Fear, Intimidation and Retaliation: The Atlanta Cheating Scandal and You

I promised in my last entry that I would blog a bit about the Atlanta Teacher scandal.  How little did I know how closely this thing would hit home for me, personally.  But you’ll have to hang on for a minute.

As I wrote my last entry, I began looking deeper and deeper into that situation, watching and reading hours of testimony given by witnesses.  There were initially over 170 educators from 40 different schools named in the investigation.  As time went on, educators came forward, confessed and cooperated and in return they were given a sort of leniency.  But it was all predicated on an admission of guilt.  They had to confess that they had some role in falsifying or corrupting the testing process.   One by one they came forward and made deals.  Until there were only 12 defendants left who went the distance and went to trial and all the way to sentencing.

Actually, that isn’t quite true.  There was at least one who could not be prosecuted because she died before she could have her day in court.

As I poured over the history of this unfortunate incident my heart went out to each and every person involved.  Everyone.  Of course the children who were fooled into thinking they were somehow gifted or doing better than they really were and subsequently failed to receive earlier intervention that might have come if the tests were serving the purpose they are purported to serve.  But in truth, these tests have never served that purpose.  George W. Bush made No Child Left Behind the crown jewel of his legacy.   Barack Obama took NCLB and “improved” it by taking the most onerous parts of it and incentivized it during a recession that gripped the nation through “Race to the Top.”  Beverly Hall won her accolades as Superintendent of The Year in 2009– on his watch.

The teachers involved lived in a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation.  Their jobs were on the line.  They needed the benefits for taking care of their own children and to put food on their own tables.  Even if they didn’t cheat, they knew it was happening.  Erasing student scores was wrong.  We all know this.  But I often ask myself, “what would I have done?”  Then I ask myself “What am I going to do?”  Because you see, things have changed but maybe not that much.   Notice that these teachers were sentenced on April 1st– a mere 3 weeks before the state of Georgia goes into its testing season.  Fear, intimidation, retaliation.  Those sentences and this whole story casts a long, long shadow over every single teacher in this state and even across our entire nation.  NONE of us are immune from the fear, intimidation and the fear of retaliation caused by the spectre of the long arm of the law reaching and grasping us with its cold and loveless fingers.

I felt for the judge.  He really pleaded and did almost everything he could do to keep from having to hand down sentences to these educators.  He delayed his sentencing by a day, in order to give them all a chance to make a deal with the district attorney.  It reminded me of the story of Pontius Pilate who did not want to administer a certain other sentence, trying the flogging first and then appealing to the crowds.  I’m convinced he took no pleasure in this.  Everything about this trial was painful to watch.  I know the educators did wrong and deserved some form of punishment.  But are they that much of a threat to society that they need to be taken off the streets and incarcerated with rapists and murderers?  They’ve lost their credentials that they spent a good portion of their lives acquiring and will never be able to practice their profession again.  They are jobless and in some cases indigent, unable to afford to pay for their own appeals.  They are broke and broken.

As I watched the videos of the sentencing and the efforts of the attorneys to appeal for some mercy, I was genuinely moved by the entire thing.  I felt a sense of hopelessness for every single person in that courtroom.  I would have taken the deal.  Any deal.  Whatever it took to wash my hands of this dirty, filthy mess.

And that is what this entire testing culture is.  It’s not about the children.  It’s not even about accountability and it certainly is not about teaching and learning.  It’s pure filth.  And as educators, we all have to swim in this hot, steaming vat of it.  I’m beginning to wonder if there is any pension, insurance benefit or salary that can possibly wash the stink of it off of any of us.  We’re in it for the kids.  But it’s not about them anymore.  It’s all about the data.

In my last entry, I described our testing season.  We are now a mere 3 days into a 10 day ordeal.  I am working with a team of 6 other extremely dedicated educators who like our kids and enjoy teaching them.  And 3 days in, each and every single one of us have had to write at least one incident report, reporting some sort of “testing irregularity” that will put us on the radar of the Department Of Education and subsequent investigations that might just put an end to that.  Most of these things are out of our control.  The new computerized testing administration is full of glitches and problems which are still being hashed out and has caused most of these “irregularities.”  In some cases, entire tests will be invalidated because of these problems.  Some students didn’t get their accommodations and we scrambled to make the best of things.  Only time will tell if we did enough to satisfy all of the oversight.

