\u2019s hard to do otherwise.\n
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\n\n* this was a throwaway example but now I notice there are some amazing \u201con the spectrum\u201d jokes here