The Autism Clause
In what would be the biggest change yet to the way New York City's school system is administered, officials are considering plans to hire private groups at taxpayer expense to manage scores of public schools.
The money paid to the private groups would replace millions of dollars in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which supported dozens of these groups in opening more than 180 small schools in the city since 2003.
The four-year grants, typically worth $100,000 a year per school, will run out for more than 50 schools in June.
The move would further Chancellor Joel I. Klein's earlier efforts to tear apart the traditional bureaucracy of the nation's largest school system, giving principals greater autonomy and increasing the role of the private sector. It could put private entities like the College Board, the Urban Assembly and Expeditionary Learning-Outward Bound on contract to manage networks of schools as soon as the 2007-8 school year.
A handful of new schools charge up to $140,000 a year to educate an autistic child. Who can pay that much? Anyone with the right lawyer.
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It’s not entirely clear what’s wrong with Jasir Abdullah-Musa. When a fire engine screams by, he cries. When a fly buzzes into a room, he descends into tantrums. At his family’s home in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, he flings his chubby 5-year-old body from couch to couch, ramming his head into the cushions and shifting between twisted poses. Jasir has a habit of recounting his daily routines ad infinitum—down to the color of the stripes on the bus and the menu at McDonald’s—but as he sizes up the stranger in his living room, he doesn’t say much, except to bellow “I want Rollos!” and “Noooo!”
posted by Whitney Tilson at 1:57 PM
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