Parents all around the state  and country are starting to push back for a variety of reasons.  But one thing they realize is that our education system is hopelessly broken and every effort by our government to “fix” it has made it even more broken.  One of the reasons schools push so hard for students to take these tests is because there is money tied not only to the pass rates, but simply for having at least 95% of the students take the test on test day.    Fear, intimidation and retaliation.  While those Atlanta teachers who cheated didn’t do the rest of the dedicated teachers in the country any favors, the system has not gotten any kinder.  It continues to cultivate the exact same culture that incubated the scandal in the first place.  And it has made teaching a much more difficult and less rewarding profession than at any other time in our history.  And its starting to show.  I would have a really hard time recommending this profession to any student given the present climate.  Back when I got my undergrad degree in agriculture education, only about 2 of us out of 10 who graduated the program that December had any intention of returning to the classroom, with the rest opting to go into agribusiness.  I’ve always liked teaching, and still do.  But so much of the job involves so many other things besides teaching students, and almost all of it revolves around “accountability.”  Covering your bum.  It’s increasingly difficult to survive and thrive in that sort of climate for students and the teachers who teach them.   We’re sowing seeds that will reap a bitter harvest for this country unless we can regain some control over a testing culture that has gotten out of control.

Just remember that whenever you hear the word “Accountability” when applied to education, it is shorthand for fear, intimidation and retaliation.

5/4/2015 Edit: Thank you John Oliver!

IEP Academic Goals: A Remnant of an Older Age?

At my job, tensions and stress are running high as we try to do everything perfectly for a state organization that has all but declared war on us. Having failed at the ballot box, they are trying to accomplish administratively what they could not get done politically. At least this is how it feels. The level of compliancy required of our special education department surpasses anything done in any other school in the state. And we have 66 days to get all 1000 IEPs perfect.

In my previous writings regarding goals and objectives, my experiences were with those students who were k-8 or those with more severe disabilities. Since changing to a more inclusive environment that makes up the vast majority of those receiving services in high school, my eyes have been opened. There are some glaring problems and inconsistencies in the process that extend far beyond my particular school or the students I serve.

With students who have severe disabilities, or in a self-contained setting the caseloads were relatively modest and I was their main teacher for most of the day. This made collecting data, making observations and writing effective goals relatively easy. Whats more, these students were following an alternate and adapted curriculum, so even if we were basing what we did on grade-level standards, we had a great deal of latitude in what was taught.

In a more typical high school setting, none of these things are true. The caseload sizes are larger, the students switch classrooms several times daily and may even switch their class schedules in mid year. On top of this, the caseload manager may or may not even have this student in one of their classes. All of these things make monitoring progress problematic.

However the standards-based curriculum has rendered traditional academic IEP goals and objectives almost useless and meaningless on the high school level. As a caseload manager I have absolutely no say in the curriculum of a student as it is dictated by the state. The graduation requirements are dictated by the state. The topics on the end of course tests (EOCTs) are dictated by the state. The amount that the test counts toward the final grade is dictated by the state. The type of diploma is dictated by the state. The scope, sequence, and the speed at which material must be covered is dictated by the test, which is dictated by the state.

You see the trend?

So the question is this: what can an IEP committee possibly write in the way of academic goals that are meaningful? We can write anything we wish, although we are admonished to make sure they are based on the state standards. The problem is that the goals that we write are worthless if they do not lead to a student passing a required course that gets them through the required exam that grants them the required credits in order to get the one college prep diploma offered by our state. The true measure of any IEP component is whether or not it gives the student access to the regular education curriculum in the least restrictive environment. At the present time, there are no academic goals that succeed in doing that. The dictated curriculum can not be modified nor can the passing score on the required exam be modified.

The frustration I’m feeling comes from the fact that we are being pushed and driven into writing progress reports over our academic goals. Suzie is a 9^th grader who is struggling mightily in her algebra class. She struggles with algebraic concepts like positive and negative integers and multi-step problems. She is lost with anything involving fractions. And she feels absolutely hopeless when confronted by a word problem. Suzie is not alone as most of the students in her co-taught class struggle the same way. You may know some students like Suzie. YOU may be like Suzie! Oh, and this is Suzie’s second time taking algebra after failing it the first time.

