It's tough for me, in particular, because special education is something that I largely see from the outside. My classes - honors and advanced placement chemistry - tend not to be heavily populated with special needs students. Add that to the fact that I'm a school success story - National Merit, good tester, smart kinda guy - who never had an inkling of needing special services. All in all, every single thing that I'm about to say could be dismissed with a hearty "well, yeah, but you wouldn't understand."
And that would entirely correct.
Yet, I head once more into the breech, dear friends, once more.
I've been saying for years that special education will be the death of public education in this country.
I work in - and we (American students, at least) were each educated in - a system of mass production. Raw materials enter my classroom twenty or thirty at a time. I apply a fairly standard curiculuum to each blob of developing brain matter, hoping to impart the same knowledge to all twenty or so of them at the the same time and in the same way. At the end of the year, my classroom pops out twenty quasi-identical widgets ready for the next step in the processing line (their junior year, senior year, freshman year in college).
It's a method designed for maximum efficiency - one person making twenty widgets in a single go. No need or time to really differentiate anything, no real incentive to adjust anything other than what I'm doing from time to time as the line boss directs. Sure, there will be a certain amount of raw material waste as not every widget comes off the line stamped and educated to perfection, but even the most off-blueprint widgets have a home somewhere out in the world.
Then, along comes the special education movement, the idea that some of the brain blobs need to be treated differently, that they can achieve the same level of widget perfection, but that they are just a further into the raw state of things when they come to me. This means I have to invest a little more time, have to adjust my teaching a little more, have to monitor these certain brain blobs a little more closely.
And this doesn't fit well in the mass production model of education. No longer am I able to successfully widgetify twenty or so brain blobs as once because this one takes a little more time than the others. No longer am I able to be as efficient - producing the maximum number of working widgets with the minimum time and money invested - because some of the brain blobs take more of my time.
A factory education model runs entirely antithetical to a special education society. If our educational system had been a little more woodwright's shop and a little less Henry Ford, then things might be a little different.
Why do we have special education?
My general understanding - and I'll admit that I've never seen this written anywhere, it's entirely my conjecture - is that somehow we're saying that certain people come to school behind and need a little help in catching up. Some of the reasons for that catching up need seem entirely reasonable to me - blindness, head trauma, radioactive spider bite - but some of the reasons for special education just seem like poor home training.
The boy who won't do his homework...the girl who doesn't seem able to control her mouth...the boy who throws tantrums at the age of fifteen...the student who was never trained to appreciate education so won't do the work needed to see the rewards. How are those justifications for employing a new person to do nothing more than do the home training that never got done at home?
I will admit that I struggle sometimes seeing the necessity for special education services when the disability is not readily visible. The blind student, the epileptic student, these are disabilities that I can see, that I simply cannot doubt.
The student with anxiety, depression, ADHD, disorganization are students that I often find myself wondering why they need services. I don't mean to doubt the veracity of these conditions - at least not the veracity of the existance of these conditions within the population - merely to state that I often find myself wondering whether these conditions really exist within the students that I see.
I know that there are people with far more expertise than I - psychologists, counselors, special education specialists, medical doctors - who are able to diagnose these conditions, but I wonder how many of the conditions are excuses for a lack of training that these young people received in their very young, most early formative stages.
ADHD? Maybe you just weren't given tasks that occupied you. Maybe you spent too much time in front of hyperactive, jump-cut-filled television programs as a wee bairn.
Disorganization? Don't ask me the proper, clinical term - I just know that I have had students whose primary symtoms came out to me simply as disorganization. He would do assignments - according to parents and counselors, anyway - only to never turn the assignments in, having simply lost or forgotten them. Are we really saying that this student is somehow crippled? Disabled? Because he was messy? Because he was forgetful?
I admit freely that I find myself wondering whether many of these conditions couldn't have been more effectively dealt with by the parents at a younger age. Wondering whether these diagnoses aren't simply admissions of poor parenting.
I had a student once whose condition was "weak wrists."
The student was allowed to see another student's notes from class. He wasn't to be penalized for his poor penmanship. He was allowed to have his parents scribe his assignments from home.
