Dani asked David Wong:

I was rereading JDATE recently and I realized you almost perfectly articulated the shame that comes from beinging in a special ed student (that's even what they called it in elementary). Was it just a lucky guess or did you know/be in special ed class?

David Wong You're the first person to ever ask about this - the truth is I had a job after college working with special education (I didn't work directly with the children much). In the USA it's a system that's always desperately short on resources and (until very recently) lacking in the training for the faculty. Kids with different needs were all lumped into the same room/school (where you'd have a high-IQ ADHD student sitting next to one who was totally incapable of learning basic skills, sitting next to one who was academically normal but with severe behavior disorders and prone to violence. Those kids all had rights under the law but good luck getting rural school districts to craft the curriculum that each of them needed, where the institutional belief was that, first and foremost, you had to make sure they didn't create a distraction for the "normal" kids and drag down everyone's test scores.

So, they wound up just warehousing them, not making much of an effort to teach them anything, and lumping them all together - the student with dyslexia in the same room with the kid who was always starting fires. It was clear at the time that we were failing these kids pretty hard.

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