GAA Backstory November 30, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment, Ed Policy Discussion, NCLB, Special Education.comments closed
Okay, hope you enjoyed the break from GAA, short as it was. But there’s too much good stuff to share to hold back. Really.
First off, let’s talk just a minute about scoring. Most assessments that are performed un NCLB are scored by a computer or machine, unless there is an essay portion. In Georgia, the Georgia High School Graduation Test does have an essay portion to it. This is being done more and more on standardized tests, in general. The last time I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) I had to write an essay, maxed that part out which is good because the rest needed a bit of help!
The portfolios that we are turning in for the GAA are even more challenging than an essay. Very few tasks will be the same, the abilities of the students vary greatly and the methods of taking and recording the data vary. For instance, just for TAZ, I have several pictures with captions, some data that include least-to-most prompting, and then some pictures of some exercises he does on a flannel board. Other teachers will use observations, interviews, video and all manner of student samples of work. Now imagine scoring about 5000 of these things and trying to have some semblance of reliability and validity. It’s kind of a joke but no one in D. C. or Atlanta is laughing. Or maybe they are, except behind closed doors.
Well, the answer to all of this is Questar. There are a lot of companies called Questar but this is the only one doing educational scoring. Questar is doing pretty well, judging by a recent merger announcement. This testing stuff is big, huge business. Remember these guys can better afford to bribe congress than you and me. And we’re still paying for through our tax dollars. So yeah, this sounds like a great way to piss away a few hundred million dollars.
I and other Georgia teachers have been complaining ever more loudly about how this process was seemingly thrown together at the last minute. Make no mistake– it was. To understand the scramble, we first have to trace the history of all of this. In my last post, I gave you a link to some NCLB history. While congress was grousing and horse trading in the reauthorization of the Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA), another reauthorization bill was looming off in the distance: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA. NCLB was signed in January 2002 after almost 3 years of political horse trading. 2002 was the year that IDEA was supposed to be reauthorized. In all the fuss and rush to get NCLB out the door, no one gave a lot of thought as to the effect those provisions would have on IDEA. Now they had some serious problems. Some of the 2,000+ odd provisions and details that were not worked out in the NCLB act that just passed were in direct conflict with IDEA. And they still are. But we’re concerned with the timeline, here.
It wasn’t until December of 2004 that this thing finally passed and lawmakers worked diligently to make sure that this law was subservient to the NCLB act. It was only in august of 2006 that the final regulations were released. However, regarding NCLB compliance, there was no such lag allowed. The first thing that hit us in the face the the “Highly Qualified” provision of NCLB. You can read all about that in an earlier entry. We had only a matter of months to comply with provisions that congress spent years trying to work out.
NCLB’s biggest issue is that of accountability, or at least this is the great big flag GW Bush used to rally his Republican troops behind as they were none too pleased about expanding the Dept. of Education’s influence and budget. Remember many of these same congress people want to abolish the DOE! So GW pounded the airwaves and the pavement and pressed the flesh and kept going on and on about accountability. You can’t know how you are doing if you don’t keep score and all of that. So now we have high stakes testing. The other provision GW made to his Republican friends was the fact that states could choose their own standards and tests as long as the tests measured performance on those standards.
Still with me?
The state of Georgia then revamped their standards which did make things a bit easier. Instead of the older standards which were a series of very stringent and objective criteria, the new standards are much more subjective in nature. As opposed to having to know a very specific set of facts and skills, student must be able to analyze, synthesize and otherwise use higher order thinking skills. It looks a lot better on paper than the old standards.
IDEA 1997 required students with disabilities to participate in state testing. You see, IDEA 1997 was actually aligning with the prior reauthorization of the ESEA which in fact had almost the same identical provisions that NCLB had. Yes, you read right. After all of that wrangling, they didn’t make a lot of substantial changes from the old ESEA to NCLB except one which was tying performance and compliance to funding. That made all the difference in the world. However, IDEA ’97 made a provision for students who could not participate in state wide testing because of their severe disabilities. It was designed for students who were so severe that no level of accommodation would allow them to even approach being competitive on a state test. This was called the alternate assessment. Again, each state could devise its own alternate assessment. In Georgia, they did not align their alternate assessment with the state curriculum instead they aligned it with the goals and objectives from the IEP. Which make sense to me, since the IEP is what determines what the curriculum is, especially for students with the most severe disabilities.
However, with NCLB, this was no longer good enough. Instead of the primacy of the IEP which was pretty firmly established in IDEA ’97, the IEP became subservient to NCLB in 2004. Congress calls this alignment. I call it ridiculous and discriminatory.
