Replies

The District spends so much per pupil largely because of the special education population. The administration has lost so many lawsuits for not following basic IEP's that about 10% go to private schools, paid for by the District. In addition, the population has a large amount of special needs children, some requiring residential care. Residential care can go upwards of 250k per year, per child. A better comparison would be one that compared dollars spent on regular education. Rural states do not have the incredible numbers of high needs children that can skew these types of reports.

I disagree with the notion that Special Education spending has caused these results to be skewed. The data that I provided above is just a sample of data that I have collected which proves that funding and achievement are not linked. Notice also that I only listed the top/bottom 10 states in this article. The other states (even the rural ones) show the same thing. The percentage of students in the District of Columbia that are served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is 15.3% which ranks 9th in the Nation. States such as New Mexico (18th on SAT scores and 29th on spending) have higher percentages of special education students.

You didn't read my whole post. It is not just the special ed services--It is also the incredible bungling and the multiple lawsuits and the transportation AND the private schools. The District of Columbia is a huge joke and needs to be taken over by somebody with some sort of ability to run a school system.

My only point was to pull out the sped related funding.

And actually sped CAN indeed skew results. We had a family move into our county two years ago with three autistic children. Those three children cost this rural county over $750k a year in residential care. Since we only have about 10k students, that 3/4 million is a huge expenditure. The taxpayers pick up that tab.