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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (53470)	7/25/2002 9:39:07 PM
From: maried.	Respond to of 82486

I totally agree with you. In many affluent towns, wealthy parents demand tutors for their children who are doing mediocre work until they are performing up to their 'potential'. And to avoid a law suit, a school system will comply to those wishes. In many cases, the student will still refuse to do the work. "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." Over-labeling (and mislabeling) children is a serious problem in special education.

To: Lane3 who wrote (53470)	7/25/2002 11:00:15 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

You are right to be concerned. There are a number of issues involved, many of which we are handling in ways which IMO are leading us to neglect the children who will need to be the backbone of our society. When a teacher has, say, 25 students in her class, there is only so much time for each student. If seriously disruptive students occupy a disproportinate amount of teacher time, there is simply less time to teach the other 24 students. They will not learn as much as they otherwise could. Take 15 minutes out of each day to deal with the disruptive student -- and it would be wonderful in many cases if it were only that much -- and that's 45 hours of teaching time lost each year. That matters. There are a number of students where "mainstreaming" can be beneficial both to the student and to the class. But there are also many where it simply isn't, but the students are forced into the general classroom anyhow. Educational money and teaching time are limited resources. Allocating them on one way means one can't allocate them in another. It is not clear to me at all that society is doing a good job of allocating its educational resources to produce the best results for society as a whole. Indeed, I'm not sure we have even defined what the best result is, which makes it totally impossible to determine whether we are achieving that result.