Open Thread: Square Pegs
February 22, 2008
9 Comments
Aside from serving as one of two Assistant Principals in my high school, I am also lucky enough to supervise three departments, one of which is Special Education. I do not manage IEPs, conduct testing, or get involved in the legalities of Special Education. I merely manage the day to day happenings with the Special Education staff, work with the scheduling and budgets, and assist the Director of Special Services and Child Study Team. I wish I had time to do more.
I have worked in three school districts in the last eight years. I am embarrassed to say that the Special Education programs have all been rather disappointing. I’ve seen watered down curriculum where handouts and worksheets are the standard of classroom practice. I’ve had conversations with Special Education teachers and heard some sad educational philosophies regarding Special Education students. I’ve seen and heard some unethical things in the highest offices of public school districts – things that would cost people their careers.
On the flip side, I’ve met (and currently work with) some of the best people for Special Education students; they are supportive, encouraging, and serve as life coaches and mentors for their students. They desire to be the best teachers they can for their kids. I’ve also been blessed to have strong school leadership role models in my life who keep me hopeful and guide me through the rough waters of Special Education law, practices, and education.
Since this is my last post for Dr. McLeod, I thought it would be helpful and intriguing for all of us if we left an open thread (a la Beyond School’s popular one). Open threads seems to me to be chock full of good advice, insight, and some remarkable stories.
So here it goes…
What practices have you seen in your experiences with Special Education? You can discuss a Special Education program that is worthy of publicity, or a teaching practice that deserves attention. If you are tempted to expose the troubles of Special Education, you may – but I would like this post to be helpful, not critical. So please, with a criticism, offer a potential solution.
It’s been an honor to share with all of you. Mike Parent, Guest Blogger
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Hi – I am a special education teacher at a small private school in Maine, where just about every student could be, considered eligible for special education (more for Emotional Disabilities than Learning Disabilities). I am very lucky, I have a wonderful Special Education Director and a Principal that is supportive and interested in what is best for our population.
Our students are usually very behind academically, but we are given the freedom to try new things and are expected/allowed to change the curriculum to meet the needs of the students. Instead of having the students meet the needs of the curriculum. The best thing about this is that I am allowed to challenge students, not just pass them through!
We are considered a special purpose school and AYP is not an issue for us.
We are just really getting started in the technology integration and are having the usual growing pains with doing thing new and differently.
So again I can say that I am very lucky.
On the other hand I am a parent of a special education student (Learning Disability) who has graduated from high school and had several poor experiences including one in Northern NJ where a Special Education Director forged my agreeing with an IEP when in fact, I was disagreeing. That caused a ball of wax to say the least! So I have experienced the “other” side of Special Education.
I have found that the front line special education teachers want to do the right thing, but can be handcuffed and told to be quiet by administration. Sometimes it is simply about the money or lack of it. Funding a special education program is expensive.
But I believe that Special Education has come miles since the 70′s when I was in high school and “those” students were hidden in backrooms or completely different school.
I would just like to say that the point of special education should be education, not just randomly gathering empty credits like a bouquet of sweet little wildflowers. If the kids aren’t learning anything, their time is being wasted. I actually DO believe that all children can learn. I would like to see some of our special education not taking the path of least resistance. It is a crime.
As a special educator, assistive technology consultant and parent of a son with LDs who is a senior in HS I have to say what has worked best for him are text-to-speech programs combined with Bookshare.org. He is able to hear/follow along with the novels that are grade appropriate.
You may be interested in a blog post I wrote which details a number of free resources for special educators for universal design for learning. check it out here: http://teachingeverystudent.blogspot.com/2007/06/free-technology-toolkit-for-udl-in-all.html
As a principal of a Catholic secondary school I often struggle with the question of how do we best serve our special education students. Before I go on I need to clarify that the range of special education that we service is very narrow. We lack the financial wherewithal to provide for students with moderate to severe disabilities.
Our school currently follows a tracking model. Students are placed by entrance exam scores into one of three categories: modified, regular, and honors. The majority of the students in modified have IEP’s although it is not a requirement to be placed in modified.
Many of our teachers (who lack special education training) feel inadequately prepared. We see a lot of resorting to worksheets and busy work. I’d like to know how we can better serve this population of our students. We are debating dropping modified and experimenting with how disbursing the modified students into regular settings would work. Would the students perform up the normative work of those students in the regular sections? Could teachers differentiate their strategies to better reach these students?
Although our families pay taxes they are reluctant at the high school level to pursue services administered by the public school. What do other private schools do at the high school level?
Can’t say I am much help with the whole public school issue and special education. My only involvement on the public school end has been to attend IEP meetings. My constant thought at these meetings is that here are a group of people who care tremendously about helping children……why do they have to attend so many IEP meetings? I think the paperwork and meeting load is killing them.
Three years ago, I was a special education teacher. It was the best of positions and the worst of positions. The worst of it got to be too much to bare; I gave in and made the transition to general education. The only thing I miss about being a special education teacher is the fierce bond I was privileged to forge with the students charged to my care. Each year I guided (often with much kicking and screaming) thirty or more of these exceptional people through the high school experience. It was exhilarating and exhausting; it was worth every tear I shed in frustration and every cheer I yelped in celebration.
