NY City to overhaul special education
Let's hope! I wonder if it's an overhaul or a reshuffling. If it's a transformation or a way to move things around. The article's focus on more inclusion, per se, worrisome. Inclusion is not an educational solution or goal. Like a methodology, inclusion should be encouraged where it works and promotes more learning. Otherwise, other methodologies should be used. Time will tell. Your thoughts?
(NYC to overhaul special education)
(NYC to overhaul special education)
posted by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, M.A., J.D. at
6:28 AM
1 Comments:
What we really need to overhaul is the perception -- widely held by educators, parents, medical and mental health professionals, advocates and lawyers (everybody?)-- that any and every student with any kind of learning problem whatsoever must, by virtue of that learning problem, have a learning disability. One can't just be a lousy writer or "suck at math." We spare no expense, and leave no stone unturned, until we find or manufacture a disability that purports (almost always without a shred of real research evidence)to explain the academic problem. Someday, anyone who ever participated in the outrageous fraud of "identifying" a "specific learning disability" will be too embarassed to admit it. Yes, certainly, there are some people who have learning differences that are so significant that learning (usually everything) is extremely difficult to the point of disability (although often, these cases are associated with some other, known, medically established disability -- and are obvious). But the notion that we can use cognitive assessments to identify a specific weakness in cognitive funtioning, and actually, meaningfully link that weakness to a specific area of academic underachievement (ruling out all other variables!!) is absurd. We've all seen the evidence of such nonsense: the cognitive weakness that changes with each reevaluation (in 1st grade, Johnny's weakness in short-term memory was responsible for his poor reading performance (but not math?). That somehow healed itself, and now in 4th grade, his low-average score in Processing Speed is "it." (but still doesn't affect math?). Now in middle and high school, all areas are low-average to average, but the state test is coming up, so we will give the Rey Osterith Complex Figure Drawing test (they almost always struggle with that) and chalk it up to "visual-perceptual..."
And, let's not forget the "specific learning disability in Long Term Retrieval," based soley on one low subtest score - "Visual - Auditory Learning," which has nothing to do with anything related to academic curriculla....
And that's at least using an "intraindivudual" approach to identfying SLD, surely more rational that the IQ-Achievement discrepancy approach, which has been thoroughly discredited, but remains widely used.
The sad fact is that schools (and others) have been pathologizing normal variation in learning profiles for decades now, and kicking even the "mild(ly) SLD (different)" learners to special ed, to the point where teachers only teach the "exceptionally normal" students, and no longer have the (willingness? skills? wherewithal?) to teach students who aren't "perfectly normal learners."
It has been estimated that soon almost 50% of public school students will come to school with some type of identified developmental disability. Will they all come to school with IEPs in place? And what about students with behavior problems (they all have SED?) and don't pay attention (ADHD?), and anyone who "sucks at math" (SLD)??? Will the 6 special ed teachers in the school with 800 students be teaching 600 of them?
We can "overhaul" special ed again and again (and we will). But as long as any student with a learning problem (very common!) is assumed to have a learning disability (very common, too, but should be very rare!), the systemic problems will persist.
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