How Many More Graduate Hours Do I Need?

by greg | Feb 8, 2008 | Guest Bloggers, Law, Policy, and Ethics | 6 comments

I’m tired of going to school.

I don’t mean the elementary school where I work. I actually like that.

When I entered the classroom I was told that the state appreciated me having
an undergraduate degree already (B.A. in Psychology, 1983) and that it was
especially nice that I even already had an M.S. (Adult & Technical
Education, a non-certification degree designed to further my career at the
college level, 2003) . They thought that my 18-hour graduate diploma in
linguistics was interesting but told me that the Australian National University
wasn’t accredited in America, and that they couldn’t do anything with those
hours and it didn’t really matter whether the ANU had produced Nobel Laureates,
they weren’t accredited. So with 54 graduate hours already to my credit, I went
back to school. Night school. Summer school. The school of inconvenience….

I learned stuff. It was good for a time.

It was also two grand a class because I live out of state and West Virginia
won’t give me a break on tuition just for teaching their kids. In three years I
spent $30K to keep my license.

If you know what HQT stands for, you can probably guess part of where I’m
going. I’m not, technically a highly qualified teacher. With three degrees to my
credit, I had to send home a note with a third grader this year explaining to
the child’s parents that I’m not actually qualified to teach him math or reading
despite my eleven or so years of college.

One of the things that most ticked me off about going to school myself was
that there seems to be a plan in place to prevent teachers from going past the
masters degree level. I can take classes that count toward a certification (for
$2,000 a pop) or I can take classes that lead to an Ed.S. (for $2,000 a pop).
But not both.

There was a time in my life when I actually wanted to be Dr. Cruey. The
material in this
piece pretty much put me off that for good.

At some point I started asking why I had to keep going to school. I have 108
graduate hours and a GPA better than 3.8. Can’t I, like, take a test or go to a
workshop? Especially since I’m not pursuing any academic credentials?

I was pleased recently to discover that the answer is “yes.” I recently
discovered a state where, if you already have a license in something,
you can add other certifications based on a test alone. I’ve passed the test
there for a PreK-5 certification, for a middle school math certification, and
for some increased special education credentials. In March I go take the test
for reading certification.

I don’t understand why there isn’t a national program to access what an
educator knows and could be allowed to teach. If I’ve passed the Praxis test for
the Principles of Learning and Teaching, and I’ve worked in the classroom, and
I’ve had positive evaluations, and I can pass a test on middle school math, why
shouldn’t I be allowed to teach math without taking 21 graduate hours of math?
The cynics among us at the classroom level sometimes argue that it’s
because the colleges would go broke if such a system was in place.

In the face of a teacher shortage in specific essential areas, eventually
there will just have to be a better system for licensing teachers. And academic
credentials will have to be separated from professional ones.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Black Wednesday (Dressing for NCLB)

by greg | Feb 6, 2008 | Guest Bloggers, Law, Policy, and Ethics | 6 comments

Because education is largely a government function, there seems to be little
hope of ever disentangling politics and education.

Today I’ll wear black to
school. I’ve worn black to school almost every Wednesday since November 3, 2004.
Why that date? On November 2nd of that year I spent 13 hours helping people cast
their ballots for President in a polling place in Virginia. I went home, had a
short but sound night of sleep, and woke the next morning to discover that
George W. Bush was still President. I wore black to work that day, and I’ve worn
black almost every Wednesday since – 168 out of the last 171 Wednesdays. The
exceptions? The day after Democrat Tim Kaine won the governor’s race in Virginia
I wore more festive colors to work. (Since I work in West Virginia, half my
co-workers never fully understood why.) I also dressed quite colorfully on the
Wednesday after the most recent midterm election – the one where Democrats won
back Congress.

There was also a day earlier this year when we had Monday off and I just lost
track of what day of the week it was. My co-workers thought that was
funny…

I know that President Bush has his fan club. And I know that there are plenty
of people who dislike him for reasons other than education policy. But in my
mind, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is among the low points of Bush
Presidency.

I have several specific complaints about NCLB.

• I don’t like the way it has reduced the scope of curriculum. I think it has
  de-emphasized the arts, for example, in favor of the most basic, pared down
  core.
• I don’t like the focus it brings on mediocrity. The goal of education under
  NCLB is to move students who are barely failing on high stakes tests to the
  place where they are barely passing on high stakes tests. There is no reward for
  excellence. getting by is the goal.
• I don’t like the unrealistic and punitive nature of the accountability
  provisions. The eventual goal of NCLB is 100% grade level mastery. Every fifth
  grader, for example, should function at the fifth grade level (unless they have
  some profound disability). Schools that don’t comply, don’t meet this standard,
  are punished. The problem is that so many of the factors related to a student’s
  performance fall outside the school’s reach. Basic issues of poverty and social
  fabric impact a school’s ability to achieve these goals; but the school has
  little power to address them. The simple truth is that there will always be at
  least one or two kids who don’t make the grade no matter what teachers do. And
  eventually NCLB’s accountability provisions will result in almost every public
  school being deemed a failure. It is a standard no other modern nation strives
  to achieve. It is unrealistic.
• I think the law is underfunded. The requirements of NCLB at onerous in terms
  of both time and money.