In the old days, we had a lot of options in what we could do for Suzie. There were other math classes that were geared to business, career and consumer needs. Suzie would like to be a chef or a work in a restaurant after graduation. But the hopes for graduation start to fade as she is stuck and unable to pass algebra the second time around.

What academic goal could I write for her to help her get her diploma? I COULD write one relating to learning how to use a calculator, as that is a standard test condition. But what objective and goal do I write that will help her pass the class? And once I write that goal, how can I or another teacher support and monitor it?

The academic goals and objectives of every high school student in our state are already written in the standards. There is nothing an IEP committee can do to alter those. The best we could do is to perhaps pick a couple of general goals to monitor. But monitoring is already taking place in the form of benchmark assessments, tests and quizzes and instruction is altered on the basis of those formative assessments in order to pass the summative assessment of the EOCT.

I wrote my goals with fine precision, making sure they were SMART and were in line with both the standards and the needs of the students. Suzie struggles with multi-step problems, which is a pretty consistent thread throughout any of the math classes. So my goal is “Suzie will independently solve an array of multi-step equations, using her calculator, scoring at least 75% on 3 consecutive trials.”

It is a wonderfully concise goal and designed for easy monitoring. I could give Suzie an array of problems at least 3 times and see if she can pass my little quiz. OR, more likely, I am going to look in the grade book to see if she has passed 3 consecutive quizzes. If she can do it 3 consecutive times, I’m pretty confident of mastery. If she can’t I am going to figure out why and see if there are any accommodations I can offer to help her. But what of she can’t do more than 2 in a row? Ever?

Do I lower the bar on the goal? Do I change the goal to something she might be able to master? This is how this game ends up being played, as there is some pressure to show mastery of goals. But even if Suzie has mastered 100% of her IEP objectives, if she does not pass her algebra EOCT, she is in for a third round or how ever many rounds until she either passes it or drops out. So where should I, as a teacher, devote my limited time? Should I monitor her and the other 25 students on my caseload more often and give them more quizzes or should I spend more time trying to teach them and help them pass the quizzes and tests they are already assigned? Do I help them by making MORE work for both them and me in order to get data for the IEP or do I devote myself to getting them through the class so they can get a diploma?

Unfortunately, there are no diplomas for mastered IEP objectives. There are no credits toward graduation that can be earned through mastering IEP goals. EOCTs are not tailored to the current functioning of a student who has a disability. Individual Education Programs can address student supports, but they can not touch the requirements of getting a diploma as those apply to everyone, regardless of need, disability, aspirations or aptitude. Academic goals at the high school level are not worth the time it takes to write one let alone the time spent trying to track them individually. The academic goals at the high school are very explicit and clearly spelled out in the state standards. Everything written in the IEP should be geared to accessing and mastering those standards if that is what our schools have turned in to. We don’t need extra academic goals to track unless the state is going to award some credit for students mastering them.

I don’t mind extra work and effort if it is for something that is worthwhile and produces some results. But the standardization of the curriculum, diploma and tests works against our kids who are by definition nonstandard. We are trying to fit square pegs into round holes here. Our kids are not stupid. They are often creative and brilliant in very nonstandard ways. We do nothing to honor creativity by wringing it out of them by our insistence upon the standardization of our educational system. We are going to have to find creative ways to facilitate and reward their brilliance and creativity while addressing their strengths as well as weaknesses.

I suppose that is why I am bothered and overwhelmed by the task at hand. It requires me to pigeon hole my kids into categories and then justify why they are not fitting into a system that was not built for them. While our school does its best to offer individualized and engaging ways to meet the needs of our students, we are hamstrung by a system that punishes nonstandard ways of doing things. The state wants to rig the game so they can point at us and say “SEE?!? You can not possibly meet the needs of these students in your setting!” Never mind that it isn’t working in the other settings any better. We’re a nontraditional setting, teaching nontraditional students in a nontraditional way. The measures and systems designed to measure us were designed for and by those married to the old system. We exist because there are those looking for ways to escape and flee the old way of doing things. They are refugees from places where they previously did not fit and did not thrive. And now those old forces are marshaling their influence and position in order to make sure no one thrives here, either.

