I propose a new amendment preventing anyone in the USA to mention “socialism” until you actually have any.

Clearly, the only choices in any possible universes include either cutting education budgets for children with developmental difficulties or cutting education budgets for children who excel academically.

In an ideal universe, of course, we’d eliminate both budget categories, and go on to eliminate education budgets entirely — thus allowing us to hand all the money to companies linked to the President, the Vice President, and their cabinet and business partners, and leave education to Christian creationist theme park multimedia experiences.

What a shallow analysis of a complex problem.

I guess we have our answer about how she ended up with the perfesser, don’t we?

One isn’t disgusted so much by the heartless things they write, as by the palpable relish with which they write them.

The funniest thing about Mrs. Instarube’s post is the comment section. Everyone has gifted children! It’s like Lake Woebegone for the toothless, gun-toting, grits-eating set.

To be fair, she said she has “no real problem” with the government educating retards, so long as you keep them in isolation somewhere, away from her ultra-talented little princess. What really irks her though is the suggestion, made without even acknowledging the superiority and deservingness of her UTLP, that public education “should” cover retarded kids. Like there’s a “public interest” to be served or something.

She “wonders” whether he is also concerned about funding gifted children, then attacks him as if he isn’t. Why would being in favor of money for slow children mean being against money for the gifted? I’m certainly for both. The whole point of the article seems to be to tell us that she has a gifted child. BFD.

Retarded children should be immediately funneled into the meat grinder that is the War on Terror. The ugly ones should be used to check for booby traps and to take the brunt of the homicide bombers. The cute ones should be told that being gang raped turns you into an elf and then be made availabe for KBR employees.

Just keepin’ it real.

The conservative media Schools are spending entirely too much money giving educating retards a forum for their ill-informed, transparent sophistry …

Fixed your typo.

In an ideal universe, of course, we’d eliminate both budget categories, and go on to eliminate education budgets entirely

I’m pretty sure that’s part of Ron Paul’s platform.

C. Giacometti: Everyone has gifted children!

Well, didn’t you see the Time cover from around August asking “Are our schools failing Your Brilliant Kids”? It had a mirror on it and everything, so every parent looking in it qualified.

Charles Giacometti said,
December 16, 2007 at 19:08

The funniest thing about Mrs. Instarube’s post is the comment section. Everyone has gifted children! It’s like Lake Woebegone for the toothless, gun-toting, grits-eating set.

Damned librul edoocayshun policies!

When I was a gifted children, you had to earn it, I tells ya!

What a creepy, elitist, and utterly unctuous swine of a human being, this “Dr. Helen.” I am sure she crosses the street when black or brown people are walking on the same side as she. She might be crazier than her famously insane shitbird of a husband.

Such shitty, horrible, reprehensible, and despicable civic virtues these assholes represent. They want America to slip back into some sort of pre-Enlightenment European class system where they are the new princes and barons just because they have a half-assed “elite” education and a $500k McMansion in some dumpy cul-de-sac in the ‘burbs. This somehow makes them better than everyone and gives them the right to deride everyone below their income level.

God forbid they should have to adhere to the egalitarian principles of a democratic society. Why elevate yourself through education and work in our meritocratic system if you can’t flaunt it and hold the working class and poor in utter disdain and call them evil parasites and unworthy losers in the genetic lottery system?

What’s so fucking funny is that these conservative and libertarian wackos love to scream there’s no class war in America, but then everything they say and do screams class war at the highest decibel level imaginable. This is the obvious proof of their insanity and disingenuous–and abjectly destructive–political aims.

Just for the record, my younger son Jamie — who, as some of you may know, has Down syndrome — did, in fact, eliminate all programs for gifted children in Pennsylvania. He did it just so he could take the “regular” first-year French course in high school. It’s just the way we think the system should work: special-needs students should get their funding from the gifted programs. We’re also totally against music and arts education, too.

And while I’m on the subject of socialism, did you ever wonder who’s to blame for the lack of low-income housing in the US? The homeless, that’s who.

Didn’t John Stossel do that bit some years ago? One of those “Give Me A Break” segments about how unfair it was to make schools pay to educate the developmentally disabled who, as we all know, can’t possibly learn anything anyway, so it’s just stealing from the regular kids (or at least from their tax-paying parents). I know he’s since settled on it being the teachers’ fault for demanding they be paid, but he used to blame equivalent education programs.

Nice snapshot of classic conservatism.
I like the Spartan approach, once diagnosed, over the cliff. Can I be a heartless wingnut pundit now?

She’s just an idiot. Educating mentally handicapped kids as well as possible, so they can grow up to be as self-reliant as possible, is enormously beneficial for everyone. She’ll write garbage like this, then go through life interacting with these people working at businesses she patronizes, and never give a thought to how the hell they got there, and how much of a good thing that is.