In 2005, the scramble was on to comply with this new “alignment,” specifically the highly qualified provisions. The alternate assessment, however, was still in place as it was. However, since it was not aligned to state standards, guess what? It did not meet the federal requirements.
So now we get to this letter dated June 30th sent to our state school superintendent. It reiterates the fact that the Geogia Alternate Assessment (GAA) does not meet federal requirements and, more serious, puts limitations on the grant awards from the federal government. “Mandatory Oversight” is the term they used. The smell of the hot asphalt we smelled in downtown Atlanta in June was actually the smell of skid marks left by a very motivated Education Department as they knew they had to get on the stick with this.
To be fair, the Georgia Dept. of Ed. was in front of this by a fair bit. They had already sent a couple of teachers out and about around the state to talk about aligning IEP objectives to state standards. Notice that word “alignment” again. They knew this was an issue and were working towards addressing it. However the brave pair of teachers who went out giving these workshops did not know what the GAA was going to look like, as of last spring. Their understanding seemed to be that there might be a phase-in or that there would be a mixture of aligned objectives and daily living skills objectives. But this was not the case at all. I’m sure they were as mortified as the rest of us when they saw that the IEP didn’t enter into the GAA at all!
This is why the state website has all sorts of ideas for students with severe disabilities, but at the high school level you’ll notice that they don’t focus on the 11th grade standards which is THE grade that determines AYP. In fact, I think there might be ONE example. That’s because they thought they would have more time to implement this process. When that letter came in June, time had run out. With several schools starting at the end of July, there was no time to spend doing a lot of discussion, debating or collaborating. They needed to get manuals printed, training materials together and get this show literally on the road ASAP. As it is, we only went through our training a little over a month ago. So this is a RUSH job, folks. Make no mistake.
Okay, now that I got that out, I feel better. To be fair, I am connecting a fair number of dots, here, between various sources. There may be some mistakes and I’ll gladly correct them if they are pointed out.
dick
No Child Left Behind: Some Predictions November 29, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Blogging, Ed Policy Discussion, NCLB.comments closed
Okay, I said I was going to write about something else, and you wouldn’t believe how hard it was! But I’m sticking to it. Sort of. It forced me to go out looking at other people’s blogs and see what they are talking about. But still, nothing seemed to touch off my imagination.
I did read a very interesting paper on the No Child Left Behind Act from the Hoover Institute. I think this should be required reading for anyone who wants to discuss anything about NCLB, its reauthorization, its politics or provisions. Basically it tells about where it came from and how the thing got passed. The parties involved were so desperate to get some sort of education bill passed that they left a lot of ambiguities that needed to be worked out later. And these chickens are returning to roost, today, with all of the problems we see.
I predict that NCLB is either going to remain substantially the same or it is going to be left to rot on the vine. There are entirely too many competing interests in this thing for it to survive the sort of horse trading that took place in order for it to be passed the first time. What congress voted and cobbled together back then was something that no one was terribly happy with. No one, except George Bush.
NCLB is up for reauthorization in 2007, but I predict that it will not be reauthorized in 2007 but the stake holders will hold off until after the presidential election of 2008 just like they did in 1999. However, unlike the original NCLB bill, the reauthorization will come under serious fire from special interest groups and it will be ripped limb-from-limb. Both houses of congress are more divisive now than they were then. Each party has sought to kick their party moderates out in favor of more extremism on either side.
Those thinking this thing will just go away need to think again. Since each side of the debate is so polarized, I see things remaining frozen the way they are. Since everyone is equally unhappy, it’s safer to leave things the way they are rather than run the risk of making the level of unhappiness unequal and having some people more happy than others. Having some people happy, while leaving others more unhappy violates the spirit of NCLB which is to make sure that if no one is made happy than no one can be made more unhappy than someone else.
Okay, I’m still into policy with this post and need to post something that might be actually useful. How about semi humorous?
No Child Left Behind:
The Football Version
Author Unknown
l. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.
5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.
If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.
Hat tip to my teacher-friend “Bubba” who was sent my URL but probably doesn’t read it because it’s not written by someone with a 1-900 number!
dick
Hacking Away at the GAA November 17, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment.comments closed
Next week we’re into Thanksgiving Break and then 3 more weeks to Christmas. Today I made a mad dash for completing a large chunk of Taz’s GAA and it took most of the morning just for the half dozen tasks I had set up. Some turned out better than others. I got about 90 pictures and about 30 minutes of video. I quickly got the idea that still pictures were going to give me more flexibility as far as how the story is told.
