[SoftballMominVA]

Belgium and other European countries shift the cost of educating the disabled to the health departments.

I'm not talking about the learning disabled students. They do not add substantially to the budget, it is the other categories.

Want proof? Go to your own school district and ask to see a line item budget. Look for the special education expenditures. In our county, we have 9 residential placements at an average cost of $180k each. That is over 1.6 million a year. We have close to 40 kids in day placements at about 60K a year.

You cannot tell me that those large amounts of money do not have an impact on the "per pupil expenditures."

[Maigrey]

For our state, for every special needs child that is educated, they get additional federal funding for their education. Sadly, many adminstrators push to list kids as "special needs" so they can get more funding.

(In TN, special needs kids include the accelerated students, AP students, optional program students, along with the handicapped and mentally challenged.)

Quite a system, huh?

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

You are focusing strictly on the issue of disabled students. Assuming that other countries finance the training of disabled students via non-education sources, that does not explain the what percentage of the cost for the disabled students is to the general education budget.

I did find this link:
http://www.cbpp.org/11-7-02sfp2.htm

"States have responded to the cost of educating children with disabilities by developing supplemental funding mechanisms that distinguish between different kinds of disabilities and provide funding accordingly. These programs provide significant levels of funding; a recent study put the average cost of educating disabled students at 90 percent greater than the cost of educating students without disabilities.(9)"

Most importantly, it does not address the performance issue.

See related article:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_8_2_02jg.html