What the hell is wrong with this woman?

If somebody wants his kid to have an education he MUST want the funds to come out of your kid’s education?

It’s imbecilic to invent some kid of war between the retards and the nerds, because a whole hell of a lot of us fall into both categories.

I was right in the middle of it when my school’s TAG program collapsed in on itself, AND I have severe depression and very mild asperger’s syndrome.

I don’t even really know what I’m saying, this column makes me so mad. I guess my point is that, in my life, I’ve had to use resources directed at the unusually gifted AND resources directed at special needs people, and I don’t think I’m particularly anomalous.

Dr Mrs Ole Perfesser: living proof of the shoddy licensing standards for psychologists in Tennessee.

The parents & family of special needs people pay taxes, don’t they? Or do only poor people have special needs kids?

Ah, I remember the predicament of being a so-called gifted student in the regular classes. Breezing through classes, slumming it with the Delta-minuses, you know, real people, having endless time for extracurricular activities and just screwing around, getting into every college I applied to even without the AP-course-grade-inflated GPA. The horror, I tell you, the horror. Why should a new generation of precious snowflakes be forced to contend with even a single hour of boredom in their school day like a regular student when the mentally disabled, some of whom aren’t even aware they’re in school, are sucking up funds that could rightly be used to buy even cooler programs that interface TI calculators with laptops?

The real irony in her twaddle is that gifted kids actually have more in common with special needs/special ed kids than they do the “normal” school population. As a friend of mine who works in gifted ed says, “A 140 IQ is as divergent from the norm as a 60.” Many gifted kids have developmental issues that require occupational therapy, just like the “retards” do. And for the record, I work in special ed and my daughter is classified as gifted.

Here’s a suggestion to make her Tennessee blood run cold–why don’t we quit funding (certain) interscholastic sports programs at such high levels? My town of 4,500 has a budget of over $100,000 just for the football team. And the team runs a deficit every year.

hi all. well, i added my two cents worth to the discussion in the comments section of dr. helen’s blog. basically, all i had to say is that “gifted” kids do have opportunities and it is called “AP” classes. as a teacher of an ap class (ap chem), i have had the supposedly gifted kids, and they ain’t.

No, Tufdaawg, AP classes are for high achievers. Different group than gifted kids. Very little overlap in that Venn diagram.

Well, “gifted” kids aren’t all the same. The faster pace of AP classes is great for many (though not all), and since these classes ideally require/allow more critical thinking and independent learning they’re a lot less boring. One problem is that AP classes aren’t available until usually 11th or 12th grade, by which time a kid who’s just too smart for the class has often already been pretty strongly labeled a troublemaker, a smartass, a clown, and has possibly become a Ritalin dealer (for kids who actually have ADHD, rather than just boredom from sitting in boring classes taught by boring teachers, there’s an interesting thing — Ritalin has little or no recreational value. Instead of “wow, I feel great and I am the best and I am going to clean the floor with a toothbrush for 36 hours” it’s more like “I just sat through an entire class without desiging a working trebuchet in the margin of America: Experiment in Democracy”).
Anyway, the other thing is, it’s not just that there are some kids who are “smarter” and some who are “dumber”, but that there are some who learn and remember best in different ways, and even some really (educationally) progressive private schools miss a lot of that, so there are a lot of kids who could learn a lot but don’t, because they’re not being taught well. I mean, before we understood anything about dyslexia, those kids were just thought to be stupid. The educational system is still only doing “okay” by these kids, and they’re still frequently left to fail.

The Rapture is almost upon us. We should stop worrying about the mortal future of our children because that will all be over soon. We need to focus on being ready for Jesus. By passing an amendment forbidding gay marriage, putting Intelligent Design in all school science classes and killing as many non-Christians as possible so Baby Jesus won’t have to see how messy they are.

Silly liebrils. Everyone knows that like teh gheys and the sick and the old, and the non-whites, these stupid people made a choice to be stupid. It’s all about making the right choices.

Or is it I’ve got mine, so eat shite and die? I get confused…

While I have no real problem with special education students getting an education in public schools …

Just so you all know, “No one is opposed to helping the disabled” occupies the first square on my anti-disability-rights bingo card.

What Doctorb Science said.