And let’s be honest, here. We’re telling a story. The idea that Taz is working on the 11th grade level with 11th grade materials is ludicrous beyond words. I’m still trying to teach him how to wipe his own bottom. I’m going to use at least one video, just to give evaluators some idea of what we’re dealing with. But I’m wondering if they will even care about the hours of work put into trying to adapt 11th grade literature for someone functioning on a 3 year-old level.
dick
Para-Educator Day November 15, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Paraeducators.comments closed
Somewhere, someone designated today as official Para-Educator Day (a.ka. paraprofessional day, teacher aid day, teacher assistant day…etc) but they failed to tell me about it. It was announced over the intercom this morning so the paras and I found out at the same time! No time to prepare anything. I usually make a proper go of it the week before we get off for Christmas Break, bringing in breakfast and cooking something for lunch plus various gifts and such. It’s quite a deal since I have more paras that anyone else in the building and mine have arguably the toughest job in the school.
So if you see a para today, let them know that you appreciate them and the work they do as theirs is often among the most thankless of jobs.
dick
A Reader Question: to Label or Not to Label? November 14, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Autism/Asperger's, Parent Support, Services, Special Ed..comments closed
I adore questions from readers because that means I don’t have to think about what to write about. It also means I can procrastinate more on the nightmare that is the Georgia Alternate Assessment.
Alexander’s Daddy asks:
I need a little advise. My 3.5 year old will be entering kindergarten in the fall of 2008. He has high functioning autism, possibly asperger’s. I’m convinced I would have been diagnosed as a child based on the DSM today, but of course I never received a label. Do you think my son would be better off starting school without the label. He doesn’t need speech help, perhaps some intensive OT, but I am concerned that the label may in someway be used against him by teachers unable to handle an active boy. What are your thoughts? I bring this up because you wrote that the schools are now actually rewarded with funding for inclusion so maybe I don’t have anything to be concerned about.
This sounds a lot like my youngest son, Percy. He was evaluated at the age of 3, and was found eligible for some services at that time under the significant delay label, including O.T. In fact, OT was the main service although he did go to a special preschool 2 days a week for half days but stayed in his regular church preschool the other days. The fact is, is that your son could be eligible for services NOW, and if all he gets is OT, now is a good time to start.
And this is what I think most professionals and other parents will tell you. Go to the school board office, ask to see a coordinator for special needs preschool and see if they can do an evaluation. They’ll tell you if your son is eligible and for what services he is eligible. Medical diagnoses will be considered, but the education system will want to do their own thing. If he is found to be eligible, the Special Needs Preschool (SNP) coordinator will explain the process for getting him services. These do not have to be full-time.
Here’s the deal: you really do not want to wait until kindergarten to go through this. If your son has delays, you need to know NOW. If he is significantly behind now, he will continue to get more and more behind over time. The problem is this accelerated curriculum that is going on around the country. I harp and grouse about NCLB, but this has been going on for 15 years where the curriculum is drifted into lower and lower grades. Kindergartners are expected to enter in knowing colors, shapes, numbers and letters. They will begin simple reading and simple math and will begin writing. It truly is much more intense than it was when you and I were going through school.
Also there is the whole social skills business. Fortunately my youngest has really picked up quickly from being around more typical peers (instead of his brother who is definitely high functioning autism) and might not even need anything but OT next year. But students are expected to sit still, do lots of work and to generally behave coming right in. Most children will since they were in preschool or daycare prior to kindergarten. Jane and I (mostly Jane) has worked very hard to make sure both our boys get as much social skills exposure as they possibly could and as early on as we could stand it.
I usually advise getting the services as soon as possible. It is far and away easier to be discharged from a service than to try to get in later on. Percy’s OT evaluation took several months, and he did eventually get qualified but did not qualify for speech which we were sort of really hoping for. Today, it is obvious he doesn’t really need it. Thomas qualified for speech, OT and PT at the beginning but we were eventually able to discharge him from PT. But I kept him on PT consult for an extra year, just because I knew that getting back in would be very difficult.
I wouldn’t worry about the label being used by teachers to exclude your son. What it might do is help obtain some help and eliminate some grief. Teachers are becoming increasingly educated about autism thanks to the parents who blazed the trail ahead of you. The label might help them access some knowledge and adaptations for him where they might otherwise be prone to labeling him with a behavior disorder or even bad parenting. Yeah, some teachers still like to lay it all at the feet of parents. Sometimes it belongs there and sometimes it doesn’t.
dick
A Bit about FTE and Funding November 13, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment, Services, Special Education.comments closed
The battle rages on.
Last week, I was able to get a few things on video for GAA collection purposes. Taz is such a spastic, the baseline data is going to be relatively easy to do. Getting him to actually demonstrate learning; well that’s another story entirely. Sometimes he can and sometimes he can’t. Fortunately I have a few more months to worry about that.
