This school year I went "undercover" at my local school district. Long story short, I'm in a position in life where I don't really have to work so I can do more or less what I want (once I see to it my children are taken care of that is).
So I decided to become a substitute teacher. It's shockingly easy. They'll let anyone with a pulse do it apparently because I just applied on the website and a week later I was in a room with 40 other people in an orientation.
I went to elementary, middle schools and high schools throughout the district to get a good idea of what's going on all levels. I know we all have a basic understanding that public education is bad but what I saw shocked even me.
My district has begun a policy called "inclusion" wherein all the special ed kids are put in regular classes in the name of, well, inclusion. This goes about like you'd expect. The teachers spend all their time trying to control the screaming autistic kid while all the others play Fortnite on their school issued laptops. The gen-ed teachers told me they were given no extra training about how to deal with kids with special needs. They just got an email a week before school started letting them know of the new policy.
The lowest grade any student can be given is a 50%. If a student puts their name on a paper and turns it in blank, congratulations! Automatic 50%. This was done in the name of "equity" because certain demographics were performing poorly compared to others (you know who). The fudging of the grades serves to eliminate some of that gap and also boost graduation rates so they get that sweet, sweet federal funding.
The most shocking thing to me though was the absolute lawlessness in the high schools. Teachers told me they have no way to discipline a kid now. The admin will side with the kid every time (especially if they have a certain baseline of melanin) so the teachers don't bother. There were a minimum of two fights every day and the video was circulating on snapchat 20 minutes later every time.
Kids do basically no work and learn nothing at any time. Assignments are either ignored or the kids get the answers from a group chat.
I looked up the district's budget to see if maybe a lack of funds was causing some of this. Nope. My district's total budget for this year was 200 million (!!!) dollars. No doubt all that money is lining someone's pocket because it hasn't gone to any of the classrooms that are the same as they were in the nineties when I was in them.
The kicker? I live in one of the reddest states in the US. Get your kids out of public schools as fast as you can.
This was done a while back in my nephew's school district. They did it only for high functioning Special Ed kids.
It was successful, in a way. The high functioning kids routinely outperformed the regular students at anything Math/Science, but initially could not keep up in subjects like English and Phys Ed. They adjusted at the bottom 25th-50th percentile over the school year.
It needs to be done in a smart way and for a few selected kids that CAN benefit from it without being disruptive.
Of course, that would violate the central "equity" creed of the Church Of Woke.
I agree. There was a kid with Asperger's in several of my classes in high school. He was obviously in some special ed program, because he had an aide to help him with organization, and he took all of his notes via laptop. He wasn't disruptive at all, and never caused a problem in class.
I was one of those kids. I was allowed to record the lectures in some way, and I had rules as part of my IEP that when we did test I was supposed to be in an isolated area (usually the main room for Special Ed students). Over time, I eventually learned to work with everything so that I still had the IEP for if I needed it (like in math classes mostly), but I could be largely normal while still retaining my steel trap of a mind that remembered everything I saw and heard. And now I work a job in manufacturing, where my Aspergers means that I dont just survive, I thrive.
Yeah when I was in middle school we had autistic kids join in for certain classes. They caused a bit of disruption, but overall it was perfectly fine.
Yeah I agree it can work. I don't want it to seem like I'm against the idea categorically, but they way it was implemented made it doomed to fail.