Not to go into personal detail but I’ve experienced this issue (or really cluster of issues) from several different angles. A very large part of the problem with public education as a whole stems from the practice of post-testing rather than pre-testing in a way that helps to target each child’s learning style. Another part of it is that we have become convinced as a society that educational equality = preparing each child for college, which is a nice utopian idea but not a practical one in that even if it were achievable, our economy is not structured to support a 100% college educated base of workers. If we had more in the way of leadership we might come to see educational equality = giving each child the base of knowledge necessary to get through life (this would include a much greater emphasis on citizenship and participation in government) and a skills base appropriate to where their pre-testing and personal goals for the future will take them following high school. The debate here for a long time has been in one way or another one that rejects the evils of “tracking” as done in schools in the U.K., though to be sure there are probably just as many barriers to higher education here – they are simply less formalized. The result is that in a lot of areas, vocational education programs have disappeared while AP course offerings have increased, standardized testing has become the accepted means of measuring the effectiveness of the education system, and it has served neither the students, the economy, nor the society at large well to maintain the Lake Woebegone premise in the face of reality. Not that I would want to adopt the U.K. model…but some kind of acknowledgement in the structure of the education system that recognizes that less than half of all kids will be going on to college would be a good start on giving those kids the education they need.

As my fellow Brooklynite, Dr. Howard Zinn, has explained, our school system was designed to create docile clerical workers for nineteenth-century factories. Thus, it does a pretty good job of inculcating via rote learning. Anyone who falls outside certain limits on the bell curve will have problems in this system.

The answer to the wingnut’s original post is to insist on more educational funding for everyone’s children, and more creative instruction. That will run counter to her “I got mine” ethic, but hey, too bad. (I have no children, and I vote ‘yes’ on every school-funding measure.)

shorter DR, Ole Perfessor

Vee moost hask teh Mastier’ vace.

Here’s a suggestion to make her Tennessee blood run cold–why don’t we quit funding (certain) interscholastic sports programs at such high levels? My town of 4,500 has a budget of over $100,000 just for the football team. And the team runs a deficit every year.

Now that’s a proposal I can support, just for the ensuing howls. When I hear all the jock BS about the effect of coaches on players, I think ‘well, you damn well should be making a difference for the amount of money being shovelled your way.’

Be careful. If you improve education too much, then we might have too many empty prisons, and think of all the people who depend on their law enforcement profits to buy Congressmen who are opposed to medical marijuana.

Don’t mess with the status quo. It works really well for some people.

Agreed Paddy Mac and Jennifer. We don’t have kids and never will, but we always vote for any school-funding measure. The problem I see is vocational education is being eliminated from high schools and community colleges; I suppose folks who aren’t going to be heading off to get a BS or higher should just accept their burger-flipping lot and get over it instead of learning a trade that would pay them well enough and be better suited to their interests/talents/whatever. Business suit or Burgerking suit, no in-between in our brave new educational world, though that is somewhat better than what Ron Paul has in mind.

The underfunding of education is going to send the US to the second world status, but we will be an extremely well-armed second world country.

Typical conservative pig.

I always think the worst of them, and they never fail to disappoint.

She’ll write garbage like this, then go through life interacting with these people working at businesses she patronizes…

And then she’ll patronize the people, too!

Dr. Missus Perfesser is quite a piece of work, it is true.

Dang it. They never fail to live up to my expectations.

I need to focus on posting and not try to watch football at the same time.

Public education is the root cause. Feudalism is teh rawk.

Or do only poor people have special needs kids?

Considering the state of health care in this country, it often works out that way after a few years of trying to care for and provide for special needs kids.

The problem I see is vocational education is being eliminated from high schools and community colleges; I suppose folks who aren’t going to be heading off to get a BS or higher should just accept their burger-flipping lot and get over it instead of learning a trade that would pay them well enough and be better suited to their interests/talents/whatever.

Alas, there are precious few trades left to which we can train our young.

We are the only people I can think of in the world who ever deliberately turned our OWN economy into a colonial economy. It’s breathtaking to see.

I agree with the Perfesser; I mean c’mon, where does this end? First sick kids (S-CHIP), now retarded kids… these things are expensive, we need to save our money for more important things:
http://nationalpriorities.org/cms/costofwar

The good doctor seems to think that parents make an intentional choice to spawn special-needs children in order to be a burden on those who are more worthy. Perhaps she would prefer to euthanize the little pests?

Here’s a suggestion to make her Tennessee blood run cold–why don’t we quit funding (certain) interscholastic sports programs at such high levels? My town of 4,500 has a budget of over $100,000 just for the football team. And the team runs a deficit every year.

Please tell me this is a joke, $100K just for the school football team? And this has a higher priority than say, educating low achieving kids, I’m speechless, should the sports program not be the first to go in a budgetary squeeze?

Krassen said, December 17, 2007 at 2:58

I agree with the Perfesser; I mean c’mon, where does this end? First sick kids (S-CHIP), now retarded kids… these things are expensive

Next thing you know they’ll be tellin’ us we got to pay for the poor women to have their babies in a hospital instead’a them just lettin’ it out in a field or where ever.

lobbey,

About five years ago, our school district faced a financial shortfall. A proposed levy increase was defeated. The school board voted to eliminate athletics in order to save money. A “concerned citizen” stepped up and wrote a check for the athletic budget. There’s your priorities in action.