I'll admit that I haven't a clue as to how you measure the strength of wrists, but I always did wonder how this "weak wristed" student could manage to be a starting pitcher on our school baseball team in spite of his 'disability'.
I know I'm probably of a very old school mindset here, but I so often wish that I could simply stand up at some of these meetings and say "Your kid isn't good at science." or "Your kid isn't very smart." or even just "Your kid isn't honors smart."
"Lots of people aren't, and they're doing just fine. They end up as store managers, solid workers, hell, teachers in this building."
"Just because your kid isn't going to get a National Merit Scholarship or isn't going to be the valedictorian doesn't frickin' matter."
"Let him find his way in the world and offer him help where he needs it, but get him the heck out of the honors science class because he's drowning. There's no shame in being really good at some things and not so good at others. This is the way of the world."
"Few of us can be outstanding at everything. Maybe your kid's skills are in playing soccer, singing, making music, throwing a baseball. It doesn't mean he's disabled just because his science skills don't his skills in other areas."
I had a girl in class whose disability was that she was really smart in all areas but one.
Her tested ability levels in math and science were outstanding, 99th percentile kind of stuff.
Her tested ability levels in English - particularly in the writing part of the game - was in the 70th percentile, above average but not phenomenally so.
She was on an IEP (individualized education plan) because he writing skills weren't the equal of her math and science skills.
So what?
So she didn't write so well. Why does that mean she should get twice the time on tests as the kid who is just average - hell, slightly above average - across the board?
I remember her counselor telling me - us, probably, there were seven teachers at the meeting - saying that the qualification for special services came about because one of her ability levels was drastically below her other ones, that no matter that he one was still in the 'above average' category, that skill being below her other skills made her a special education student.
To me, a spike in one ability doesn't mean special education, it means gifted...just in one area.
Why does talent in one area have to mean disability in the other areas?
I could never do the job of the special education professionals in our building.
I especially could never do the job of the special education folks working with the severely handicapped, the mentally retarded (I apologize for not knowing the correct current term), the non-verbal, the wheelchair bound students.
I love my job, love working almost exclusively with the smart kids, the good kids, the ones with whom I have to worry about cheating and SATs and APs and calling home because they aren't doing their homework.
I never have to worry about taking one of them into the shower to clean them up after they've soiled themselves. I never have to worry about guiding them by hand through the hallway during the bells because otherwise they will grab onto any person who passes by. I never have to wait patiently for them to construct a sentence using a word board, one picture at a time before the computer will enunciate their words for them.
I also never have to worry about the murderous, the violent, the unstable, the abusive and the abused. These are all taken care of far from my door. For good or for ill, I simply never see those folks except as they pass by my door on the way to lunch or to Mr O's room,
I know that special education is too expensive for us.
In the past decade, the special education population at Princeton High School has sky rocketed from 4% to nearly 20% this year. That mean one in five of our students are somehow deemed as unable to perform without assistance.
That means in my typical class of 20 or 25, there should be 4 or 5 students who are legally entitled to more of my time, more of our school's money than are the other fifteen or twenty.
It's a problem financially, a big problem financially, because it means that 20% of our population is taking up a far bigger proportion of our resources than 20%. There are separate federal funds to support this extra outlay, but it's not like that money comes out of thin air. Somewhere along the line, it's coming from the same pie.
And when people look at schools and say that we're paid too much, the we spend too much, that our building are too opulent, we need to point out that we are doing exactly what we're told to do from above, from the government, from the people who vote for the government.
And that government says that the moment a student is labeled as needing an IEP or a 504 plan, they are entitled to more services which are more expensive, and we don't have a lick of choice in the matter.
Not that I'm sure we should.
With all that being said, with my very solid dose of skepticism, I can't imagine how it must feel as a parent to realize that your child is not - and maybe cannot - be ready to be independent in the world, to think that the only way my child could ever succeed is with drastic help beyond that which most people get.
Especially, if that knowledge made me confront the fact that perhaps I made a poor choice of mates (nature) or that I had done a poor job of raising my child (nurture).
