special ed The LA Times [login: laexaminer, password:laexaminer] has an incredible (meaning "hard-to-believe") piece on the court-ordered plan to include special education kids in "mainstream high school classes":

Moji Duenas cannot read and may never learn to. Nor can the 18-year-old walk or speak or feed herself. She is incontinent. Convulsions sometimes rattle her body. Yet Moji is a high school student in the San Francisco Unified School District, taking most of her classes with teens en route to university. [...] Her teachers at George Washington High School, a 1920s-era campus with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, said she has little hope of ever being communicative, much less independent. Still, her mother, Juno Duenas, insisted that Moji (whose given name is Marjorie) spend most of her time in regular classes with a full-time special aide — and also be given speech and physical therapy. [...] Moji's favorite class, Duenas said, was drama. Teacher John Propster said he sometimes worked Moji into scenes by asking her schoolmates to wheel her around the stage and recite lines for her. [...] When other children in art class are drawing faces, an assistant will help Moji draw a circle and then help her place paper eyes, noses and lips.

It reads almost like an Onion article. Godless remarks: This is just another manifestation of the "all must have prizes" mentality (aka the "every child can succeed" attitude) - and, as usual for leftist idiocy, it can be traced back to the fallacious axiom of equality:

San Francisco reformed its special education programs, in part, to reduce the number of African American children who were unnecessarily labeled as disabled. The hope was that mainstreaming would build their academic and social skills.

What I don't understand is why leftists will acknowledge the meaning of IQ when it means exonerating retarded murderers ...yet deny the meaning of IQ when it comes time to put retarded children in mainstream classes! But it's a thought crime to bring up the contradiction, of course... One other (characteristically insensitive) observation: has anyone ever noticed that there's a blurry IQ threshold below which it becomes impolite to mock stupidity? The threshold is infinite for blacks, as it is impolite to call an individual black "unintelligent" - even if he or she is unintelligent. [1] For whites, however, the threshold is very real. Those who are really dull get mercy and compassion and all the crayons they can eat. Calling them idiots is offensive, but only because they're so unintelligent that everyone feels sorry for them. The slightly less unintelligent, who aren't mentally retarded, are fair game to call idiots. (The link's a joke, people....) I suppose this is because the truly retarded can't even make a pretense of self-defense, while the merely slow-witted can flail about helplessly for an appropriate comeback...but on closer inspection, that's hardly a great rationale. Am I missing something here? P.S. - Don't get me wrong - I don't get my jollies out of insulting retarded kids. However, I do think that the sensitivity towards the unintelligent often moves from a well-meaning paternalism to a combative maternalism, turning "don't make fun of them for what they can't control" into "don't acknowledge or mention that they're different from normal people". That's the sort of slow shift that's responsible for this debacle. My position: we need to be aware of why boundaries exist lest we be exploited by those intent on blurring them. [1] Of course, I understand why this is so - it's too close to the truth (for evolutionary realists) or a stereotype (for evolutionary non-realists) for it to be comfortable as a joke or even as a statement of fact. But it's still worth commenting on. Razib adds: I did a term as a special ed teacher's aide in high school (one of those electives). One thing that this article notes, and must be remembered, is there is a big range of retardation, and they are all thrown into class together. Some of the kids with physical retardation, like cerebral palsy, aren't really unintelligent, though often they are intellectually held back by low expectations and inability to interact in a conventional manner. One of the kids I worked with had cerebral palsy, and he was a joy to work with (he died at the end of my senior year and the principal announced it over the intercom and dismissed classes for the day). On the other hand, there were the total intellectual invalids. One girl, the daughter of one of the vice principals, had a small shrunken head and never verbalized aside from blowing spit bubbles. I never once saw her initiate any act-she was totally a reactive being to a limited range of physical stimuli. There were of course the trashy inbred types that were frankly stupid, not retarded. In many ways, they were the most objectionable to interact with as they were too intelligent for others to clean and dress them, but too stupid to do it themselves. Finally, there was Ben. Ben was a kid with severe Down Syndrome. I helped him with shop class. This basically meant doing all the work for him and making sure he didn't get himself killed by messing with the machines. The shop teacher made it clear to me that he was my responsibility, and there were some sticky situations where Ben escaped my control and I had to track him down as he'd burst into an advanced math class and was attacking some guy (he had a habit of physically battering taller males-we learned very quickly to never allow him to be near basketball players as he'd try to climb them and slap them in the face). Frankly, we only tolerated Ben because he was kind of a dumb 3 year old (really dumb). Was any of this good for Ben? I don't think so. He was an annoyance for most students, and one of my friends that had been punched by him many times lost it one day started beating on him (Ben only punched me twice, he was a little taller and fatter than me, not too strong, but very persistent, and though he did not have a high g, I have to say he was possessed of some cunning). Anyway, just another argument for getting government out of education.