The Big IDEA
For all x, the idea that we ought to “fully fund x” sounds very appealing. That’s largely because the phrase “fully fund x” implies to most people that x being partially funded is an unusual situation that ought to be corrected. In fact, the way federal budgeting works it’s actually common for programs to be less-than-”fully” funded, so you need to peer into the details. Sarah Palin, for example, yesterday called for fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This is contrary to John McCain’s record, but lots of things are contrary to McCain’s record and they’re not necessarily bad ideas. So what about IDEA? Sara Mead explains:
In contrast to the voucher proposals, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Palin’s proposal to fully fund IDEA. It’s just terribly expensive. IDEA “full funding” is determined by a formula that multiplies the number of children with special needs, by the average per pupil expenditure in the United States, by 40 percent. For fiscal year 2008, fully funding IDEA would cost more than $25 billion dollars–more than double the roughly $11 billion the federal government spent on IDEA Part B grants this year. “Fully funding” IDEA next year would require roughly $15 billion in additional federal education spending–hardly consistent with Sen. McCain’s proposals to freeze domestic spending, and nearly as much as the $18 billion cost of Sen. Barack Obama’s entire early education and K-12 school reform proposals.
Long story short, more money for IDEA seems like a reasonable idea to me. But so does more money for a lot of education initiatives. The McCain-Palin proposal of cutting overall education spending, while more than doubling federal spending on IDEA doesn’t seem to me to have a compelling rationale.
As I said yesterday, all children have serious needs and we ought to be trying to meet all their needs. Insofar as some children have special needs they will, of course, need more help than other children. But the moral logic of focusing single-mindedly on the needs of families with disabled children while ignoring the “normal” problems faced by poor families more generally simply because a certain number of prominent conservatives are parents of disabled children is perverse.
33 Responses to “The Big IDEA”
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October 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Here’s one problem with this, Matt: If special education funds are insufficient, school districts have to raid their general education funds to provide services agreed to in the Individual Education Plan. And bad as IDEA ‘04 was for parents and children on some levels, “we can’t afford it” is not yet a valid explanation for why an educational service won’t be provided, and the district will definitely lose their fair hearing — after having to raid their operations budget to pay their attorney to appear in front of the administrative law judge. By fully funding IDEA, you’re also in effect pumping money back into regular education. Chalk one up to Palin: it’s not a bad idea.
Of course, it also runs contrary to her own record in Alaska, but what the hell. As a special education advocate, I’ll take my wins where I can get them.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:22 am
The part of yesterday’s speech that is getting the real play on blogs today is her rant against fruit fly (e.g. basic genetic) research.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Parents of special needs children are organized and vocal in a way that parents of other children generally are not. One consequence is that spending on the special needs children can be disproportionately high. I don’t really see any easy answers.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Somebody is going to make a smartass remark exploiting this, so in advance: There’s an implicit quantifier domain restriction in the “For all x” that allows IDEA and Head Start, while ruling out hypothetical programs to kill and eat all of the elderly.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I want to make a point that is sort of a devil’s advocate point. One of the reasons why spending money on education is good policy is because you get something back on the money. A better educated citizen will likely be more productive. Special needs can mean a lot of things but on average the returns on educating children with special needs, the benefit to society, seems like almost certainly lower relative to normal needs children.
I’m all for giving parents of special needs appropriate help with caring for their children, but I think spending a large amount of additional money on teaching children who are less good at learning because they are less good at learning might not be an optimal allocation of resources.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Peter (and Matt) miss the ‘hook’. By law, districts are required to ‘fully fund’ assistance for special needs kids already. By the Feds not putting in more money, they are forcing districts to take monies away from ‘typicals’.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:55 am
“…but I think spending a large amount of additional money on teaching children who are less good at learning because they are less good at learning might not be an optimal allocation of resources.”
