(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Well, it seems to be op-ed day for friends of JPGB today. Below, Matt appreciates Robert Enlow as a man who has “the whole package” – and delivers it in today’s Indy Star. Meanwhile, over on NRO, Jay has a column on the perverse incentives that artificially drive up special ed diagnoses:
Schools have discovered that they can get extra funding from state and federal governments for small-group instruction to help lagging students catch up if they say that the students are struggling because of a processing problem in their brains. School officials who admit that the students are lagging because of poor previous instruction or a difficult home life, by contrast, are left to pay the costs of small-group instruction entirely out of their own budget.
If you’ve been reading JPGB, that part is all old hat to you by now. If not, this NRO piece is a good (though very brief) introduction to the topic.
The NRO piece does make one point I hadn’t thought of before:
In New Jersey, for example, 18 percent of all students are classified as disabled, but in California the rate is only 10.5 percent. There is no medical reason why students in New Jersey should be 71 percent more likely to be placed into special education than students in California.
Indeed.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 