My daughter has been in the public school since her 3rd birthday. We've been very fortunate to have the best special ed teachers around to help with her autism. She has had her progress documented since she was receiving therapy in through the state at 27 months old. I've seen her come so far, but kindergarten was a very hard year.
This attendance thing got us big time. She had pneumonia and bronchitis atleast a half dozen times and even though we produced a lot of doctors notes, she still missed about 30 days of school and we had the truency officer after us.
The teachers see that our daughter is very intelligent but some of her disabilities cause her to fall behind the other kindergarteners and our IEP plan had to change midyear to account for this. I have seen the positive and negative aspects of this program.
Mlle Rouge,
You are most fortunate.
I was a mental health counselor for a middle school and an elementary school for special ed here in the East Bay (California San Francisco Bay Area). I'd have to say that services here vary greatly depending on school and school district for special needs students. Usually the education and services given to special needs students is better than that offered to the general education students. This is because certain standards are mandated that actually make sense for special needs students.
And I saw autistic children who "fell through the cracks" because of lack of funding for their particular program that they truly needed. It always made me very sad. Being on the front lines in schools working with the most vulnerable populations has opened my eyes to how bad our education system is in this country.
My Father was a High School English Teacher who taught at the same public high school for over 35 years. He was an excellent teacher in an excellent public school district. Then again, his district comprised the one of the wealthiest areas in the State of Illinois. In Illinois as it is in most other states, education is funded by property taxes. And money generated in a school district stays in that particular school district. Therefore poor areas that have low property values and collect less property taxes have very bad schools in Illinois.
Even in his excellent school district he taught high school students how to read if they made it to high school without having learned how to read. You'd be shocked at how many kids get through the public school system without learning how to read here in the good ol' U. S. of A.
And my Father implemented their testing program for No Child Left Behind in his school and because of his cleverness the testing program runs well and doesn't interfere with their ability to teach in that school district (and he has been dead for over two years now and had retired three years ago). Let's just say that when my Dad died two Chicago Area newspapers ran stories about him and his contributions to education in the State of Illinois. I'm not bragging, it's just the truth.
I'd hear from him how badly implemented the No Child Left Behind program was and how ill conceived it was. He detailed how much money is wasted in his school district alone to meet the unfunded mandates of NCLB. It is astoundingly shocking to say the least.
I work with homeless youth who have graduated from California schools. I'm always amazed at how much they don't know about their world, history, geography, politics, government, English, math, science, philosophy, etc. It's truly shocking that most kids graduating high school can't find the USA on a globe. These are also the kids who are passing the California High School Exit Exams.. Those exams are a joke. Also it creates a two-tier system of high school graduates. It makes a California High School Certificate of Completion unusable in other states since no other state acknowleges it. Only the kids that pass the Exit Exam get California High School Diplomas. And statistics are showing that the results are disproportionate. Are we shocked? It's minorities and children of working poor families who are disproportionately failing the Exit Exams to get the "Certificate of Completion" that means nothing anywhere else but California.
OK, that was a major digression.
It just makes me mad when I hear people who don't know anything about the education system in this country say things like, "Our school budget is bigger than our city budget. The city needs to get more involved in its schools and not let them run away with spending." What kind of crap is that?
Good education is expensive. It just is. If you really value children and families and the idea that the next generations should know more and have it better than their predecessors, you would spend whatever you can on educating our children. The children are our future.
Skimp on education for them and you doom yourselves to bad leaders in your elder years who will stick you in nursing homes, perhaps euthanizing you eventually because they don't know how to treat whatever disease you have at the time because they can't even read a medical book. And they won't care because you didn't bother to care about them when they needed you.