A perfectly sensible argument. Likewise, one might question spending 250k on trying to cure a 90 year old of cancer. The problem is our culture isn’t geared to making hard choices.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I think that was the same speach where she said that Barry Hussein’s tax plan will personally kill your retarded child? It was intense.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Don’t worry Werewolf, once we start fully funding Elder Chow, you won’t have to be ethical no more.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I agree, matt.
http://culturedecoded.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/the-race-factor/
October 25th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Re Walker
Attached is a link to PZ Myers’ blog entry on this subject.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/sarah_palin_ignorant_and_antis.php
October 25th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
The part of yesterday’s speech that is getting the real play on blogs today is her rant against fruit fly (e.g. basic genetic) research.
Not exactly surprising to hear from someone who doesn’t believe in evolution.
October 25th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Michael Foody:
It’s far from obvious that the return on the dollar spent on the typical child’s eductation is more than the dollar spent on special ed. Special ed teaches a dyslexic to read, it teaches a Downs kid to follow basic instructions, it teaches an autistic kid to function in society. So the bright dyslexic kid can now go to college and get a professional job, instead of languishing on unemployment. The Downs kid can get a low-level job and live in a group home, instead of being warehoused in an institution. The autistic kid can get a job and keep it, instead of being fired because of social misunderstandings.
So if we look at the data, we might find that special education pays for itself, by saving taxpayers from having to support unproductive disabled people.
October 25th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I agree education should be fully funded, but I am disturbed by the anti-disability sentiment in these comments. The idea that children with disabilities cannot learn is simply untrue. I have a nephew who is paralyzed, but yet has a straight A grade average in public school. But we have had to fight to have schools simply follow the law and let him be educated. The schools he was in assumed he could not keep up with the curriculum and said he should be institutionalized and given only 1/2-hour of education a day. I might add that my nephew has been campaigning very hard for Obama, has educated many of his schoolmates on national issues, and for so-called progressives to dismiss the contribution he can make to society just makes me ill.
October 25th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Palin HAS a special needs child who would benefit from additional funding. She is NOT all that keen on seeing her other children even finish high school (the eldest two have not managed that feat).
It appears to me that for Palin, all politics really are personal. Don’t expect Palin to support anything that does not create personal benefit for her.
October 25th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
A couple of things here:
1. I agree that Special Education funding is money well spent, maybe a marginally better investment than regular education funding, because an under-educated disabled child is often more expensive to taxpayers than an under-educated average child.
2. Palin’s promise is perverse only because it stands in stark contrast to her side’s overall disinterest in funding education in general, and points to the phenomenon of conservatives hating all government spending except that which is focused on a problem they personally have contact with.
3. It is, nevertheless, a canny political stance, because voters with disabilities and their families cut across all political, social, and income divides, and they take the funding of their programs very personally. So, there are probably some non-ideological Democrat families who would see this alone as enough to swing them to the Republicans.
4. Barack Obama also favors fully funding IDEA, and if he will prominently say so, he can neutralize this otherwise “bold” policy statement by Palin.
5. Besides, this may be one of those things where the Palin people haven’t quite checked with the McCain people on whether he would support fully funding IDEA.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I think Palin has become so odious that liberals have transferred some of their ire to her one single substantive proposal. MY seems to be seizing on the term “special needs” in order to accuse Palin of more hypocrisy than she’s guilty of. She’s claiming to have some particular concern for special needs children (of whom there *is* a particular kind of neglect, since many schools don’t have good programs for them, and most voters don’t have special needs kids). People then start asking her what she’s going to do about it. So she proposes a pretty impressive increase in spending. Liberals should be applauding that rather than bashing her just for being a thoughtless spending hawk on everything else.
“It appears to me that for Palin, all politics really are personal. Don’t expect Palin to support anything that does not create personal benefit for her.”
There does seem to be something oddly true about that, since the only exceptions to the across the board spending freeze that McCain/ Palin are presenting are defense, veterans and special needs children. I’m waiting for some cool new tax break or federal benefit for beer distributors and snowmobile racers.
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