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Citizens for Limited Taxation

SPED in Framingham: From Mediocracy to Idiocracy

In Framingham, over twenty (22%) percent of all students are SPED and we spend an average of forty (40%) percent more on a SPED student over a regular education student. Twenty percent is not exactly an insignificant minority of developmentally disabled students.

If we are to measure education by monetary value and more money is better education, then it can easily be stated that any imaginary gains made by SPED programs that cost forty (40%) percent more than regular education programs get erased by a decline in regular education and gifted students.

We spend about $14,000 for each regular education (RED) student and $19,600 for each special education (SPED) student (see calculations below). If there were no SPED students, we would spend a flat $15,100 per student. For fiscal year 2009, we spent $32.9 million on SPED and $94.1 million on RED.

Special Education students are those with some sort of learning disability. Those with a physical disability should not have a learning disability. Those that are deaf are partially learning disabled, while those who are blind have a much larger learning disability because most of our learning is visual.

I will try to focus on those learning disabilities associated with a malfunctioning brain (mental retardation and autism). In the old days, we used to collectively call them retards. This is a term that seems to have fallen out of favor even though it correctly identifies the nature of their problem. Until the 1970s, there used to be a spectrum of intellgence ratings such as feeblemindedness, dimwits, halfwits, retards, idiots, morons and imbeciles. Of course, there are high grade and low grade variations of each, such as low grade imbecile. These are genetical in nature. Calling them developmentally disabled or SPED is like sugar coating a cyanide pill.

In addition, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation is being renamed the Department of Developmental Services. Doesn't that neatly hide the nature of the department's purpose?

Framingham schools have been advertising how great their special education program is. The schools are now more than 22% SPED so we can clearly state that the advertising is working very well, Thank You. We now have more idiots and imbeciles than most school districts and our school committee could not be more proud. We have so many SPED students that we have to outsource close to 400 to other schools. These are the tough cases.

Socialized educational programs are never detered by repeated failures. After all, it's our money, not theirs. Does anyone really believe that education can undo genetics? Only the teachers unions believe this because it is certainly in their financial interest to do so.

Does SPED work? Has anyone actually run trials on SPED classified students and seen any noticable difference in test scores for those that went through a SPED program versus those in the mainstream? Or is this a clever scam by teachers unions somewhat like all the scams we see in stock market manipulations?

The latest MCAS results show that only 33% of SPED students are rated proficient. Perhaps, its more appropriate to call some of these kids the idiots that they are.

Most parents will unequivocally state that SPED really helps their child. How can they tell? How is it different than mainstreaming? Perhaps, they are merely being very subjective and not objective.

Do Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) work? How many IEPs are cookie cutter IEPs? Are they really individual? Perhaps, it's a scam to increase the teacher count (thus reduce work level).

Pardon me while I attempt to knit my brows into an incredulous frown, but isn't the goal of education to educate those that are the most capable of being educated. In Framingham where everything is done half-ass backwards, we waste all our monies on the dumber ones. The dumber they are, the more we spend.

Each SPED student costs 40% more than a regular student and takes more monies from the regular students and the SAGE students. SPED students now constitute 21% of the Framingham school population.

Social service agencies such as SMOC, Advocates and others, are bringing in a disproportinate number of both socially and mentally dysfunctional individuals into Framingham who happen to attend public schools.

Lastly, the diagnosis of autism has increased nearly 3,000% over the last 30 years. In 1978, the rate of diagnosis was 0.04% of children. Now, the rate is approaching 1.5% of all children. Autism is characterized by poor social skills, communication difficulties, and strong, narrow interests and repetitive behaviour. Boys are diagnosed with autism four times as often as girls. This makes me believe that it is more of a scam than anything else. I myself, would have been diagnosed as autistic.

Research in comparative neuroanatomy has shown that complex brains and sophisticated cognition have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages and our school committee members have missed out on all of them.

Calculations
Based on the assumptions that we spend 62% of the 2009 Framingham budget of $205 million on schools, we spend a total of $127 million on schools. We have 8,400 students and 20% of them are SPED or 1,680. This leaves 6,720 regular ed (RED). We spend 40% more on a SPED student than we do on a RED student.

1680 * 1.4x + 6720 * 1.0x = 127,000,000
9072x = 127,000,000
x = $14,000
SPED costs = 1.4 * $14,000 = $19,600
RED costs = 1.0 *  $14,000 = $14,000

If there were no SPED students, then each RED student would get $127,000,000 / 8400 = $15,119.

We spend 1,680 * $19,600 = $32.9 million on SPED students and the remaining $94.1 million on RED students.

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