While proponents of blended classrooms may cite research suggesting positive academic or social outcomes, we must ask—positive for whom, and at what cost?
The data may reflect aggregate gains, but it rarely disaggregates harm.
Just a Parent
In practice, the shift toward multi-grade groupings is less an inclusive innovation than a budgetary workaround, one that allows districts to comply with class size and composition thresholds without triggering remedies that would require hiring additional staff or meaningfully altering adult-to-child ratios.
Schools are expected to adhere to limits on the number of students with designations per classroom, and when budgets cannot accommodate the associated remedies—such as additional staffing or prep time—they often respond by dispersing neurodivergent students across multiple divisions. The result is a consistent, institutional pattern in which children with disabilities are denied the stabilising presence of their friends, even when those relationships are documented in IEPs as essential for co-regulation and emotional safety. Framed by administrators as neutral—an opportunity to “meet new friends” or “foster independence”—this enforced social fragmentation amounts to discrimination by design. It is a policy choice that places financial efficiency above human dignity, disregarding the profound psychological cost of exclusion for a vulnerable class of students who rely on trusted peer relationships to survive the school day.
This is a false economy. It preserves short-term budget control while externalising long-term social and educational costs. It reduces the number of classrooms that exceed their contractual limits—not by meeting student needs more effectively, but by redistributing vulnerability. And it compromises relational care in the process, because no amount of instructional creativity can replace the time, attention, and safety that come from adequately staffed, developmentally coherent classrooms.
Most dangerously, it masks systemic exclusion beneath the language of flexibility and pedagogical value. Children with disabilities—especially those who mask or internalise—are quietly pushed to the margins, their needs diluted across environments never designed for them. And while those children disappear from the classroom, the economic consequences accumulate elsewhere: in mental health services, in lost parental productivity, in the rising cost of institutional breakdown.
The true cost of maxed-out classrooms is psychic, relational, and public. And the remedies, had they been implemented as intended, would have offered a more honest, accountable, and long-term investment in inclusion. What we’re witnessing is not just an erosion of classroom design—but a quiet austerity that trades disabled children’s rights for administrative solvency. The system has chosen short-term compliance over enduring care. And the public will pay for that decision for years to come.