I’m not sure if anyone else has collected anything or not. Mr. Pyle is managing 3 students and he teaches none of them. So he’s going to have to be getting up on other teachers to collect the data. This is also what I’m going to have to do with a student who I was assigned to who I have never laid eyes on. In event that we get crunched for time, I can adapt UP tasks that I’m using for Taz. It seems easier to take something simple and make it more sophisticated than the other way around. But maybe that is just me.
I am afraid that my students will master very few of their IEP goals this year, because of this state mandated circus. I can and will involve other students in the GAA activities but remember that the Georgia standards bear no resemblance to actual IEP goals and objectives. At least not for my students who are on a purely functional curriculum. I have 18 months to get Spaz potty trained. 18 months to get a 21 year-old autistic kid to successfully use the toilet in hopes that he MIGHT have a shot at group home living down the road, but my time is being soaked up by this other crap. But then, there seems to always be something demanding more time and more urgency.
And right at the moment, it happens to be the December FTE count. FTE = Full Time Equivalency which is basically the way services are funded in special education. While many will argue that this count does not affect funding, don’t be fooled. FTE always affects funding and it always will. It is the process of counting the number of students in Special Education and the number of hours of services each student receives. It is sorted out by exceptionality, grade, age and number of hours in regular vs special education. Actually ALL students are counted in a FTE count, but regular education students are pretty much grouped by age and grade. It is the special education kids that create counting nightmares. For instance, Ravi gets half an hour of speech, 2 hours of adaptive PE and the rest of the time is allotted to Profound intellectual disability (PID) services during a typical week. Simple, right? Well, he also gets consultative VI and PT services. He also requires in a bus with a wheelchair lift. Plus he goes into the community for about 4 hours per week. All of these factors are also counted in the FTE.
Some students spend only part of their day in special education, so their FTE is going to be less than my students who are in special education the whole day. Unless they are in the community, and then they get credit for being in a “regular” environment. There has been some studies done in Georgia regarding funding and some reforms have been made in order to encourage more inclusion. Funding clearly drives many, many decisions in education and special education in particular. For instance, in Georgia the funding formula is weighted based on disability. It is assumed that some students (like mine) will involve more time and money to be educated than someone with a very mild disability, like a speech impediment requiring a couple of hours of speech per week. In other states, the funding is the same no matter what the disability is. LD students are funded the same as PID students. In Georgia, OHI students get funded more than EBD students and Autism is not even funded separately but under the OHI service code. What this means, in Georgia, is that when a child’s eligibility is considered, it makes much more sense to label and serve a student under OHI or Autism than it does for EBD because of the way they are funded. In the past, mainstreaming and co-teaching were practices that were actually punished through the funding formula. My understanding is that this problem has been addressed so that less restrictive environments are actually rewarded with more funding.
I’m not saying I understand all the nuances of the FTE funding process. I’ve seen a few presentations on the subject and it is drilled into our heads that this is massively serious business. This is why we fill out the count 3 weeks before the count is actually due to the state department. Yeah, I just love it when the Powers That Be take a deadline and then move it up days and weeks ahead of time until there is virtually no time to actually do the thing that is required. NOT!
The final deadline for the GAA is sometime at the end of March, but our county is making everyone be finished by March 1st. Again, the fixation is on administrative compliance.
dick
A site that better explains issues surrounding special
Oh, and most many of my acronyms can be found here or here. Actually, that last link is a MUST read. I especially like the acronym GASTD: Go Ahead and Sue The District!
My own lame attempt at addressing acronyms is here. And it is dire need of an update!
Call Me Ishmael November 9, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment.comments closed
Call me Ishmael.
In order to meet the requirements of the Georgia Alternate Assessment, (GAA), I must use 11th grade materials and teach to 11th grade performance standards. There actually are some standards that my students might actually be able to do, but the state of Georgia did not put them on the list that we are to pick from.
You see, people, this is what happens when you let the federal government take over the public school system. You get the abomination known as NCLB. You get people who sit in a building thinking up crap with no knowledge of consequences. Georgia’s previous GAA did not meet federal standards, so they came up with this lunacy. Which is why, even on the state level, they don’t know beans. We end up with choices that are uniformly stinky and undesirable, much like the midterm election we recently suffered through.
So I am trying to turn my thinking around. I have to go from thinking like a teacher trying to meet the individual needs of my students to being a teacher trying to meet the requirements of the state. The requirements of the state have absolutely nothing to do with the needs of my students. So I am going to have to simply swim in a puddle with this pig known as GAA.