6 comments:
When evaluating a child to determine if they do have a disability, you have to check a box to confirm that they are not being identified due to being deprived of experiences at home. I don't know how on earth we check that box with confidence for most kids. How could I even begin to determine that?
I know this is something I need to learn more about, because I don't assume to know it all by any means, but I really need to learn where the line is drawn between a badly behaved young person and a person who qualifies as "emotionally disturbed"... So he cusses at peers, insults his teacher, refuses to do work... When does that become a disability? It's something I'd be interested in learning because I only understand kids with bi-polar or schizophrenia or something along those lines as being easily identifiable as someone who qualifies for ED services.
Oh, it's "cognitively disabled" at the moment. I'll let you know when that changes again.
I will agree, though, too many kids are identified as having special needs. Whether we like it or not, standards and expectations immediately drop for that child and they're immediately doomed to be ill-prepared for functioning appropriately in society both behaviorally and academically unless teachers actively place higher expectations on them.
You sound like a caring teacher, and I appreciate your "outside" perspective (or your inside perspective in the college-prep educational world, as I see it). You have a lot of valid points. I'm afraid I only have time to respond to a few of them.
First, I think you're absolutely right that a lot of the disabilities that qualify students for special services today are caused by environmental factors. However, that doesn't mean they are not disabilities. We can say that if the parents had done a better job teaching these kids in their pre-school years and instilling in them a value of education then they would be better off. That doesn't change the fact that these kids come to us with serious deficits and we need to do something about it. These kids didn't choose their parent or their home life, and they are just as deserving of the best possible education as anybody else. That means that we may need to do some things to accommodate for their disabilities.
You mention students who are skilled in almost every area but are low-functioning in writing (the very definition of a learning disability, incidentally), and you seemed to be asking why such a student would need extended time in all classes. A learning disability in writing is actually a great example to explain why that's needed because writing is a skill that's used in all classes (okay, maybe not as much in math). But if a student really is markedly lower in writing, that is going to affect her performance in any other class that requires that uses written assignments, even though she may know the material.
I understand your frustrations. I get frustrated too. After spending a total of 6 years teaching in both regular education and special education (this year I'm doing both simultaneously), I've changed my views on education quite a bit. I've seen too many students who have serious disabilities in reading and writing who struggle to complete four years of high school English, but thrive in their Agricultural Science or Industrial Technology classes. I would actually like to see a two-track educational system in America (something that I would have called heresy in my student days). Rather than being restrictive, I think it would be a great opportunity for those students who don't want to study English or Chemistry, who don't want to go to college, but just want to learn to work on cars or whatever interests them. If students had that freedom to just study what they want (and what they're good at) we would have fewer failing students, fewer discipline problems, and fewer drop-outs.
That's not what we have, though. We have a system in which all students, regardless of ability, are required to complete their core subjects all the way through their senior year. And it's our job to take those students where they are and try to get them to learn as much as they can before they leave.
Ahhhh fun topic.So many comments so little time.
I would like to start by pointing out that GT (the elementary/ middle school equal to AP in our district) is actually considered by many educators as the other end of the special education spectrum. One of my special education classes in college was "SPEC ED for the gifted student".
That being said when I taught computers I had every student at our school except the most severe cases. I had students who could not even communicate. In English I had LD and ED and even honors. My opinion from seeing this and sitting in (at this point) hundreds of IEP/ 504/ RTI conferences is many parents are wanting their students labeled because they are at their wits end and they don't know what else to do.
Somewhere along the line college became the mark of success for America. Because of that students not on a college track are often viewed as not successful. Its time we started to look to vocational education again. I have had students graduate from Prosser who could barely read, but they will start at 18 making 30$ an hour as a welder. I don't know about anyone else but I view those students as just as successful as a college grad.
I'm going to speak to this issue from the point of being a parent as opposed to teacher - I am both, but I'm writing this as a parent.
Classroom teachers want to label kids. It gives them the out so that they don't have to teach the organizational skills or self - control or proper behaviors in different settings.