Next thing you know they’ll be tellin’ us we got to pay for the poor women to have their babies in a hospital instead’a them just lettin’ it out in a field or where ever.

I think that most wingnuts can agree that poor women should not be allowed to reproduce. Unless they don’t want to reproduce, in which case they should be forced to. Whatever, they aren’t getting a dime.

The underfunding of education is going to send the US to the second world status, but we will be an extremely well-armed second world country.

Best comment of the whole excellent thread, Stringonastick!

Christopher, as you’ve probably already figured out — you are not alone, not on this blog. And frankly, I suspect the Interntoobz were invented by people like us, who “suck resources” at both end of the Reichtards’ beloved bell curve. Although things have improved somewhat, however unevenly, in the last 40 years, because it’s no longer canon that “only boys are dyslexic, so a girl who consistently reverses numbers is just being *funny* & should be punished” or “you can write an excellent essay, so if you’re incapable of focusing during an hour of classroom rote recital, you’re just being lazy on purpose”. Given another 40 years, maybe we’ll even find some treatment methodologies to compensate for total lack of normal human empathy and pathological refusal to learn from experience, and future generations of Dr. Helens will be able to live nearly normal lives! (/snark)

I’ll bet a cookie that someone with a stronger stomach than mine could find a Dr. Helen quote preaching against women aborting Downs fetuses “for convenience”, too. Not to denigrate people with Downs, or the parents who have to work so hard to get them the help they need, but insisting that All Life Is Precious from conception right up till the point where the individual life in question might require public services of any sort is a refinement of cruelty common to the Dr. Helens among us.

nightjar said,
December 16, 2007 at 23:38
shorter DR, Ole Perfessor
Vee moost hask teh Mastier’ vace.

I call Godwin on nightjar. Call “Dr. Helen” whatever garbage you want, but fuck you for calling her a nazi.

And a hearty fuck you to Dr. Brad Rocket as well for falling for Dr. Helen’s trap of pitting all the kids against each other. Yes Brad Rocket, gifted kids have it too easy. I would hope you would realize the answer is more funding for all education, not putting A against B against C. Sadly, No!

For a bunch of self-absorbed self-proclaimed mighty nuanced enlightened liberals, sometimes we all sound like a bunch of fucking bigoted idiots.

For a bunch of self-absorbed self-proclaimed mighty nuanced enlightened liberals, sometimes we all sound like a bunch of fucking bigoted idiots.

If you were looking for the new “I am OUTRAGED! So OUTRAGED that I can hardly type 10,000 words about my OUTRAGE!” spot, you want http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/ , where the Hugh Hewitt Man Boob jokes never stop.

Here, it’s still cheap snark and random irony, same as always.

“Educating Retards” – ah yes, Julie Walters and Michael Caine. Adapted from the play by Willy Russell, I believe.

I call Godwin on nightjar. Call “Dr. Helen” whatever garbage you want, but fuck you for calling her a nazi.

Oh noes! anon, you are so right.
An authoritarian, corporatist, pro-violence, eliminationalist bigot she may be, but she was never a member of the pre-1945 German National Socialist Party.

What a fucking bitch.

I sent a note to the guy who posted at PJM (foolishly, as he learned to his sorrow), Rob Rummel-Hudson – I’ve been reading his side-splittingly funny blogs for ages now – and he came for a quick visit.

He was edified to see that everyone immediately saw through most, if not all, of Dr. Helen’s logical fallicies.

http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com if you’re interested. He really is a wonderful writer.

I agree that the programs for gifted students are important. Except that they do not have to be expensive, gifted students have to be challenged, and their homeworks are harder to grade, but they do not require extra small groups.

It is very sad that the county of Prof. Helen cancelled programs for gifted in the schools. Mike Berube is lucky to live in a university town where people happily pay higher school taxes, and I think cancelling programs for gifted would lead to bloody strife at school board meetings.

And not every school district offers AP classes. Small rural districts can be short of resources and may have too few students willing to take those classes. Perhaps they should be offered by video-conferencing, which would be better than nothing. From what I have seen, either kids will learn decent math in precalculus and AP calculus etc. or they will never do it.

Enjoy your tax cuts, kids!

I stopped reading the comments after I got to the guy who said special needs kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps/school of hard knocks/whatever, and that the families should be responsible for educating their special needs kids, not the government.

My son is autistic, and let me tell you, it’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don’t even know you’re wearing boots.

Early education has made all the difference in his life – someday, he might be able to pull himself up by the old bootstraps, but it will be the education he received at public schools that taught him how to do it.

To this day I don’t understand how “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” became a popular expression — and with such staying power. I mean, leaving aside the fact that it’s quite obviously physically impossible, how many people have even seen a boot with straps?