Special Ed Lawyers Living Large?

My new favorite special ed blogger, Charles P. Fox, is pretty quick on the uptake and has already posted a rebuttal to the Chronicle Op-Ed piece penned by a Marin administrator. Mr. Fox points out the many, many cases where school district lawyers have overcharged children for their services. So just which lawyers are living large at the kids expense? And an alert reader points out that our Marin administrator, Ms. Karen Mates, is being quite disingenuous when she argues:

Public schools must certainly provide the best possible education for children with disabilities (and for all children), however, this becomes exceedingly difficult when tax dollars destined for all our public school youth are given to a few whose parents believe they are entitled to services beyond what the public schools provide. The result is huge amounts of money ($34 million in San Francisco Unified School District alone) is funneled into special education from the general educational fund over and above what is provided for special education by the state and federal governments.

The "huge amounts of money" from the general education fund result from the failure to fully fund what IDEA costs, not lawsuits.