Or in this case, it is a whale. A big, white, evil whale. “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!” I am going to attempt to modify the novel Moby Dick into something my students can work with. This means processing a novel of over 700 pages into one or two overlays consisting of maybe 20 picture points. I’m presently gathering up various pictorial renditions of the story using our public library system. I’ve got the Patrick Stewart video. I don’t care what it takes or what the cost, I will do it. I will keep going and going on this GAA stuff and pursue it to whatever end. There will be no escape. Day and night and night and day, I will pursue it. I will not rest until the GAA gushes its black blood into the sea! DEATH TO THE GAA!
Teacher absences and Health November 1, 2006
Posted by Daniel Dage in Survivors, Uncategorized.comments closed
GAA is still the dominant influence in my teaching life, but I’m going to take a shar p turn, here.
Every Friday and every Monday, the principal of Magnolia High, Mr. “Fightin’” Joe Clark sends out an email to everyone announcing how many of the staff are out. Last Friday, about 20% of the staff were absent. Monday, about 12% of the staff were absent while only 8% of the students were absent. Our Superintendent mentioned this in a beginning-of-the-year speech he gavem where he said that teachers were missing more days than the students. It would be interesting to know how wide spread the problem is, and what the cause is.
In my classroom, I rarely go a week without at least one person out for some reason. As for me, last year I didn’t miss a day and haven’t so far this year. But if it does happen where I have to, it’s not a big deal. I just find it more of a bother to be out because it takes time to put things back together after just one day out and the kids like to punish me for not being there upon my return.
But there is a problem that is lurking in the wings, and it seems to be growing nationwide. Last Sunday, I happened to catch part of a PBS special on it, and this months Reader’s digest had at least 2 articles on it. The radio waves are filled with advertisements warning about it an epidemic that is mostly preventable. And it’s not autism.
I’m talking about diabetes, specifically Type II Diabetes. Apparently this is what happened to the little girl I was doing Hospital Homebound for last year, and they didn’t know she had it. But it is a growing problem in the U.S. and threatens to overtake our healthcare system. It is also becoming a global problem. Apparently having all the food we want is killing us.
According to the PBS special, those of Hispanic or African descent have a 1 in 2 chance of getting diabetes at some point. That is an incredible rate! And the consequences of carelessly ignoring the issue can be quite dire. The good news is that it is controllable and perhaps even preventable. I’m sure there are readers who are more familiar with this that I am, and could expand on the topic much more.
Aside from the ads and publicity, this has been something that has been casting a shadow over my own classroom. Queen happens to have almost every risk factor there is for this disorder, including a temperament that is in deep denial of the problem. She already takes blood pressure medication that she does not take regularly as prescribed. She insists on eating the fattiest, most sugary substances within reach and is relatively inert when it comes to exercise. Her lack of physical mobility is becoming more of an issue as our students require more physical involvement.
Coach is also being monitored for his blood sugar, his heart and his blood pressure. He is only about 25, but is overweight at about 290 lbs and about 5’11”. The good news is that he has dropped almost 50 pounds over the last 18 months, and is getting serious about his diet and exercise. He seems to have some motivation in his favor, as well as being of European descent which for some reason helps.
Patience is in her early 30’s, is not significantly overweight and eats relatively well. She’s probably the most fit of the 4 of us.. However, she is of mixed Hispanic and African descent and she says it is easier counting members of her family who *don’t* have diabetes than ones who do. Both her parents and 5 of the 7 siblings of her parents have it. She suffers from low blood pressure, so her risk is still pretty moderate.
And then there is me. I quit smoking months ago and have weighed 220 lbs for the last 10 years at 6’1”. So I am a bit over weight but at least stable. My blood pressure and general health have been pretty good and my family’s health has been good with no known risk factors. I know I’m not getting enough exercise which is a challenge with a bad knee.
As far as being physical, while we do lots of lifting and positioning and moving, it is not quite as physical of a job as my own ancestors who were all farmers. We have our own kitchen in our room, so we have access to food all the time.
And parents…egad! ALL of the parents of my kids are severely obese. Every. Single. One. I hadn’t thought about that at all until just now.
Am I being alarmist? I don’t know. I do know that I would rather NOT have diabetes than have to deal with whatever complications occur with it. I see a lot of over weight educators (even bigger than me) out waddling around. Could we be smarter about it? Should we? Is our healthcare system on the verge of collapse because of this one disease? These are all sobering questions but I suspect I’m not the only one thinking about the possibility of dealing with these issues.
Links from PBS (although not the special I watched) :
Frontline on India: A Pound of flesh
American Family: Dealing with diabeties
Second Opinion: type II Diabeties
dick