I'm not saying this is true of all classroom teachers, but as a parent of a relatively intelligent child who has all the other issues listed above I have had to fight his being labeled with a disability since he was three years old.
My husband and I have asked ourselves again and again if we were doing the right thing. If we tested the boy and got him all labeled up and then drugged up, he might function better. We were told by some of his teachers that things would be so much easier for us and for our son if we just labeled him so that he could have modifications.
The strange thing is, we didn't hear it from all his teachers. Pre-school teachers and kindergarten teachers wanted him on meds. His first - third grade teachers loved him and worked with him and he succeeded in their classrooms. Apparently in grades four through six my son became an idiot and couldn't handle himself in the classroom. My favorite comment during 5th grade conferences when his science teacher commented, "Your son is my best student, I don't know who he becomes when he leaves my classroom" Seemed to me it wasn't my son, but a couple lazy teachers who didn't want to work with my kid.
We wanted our son to learn organization. We wanted him to be able to control himself in various situations and we wanted him to learn how to behave with different teachers. We wanted to teach him that stuff and have him figure it out for himself.
In the 6th grade, my husband and I were called in for a special conference for our son and given a set of questions we were supposed to take to our pediatrician. We went home and talked and talked and talked...was there some magic pill we could give our kid and all his problems would go away?
Or...if we gave him a pill would be teaching him to find easy fixes when things didn't come easy to him?
We really didn't want to teach him the easy way out. We really wanted him to work on his "disabilities" to become a better person and student and we wanted him to learn to do it without help or modification.
I put the paper in the recycling bin and bought the kid a trapper keeper to help him organize.
We worked with him - without the help of his teachers because at that point, they felt we didn't want to help our son.
We were bad parents in their eyes because we didn't get him a label.
And now, two years later, he's got all A's and B's on his report card and we've gotten three positive postcards from his teachers in one quarter.
I have no idea what the future holds for this kid, but right now I really think he's figuring things out and more importantly, he's figuring it out for himself. He's getting his homework finished, managing his facebook account, playing football...and being 13. I feel like we've done what we needed to do for him.
We've kept him off medication and ignored the recommendations of lazy classroom teachers who didn't want to work with him and help him grow himself.
Again...not all classroom teachers are lazy. My son has had some fantastic teachers and as a result he has been able to experience success without medicating or recieving modifications. As a parent, I think teachers can be a little too quick to want to label kids.
TL - that's seriously a box that has to be checked? Yeah, there's no way that you could check that with confidence without a ton of home visits. Blech...
The "emotionally disturbed" category mystifies me entirely. I get a number of learning disabilities, but the more behavioral disabilities leave me entirely stymied and befuddled.
I'm sorry to read your last paragraph, though - that sped identification = lowered expectations, no matter how hard we try otherwise.
Kyle - I fully understand the fact that the kids didn't request and certainly can't control the parents and parenting that they get. But how do we break that cycle of poor parenting leading to special education students back to kids who accept that poor parenting doesn't matter because the schools will take care of whatever their kids can't do?
The girl I spoke about who was high functioning in almost all areas was actually above average in writing. But she was really far above average in math and science, so the disability came about because her one ability was below the others - but even that one was still above average. That I don't understand as a disability.
I love the idea of a more prevalent trade school system, but our society currently looks down at anything that isn't "college prep". If we somehow suggest that our kids aren't headed to college, it's taken as being a huge slam. Hence, why we're eliminating any track that isn't headed toward college next year.
Ame - the special ed at the high end gets to be really interesting. We're having a discussion at school about the argument that "every student can learn" - if given enough chances, if given enough different ways to show mastery, if given enough scaffolding - but does that mean that every student can learn at an honors level? What about at an AP/IB level? Should those courses provide multiple opportunities, multiple ways for kids to succeed? If so, aren't they watering down their standards?
Calen - That all sounds like a much more reasonable strategy - teaching your kid to work around/through his challenges.
Hell, we all have challenges - I'm easily distracted and don't want to do my work...I'm better at some subjects than others...I don't want to put in the work to learn things that don't interest me.
We aren't all special ed, and we sure as heck don't all need meds.
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