I spent my last years working at an urban high school that was plagued with too many drops outs, most of them attributed to the special education program. Our team decided to change things. We spent four years developing a program that yielded phenomenal results. In our fourth year, 90% of the cadre of students we started with in 9th grade graduated on time. Many (though I don’t remember the stats now) passed our state standardized test. This was totally unheard of in our area. I can tell you there were plenty of raised eyebrows amongst the highbrows. So much so that our county administration totally dismantled our program. We were told we were out of compliance with the county’s IEP and we had to follow the prescribed service delivery models. Gone were the skill targeted learning labs and pull-outs. Gone were the parallel English and math classes where reinforcement and reteaching took place. Gone was our sacred and essential advisory period where we practiced tough love with our students. That’s when I quit.
I accepted, then, that special education, at least in our county, had nothing to do with helping students reach their potential. It was about writing IEPs that met the county’s compliance standards and generated revenue. Revenue, by the way, that supported a too heavy administrative staff and not classrooms. It was a crushing acceptance and one that still hurts deeply.
I cling to the thought that this is not the case across the country and that there are special educators who are encouraged to do for their students what their students need done.
Hi Mike: I’ve been enjoying your posts, especially “What Have We Become?”. It was refreshing to read those words from an administrator.
As a special educator, I’ve often wondered if maybe the pegs are the right shape and it’s the board that’s misshapen.
My biggest beef from what I’ve seen in Spec. Ed. is the lowering of standards. As special educators have probably heard, “special ed is nothing more than good teaching.” I firmly believe this. It’s interesting to note than when I’ve been able to involve students in project based learning, the special ed students often lose their “specialness”. They are often the ones digging in with wild abandon, producing great ideas and solving challenges. Sometimes I think some of their specialness has to do with the fact that they simply don’t care about grades and won’t be led down that path. In a world of grades, this can get you labeled.
Something I’ve been following for over a decade that seems promising: http://tiny.cc/ffwd
Alas, I’ve never been able to try SciLearn’s stuff for various reasons.
Be well, Bill
The sad reality of Special Ed. is that they are hard positions to fill. This means that too often those who should be the last considered teaching with this special population are the first hired. It takes a very dedicated person who is willing to work above and beyond even what a regular educator does in the classroom with the same pay, but with more paperwork, differentiation, and not enough support.
As the sister of a brother who is mentally retarded, we experienced some very wonderful special education teachers during the time he was in school (which was during the 70′s and 80′s). That being said, he also had a lot of horrible experiences and was placed in classrooms that the teacher in charge had no business being in.
Thank you for your insightful post. Your school is lucky to have you because you are one of those administrators that “gets it.”
I work very closely with a resource room teacher. She is literally one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever worked with. The kids who are lucky enough to have her really grow. On more than one occasion, we have been able to offer an advanced class to a resource room student because with support they were able to rise to the occasion.
Her effectiveness has been diminished because of the priorities of NCLB. In the past, the program was directly related to the child’s skill base and used resource room time to support the curriculum. This benefited the kids because it was just in time support that enabled them to use strategies to support their real life obligations (the subject areas they had) More recently, a significant part of the focus has had to be on test taking skills for NCLB. At one point, a terrible director wouldn’t allow the children to get any support in the classes. The only thing that they could do was test prep. It became, in essence, a test prep class. Lately, they are allowed to modify again to support subject areas and it is improved. I see kids make tremendous progress, because she is there to help them to break material down. She also works closely with me to help me to modify work meaningfully for our students. She’s a unique person because she also maintains a teaching load for weekends and some afterschool time with advanced students, so she sees both ends of the spectrum. This turns out to be a good thing because she has a broader sense of what is possible for children than a spec ed teacher who never sees children who don’t have a deficit in one area or another.
She does not support “learned helplessness”, however. She holds kids accountable to produce and maintains very frequent contact with parents and teachers. She knows what every teacher is doing in the classroom and what every child is producing. Her children are notable for their ability to advocate for themselves, ask for clarification. And the unwilling among them are never allowed to languish and just not do (as is the case in some other resource rooms) or allowed to merely use the resource room as a homework center (as is the case with other teachers). She does not use a token economy, but instead provides a rich home base of material and emotional support and rigor.
My son Dylan is in a self-contained special-needs pre-K classroom. He has a wonderful teacher who challenges him to learn. She celebrates his successes. She is so positive about his learning. She is teaching him to be more independent and to use language in order to get his needs met. He is autistic and had only a few words before the beginning of this school year. He has learned so much in her class. There is no way I can ever adequately thank her for all she has done and continues to do for my son. In many respects, I feel like she gave my son to me because she opened him up and helped him learn to communicate verbally. He is not the same child he was when he started her class. And it’s not just my child. The parents of all the other children in her class feel the same way. She posts pictures to a Snapfish account for us parents each week, and just by looking at the pictures, I can tell the students are all learning and being challenged. My sincere wish for every special needs student is that they could have teachers like my son’s.