J.J.: Half Sigma is quite ferociously anti-Palin, and I disagree with him on that. His scare quotes around “special needs” are not altogether unjustified, though. There are indeed children with special needs. Unfortunately “special needs” — regular quotes there, not scare quotes — is a continuum. At one end of the continuum are kids who really do have special needs — severely disabled or disturbed kids.

(Credentialing note: I spent a year teaching in a special-needs school in England: Queensland School in Liverpool, 1968-69. The school is now defunct, and in fact the entire system of public Special Ed. in England has been completely overhauled.)

At the other end of the spectrum are kids whose special needs are arguable: various kinds of learning or behavioral disability, like the ones I taught — “Educationally Sub-Normal” was the official classification. Kids with actual, identifiable brain injuries or dysfunctions were a different classification. Our kids were perfectly normal, but they had IQs in the bottom decile (i.e. below 81).

So somewhere on the special-needs continuum you have to draw a line. On this side of the line are kids who get no extra attention or funding; on that side are kids who get extra taxpayer bucks. Where do you draw the line? That’s what it all comes down to in practice. And you surely know that if the federal spigot opens up, the line will be drawn to encompass as many special-needs (and “special needs”) kids as lobbyists, teacher unions, Ed. schools, and leftist leeches like ACORN, can get away with. Dumb kids, lazy kids, naughty kids — they will all be discovered to have “special needs,” and a corresponding “special claim” on our tax dollars.

This is worth resisting just on base political principles. I don’t know how things are elsewhere, but in my county there is a lot of grumbling about the often-extravagant expenditures on special-needs kids. No scare quotes there: They are mostly worthy cases, but there is still a decision to be made about how much you spend on them. There are plenty of people — including, understandably enough, the parents of these kids — who believe the correct answer is: We can never spend enough. And of course, as the expenses mount, so do the opportunities for corruption. Look at some of the comments here, from the next-door county to mine. (BOCES is the supervising authority for special-needs education, amongst other things, in New York State.)

As the green-eyeshade party, we should talk back — politely and compassionately, but firmly — to these people pushing for ever more “investment” (hold on to your wallet) in special-needs education, even if one of them is a vice-presidential candidate we like a lot on other grounds.

As for vouchers in general, I think Peter Brimelow hit the nail on the head in his 2003 book The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions are Destroying American Education. Pages 142-3:

The voucher movement’s fundamental and unspoken problem, however, is race. Government schools in wealthy suburbs are already de facto private schools — and they are de facto segregated, by class if not completely by race. Families who cannot afford to live in these neighborhoods cannot send their children to those government schools. To many suburbanites in these areas, vouchers just look like a new word for busing … It may well be that a perfectly rational way of delivering government services is permanently crippled in America because of the country’s profound demographic division.