The New York Times Endorses Vouchers!

Ok, not exactly. What they did do was point out a major problem with the way special education is provided in this country.
The city of New York hired expensive consultants to find ways to save money in the education budget. One of their suggestions was to fight parents of special needs children more aggressively.
The problem is this: school districts are required to provide special education students with free and appropriate public education. If the district does not offer appropriate services, they are required to pay for private services. According to the consultants, it may be cost effective for the city to spend money litigating with parents, rather than paying for private school tuition.

The consultants said it “was forced to pay millions of dollars in private school tuition for students that could have been adequately served by our public school system,” not because of the cases’ merits but “due to staffing level deficiencies.”

The city, the consultants wrote, has already acted on their advice, more than doubling the size of its special education legal team by adding five lawyers and a dozen paralegals. The effort, they estimated, will save the city $25 million a year in private school tuition.

Advocates of special education criticized the move. “I don’t think they are paying private school tuition because they don’t have good lawyers,” said Kim Sweet, the executive director of Advocates for Children. “I think they lose these hearings because they don’t have good programs.”

Ms. Sweet added, “I would rather see them pour resources into special education services than lawyers.”

So, the incentives are all wrong for the school district. They would rather fight with parents than provide schooling for children. This incentive-mismatch could be corrected if parents of special needs children were simply given a voucher: a flat sum of money that they could spend on their child's needs, however they saw fit. Then the school district would have no incentive to withhold information from parents in order to low-ball them into accepting the services they provide.

I wrote about this problem here, a couple of years ago.

Male Biological Clock

We are all familiar with teh fact that women's fertility declines with age. We are now discovering that male fertility does as well. And worse, the damage to male sperm may do more than reduce the likelihood of conception. Advanced paternal age has been implicated in a number of birth defects. From an article in Psychology Today:

Nonetheless, a virtual tidal wave of recent research has made it irrefutable: Not only does male fertility decrease decade by decade, especially after age 35, but aging sperm can be a significant and sometimes the only cause of severe health and developmental problems in offspring, including autism, schizophrenia, and cancer. The older the father, the higher the risk. But what's truly noteworthy is not that infertility increases with age—to some degree, we've known that all along—but rather that older men who can still conceive may have such damaged sperm that they put their offspring at risk for many types of disorders and disabilities.

The mechanism seems to be that as men age, their DNA does not replicate as accurately as at earlier ages. Therefore, small abnormalities in the genetic struction which are not large enough to be fatal, can cause a wide array of damage to the child:

These mutations could reflect the differences in male and female reproduction, notes Jabs (Ethylin Wang Jabs, professor of pediatric genetics at Johns Hopkins University). By the time females reach their teen years, their eggs have already been formed—just one new egg matures each month. Men, on the other hand, produce millions of sperm cells every time they ejaculate. After each ejaculation, they must literally replicate those cells, and each replication multiplies the chance for a DNA "copy error"—a genetic chink in the sperm DNA. The more ejaculations a man produces, the greater the chance for chinks to arise, leading to increased point mutation and thus increased infertility and birth defects. While a woman's reproductive capacity halts more or less abruptly after all her eggs have been used up somewhere in their forties or fifties, men experience a longer, more gradual winnowing and disintegration. "We believe that something in men's DNA replication machinery keeps becoming less efficient and less accurate with age, and the problems accumulate," says Jabs.

This is yet another unintended consequence of delaying childbirth, a delay made possible by conctraception. We are increasingly organizing society around the premise that sex is essentially a sterile activity, with childbearing thrown in as an after-thought, if you happen to like that sort of thing. Widespread access to contraception has made indefinite postponement of childbearing the norm, not the exception among the educated classes.
It is time to rethink this.

Autism, Schizophrenia and advanced paternal age

A reader sent me these links on these subjects. I pass them along to my readers. Make of them what you will. I find this fascinating, and plan to keep my ear to the ground on this topic.
Dr J
http://themalebiologicalclock.blogspot.com/
autism-prevention
parentalagepostings
howoldistooold
ebdblog.com/paternalage

Many of these blogs are citing the same studies, but there are some differences in perspective among them. I report them for what they may be worth to my readers.

Expectations for Asperger's syndrome

There is an interesting set of letters at Dear Abby about socially acceptable behavior and Asperger's Syndrome. At issue, is the question of how to react to a teenager who can't keep his mouth shut. One reader assumed it was overly permissive parents who'd rather be friends with their kids than discipline them, based on his own experience as a "Disappointed Grandfather."

Two other readers wrote in to suggest a disability, Aspberger's Syndrome, as a possible explanation for the teenager's behavior. Interesting to me on two fronts: first, notice our tendency in the Therapeutic Culture, to suggest a medical explanation for behavior. Without taking anything away from the difficulties of Aspberger's as a disability, I feel confident in saying that IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES, THE "DISAPPOINTED GRANDFATHER IS CORRECT THAT THE MOTHER IS LETTING TOO MUCH SLIDE.

Even if your child does have a disability, you may not be doing him any favor to let socially obnoxious behaivor slide. Actually, ESPECIALLY if your child has a disability, he needs your help in learning good social skills.
We too, have an Asperger's son, whose behavior was very difficult to understand until we got an accurate diagnosis. But we were blessed to have many gifted teachers, including one who insisted that all her Special Ed students absolutely had to learn good manners. Her theory was that these kids will need to ask for help all their lives. They will have much better success at enlisting help if they are polite than if they are obnoxious.
We took that teacher's message to heart and have always insisted on good manners. The ultimate standard is the "Fun to Be Around" test. If the child isn't fun to be around, they flunk. If the child is fun to be around, you can overlook a lot!
We are proud of the fact that our son will graduate from high school this year, and that he is employed at the local supermarket. He has a CUSTOMER SERVICE JOB! Parents of kids with Asperger's will appreciate what an accomplishment it is for him to be a Courtesy Clerk. But the fact is, that good manners requires that you follow the rules, follow a script, which Asperger's kids can easily do.
There can be a very fine line between demanding something of a child that he really can't do, and helping him learn to do all he can. I'm convinced that Asperger's kids can learn courtesy, and that it is hugely helpful to them to learn it.