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I looked this up in detail last year and it’s even more depressing than that.

Nearly a quarter of the DC public schools budget goes to providing what amounts to private contract nursing home care for about two thousand severely retarded kids who are too broken to be babysat in the normal public facilities. (For severely retarded, read: mom on drugs).

So besides the thugs who don’t want to learn, you have the retards who can’t learn.

And they want to throw even more money at it.

Nearly a quarter of the DC public schools budget goes to providing what amounts to private contract nursing home care for about two thousand severely retarded kids who are too broken to be babysat in the normal public facilities. (For severely retarded, read: mom on drugs).

Severely retarded does not automatically equate to "mom on drugs", nor does "mom on drugs" automatically equate to severely retarded.

That's probably the subject for another post however. It is true that a substantial part of the D.C. budget goes for special education services, in part because of the incompetence & mismanagement of the system Rhee & Fenty are trying to address. SoftballMom can speak more on that if she chooses.

According to the article, 1/3 of the funding will go to the public schools, 1/3 of the funding will go to charter schools, and 1/3 will go to vouchers. The division of the funding ought to make some on here, if not happy, at least happier.

The Severe and Profound Population can indeed include children who were born from mothers on drugs, but more often it includes CP children, most often birth trauma, and the severely autistic. However, many of the SpEd children who are receiving private education are there because of the incompetence of the special education staff who let deadlines slip by without proper action. Add into the cottage industry of lawyers who specialize in catching these mistakes and you end up with millions of dollars being spent on attorney fees and special education.

If any money should be thrown anywhere, it should be thrown at getting staff who know the law and know how to get things done.