You don’t have to be a complete cynic to think that maybe, just maybe, NCLB’s
accountability provisions are a poison pill in the law. The intention could be
to make public schools look bad – worse than they are – to justify the
privatization of education through the use of vouchers. And right there in
Bush’s 2009 budget, what do we have? Proposed funding for a voucher program.

NCLB has failed. The task now is to replace it with a law with broader
vision, a law more supportive of public education. Hopefully Congress will be
wise enough to call for far more input from the educational community than they
did in 2002.

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger

Can We Prevent Learning Disabilities?

by greg | Feb 4, 2008 | Guest Bloggers, Law, Policy, and Ethics | 6 comments

Is it possible to prevent learning disabilities? There’s a policy push to do
just that, and it was the main focus of the 2004 revisions to the Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

My afternoon today was consumed with meetings. When I worked at the college
level we used to joke that meetings were the logical alternative to work. But
today’s meetings were less frivolous…

Normally I spend my afternoon working through some very scripted
reading interventions with small groups of students that I pull out of their
classrooms – some fifth graders, some fourth graders, and a mixed group of first
and second graders. Today those students stayed in their classrooms, and my
afternoon was instead spent in a series of IEP meetings.

If you’re not familiar with IEP meetings, let me introduce the concept. The
acronym stands for Individualized Education Program. Students who have been
determined to have an educational disability under IDEA have an IEP, a document
that describes how their school is accommodating that disability at the
moment.

The meetings were chaired by my principal and they took place in her office.
A specialist for the central office was present today. Obviously I was in the
meetings. The classroom teacher that has the child also sat in on each meeting
and contributed to the discussions that took place. And when we’re lucky, the
child’s parent comes to the meeting. At this school, we’re generally lucky in
that way; but today we didn’t have parents in most of meeting – although we’d
talked to them about what was going to happen in the meetings.

Five of the six meetings today were routine, almost formalities. We had
meetings to discuss whether a particular student needed to continue seeing this
or that specialist for a particular problem. We had two meetings to discuss the
status of a child’s disability; a requirement that comes around every three
years.

One of the meetings was not particularly routine. It was a meeting to decide
whether a particular student had a disability – whether, under IDEA 2004, they
were eligible for services as a special education student. For obvious reasons
of confidentiality, I can’t say much about the child or the meeting. But I
can tell you that the process of identifying some disabilities is vague
and slippery.

Emotional disturbance (some states call them behavior disorders) are very
real. But federal law is so vague that they are almost impossible to
legally define. Children with emotional disturbances make up only a very
small portion of those who qualify to be served under IDEA. But students who
have learning disabilities make up a much larger portion of the special
education population.

Until 2004 we had a pretty clear definition of learning disabilities. It
wasn’t a very good one. We called it the discrepancy model. It was clear as a
bell – a mathematical definition of a disability. Unfortunately, it was a time
consuming definition to satisfy and it often meant allowing a child to fail a
grade as proof that they needed help. For years we did this to kids…

IDEA 2004 came up with an entirely new definition of learning disabilities.
Conceptually, it’s rather clear. A learning disability is evidenced by the
failure of a child to respond to academic interventions designed to bring his or
her achievement up to grade level. Those are my words, not a technical quote.
The difficulty now is that we are grappling with just what those interventions
should be, and what level of response is sufficient to avoid the determination
that a child does in fact have a disability. And as a result, there’s not nearly
as much certainty in the process as there once was.

If you are an idealistic optimist you will say that one of the main goals of
the new law is to use intervention to prevent a child’s problems from ever
developing into a disability. If you are a cynic you will scoff that the new
law’s goal is just as I phrased it above – to avoid the determination that a
child has a disability, even if they really do. But either way, you are begging
the question of what actually constitutes a learning disability. It’s a question
I expect to keep begging for a few years.

So I go back to my original question: Is it possible to prevent learning
disabilities?

The irony of the new law is that a breakthrough in medical research that
occurred at about the time the new law was passed challenges some of its
assumptions. Somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of children
classified as having learning disabilities are thought to be dyslexic. And about
the time the President signed the new law on educational disabilities, a medical
researcher published findings that showed that a dyslexia gene exists. A year
later, two more genes connected to dyslexia were discussed at a meeting of the American
Society of Human Genetics.

The question of whether we can prevent learning
disabilities may now be largely a question of whether or not we can prevent a
genetic condition. And as for identifying them, a cheek swab or simple blood
test at birth may soon accomplish that.

I suspect that the policy makers will all have to rethink learning
disabilities again soon – maybe before the 2004 revisions to IDEA even get fully
implemented in most states…

Greg Cruey, Guest Blogger