Sir Ken Robinson is carrying the message. Am I the only one for whom this resonates?

The End of NCLB..?

On Friday afternoon, my wife called out to me “Hey!  You have to see this!”

And there on the news was a story about the waivers offered by our beloved national education secretary that would allow states to escape many of the more ornerous NCLB provisions.  Which is to say, almost all of them.  And the headline read “No Child Left Behind Ends.”

Could it be true?  Could it REALLY be true?  To me, this would be the educational equivalent of the the falling of the Berlin Wall.  Perhaps…just perhaps..we might see some real reform in education.  Meaningful reform.  Something besides the test scores.

Georgia is a state that has already delivered its waiver application.  Oddly enough, it was delivered by one of the authors of the original NCLB law, Johnny Isakson.  Remember him?  Basically, congress has not done its job in doing anything to fix this law simply because it is unfix-able.  It never was and it never will be.

Isakson was one of the original authors of No Child Left Behind. But last week the Georgia Republican sponsored a bill with other GOP lawmakers to scrap the adequate yearly progress requirement. No Child Left Behind requires that all students be “proficient” in math and science by 2014. Those benchmarks are widely considered to be unrealistic.

Isakson said that after a decade of implementation the law “has served its purpose in raising expectations and standards.””We knew when we wrote No Child Left Behind that if it worked, we would reach this point where schools would not be able to continue to meet AYP (adequate yearly progress) because the bar is set higher and higher each year for schools,” he said.

According to Isakson, they knew when they wrote the law, that schools would eventually all fail. The law was PROGRAMMED to fail!  These are the people we send to Washington and this is what drinking that water and breathing that air does to people.  And it illustrates perfectly why the congress has no business dictating federal education standards.  The law was destined for bankruptcy even while it was being written and the lawmakers who wrote it KNEW it!

But this is not the end of NCLB.  It is not the end of testing.  It is not the end of the alternate assessment that has plagued those teachers of students with multiple and severe disabilities.  There is still Race To The Top, which Georgia just received a year ago.  And those who are most saddled by a law that never had them in mind when it was written, will be the last to realize the benefits of this waiver.  That is because the waiver was also not written with these students in mind.  But hopefully what eventually trickles down will be no worse than what is already in place.

I am somewhat hopeful that the career and work-ready provisions might at least help those students who could be employable with enough and the right kind of training, when they would otherwise stand no chance of getting into a college. And yes, there are a large number of students where this is true; they will not be able to get into a college and they have no desire to do so.  But at least by fostering a culture of productivity and relevant skill-based training, it might prevent them from dropping out and actually give them an edge in life.  At the present time, the work skills of a college drop-out and a high school drop-out are almost exactly the same due to vocational funding and programs being cut and minimized in order to switch the focus to collage-ready.  And this focus has been particularly hard-felt for students with disabilities.

NCLB has been little more than an expensive and nightmarish public awareness campaign.  According to Isakson, they wanted to put a spotlight on poor performing schools and poor performing groups of students by raising expectations and raising standards.  But the law was outdated the day it was signed, as the world economy has been globalized.    We need innovation, creativity, enthusiasm for learning, entrepreneurship and exploration.  And these were exactly the things that NCLB has succeeded in killing with the standardized test-taking culture that saw the diminishing or elimination of the arts in education.  While the rest of the world has been learning how to solve problems and create, our kids have been learning how to fill in bubbles.

The Iowa Debate

I watched the debate among Republican candidates in Iowa, and it was interesting.   I can see why the economy dominated as far as the topic of the questions.  But we also heard all sorts of questions about their religion, sexual orientation, abortion or beliefs about these various moral and personal issues.  I think the question asked to Michele Bachmann about her submitting to her husband as president had to be about the lowest question of the evening.

There was exactly one question asked about education (at 1:42:00 in the linked video above), specifically about NCLB and the questioner really missed the boat on it by only asking it of two of the candidates and if you blink you will miss the less than 60 seconds spent on this topic.  But Jon Huntsman scored a home run in my books by saying he would work toward a elimination of it, but still did not focus on that question and went back to the raising the debt ceiling .  Hermann Cain was a bit less clear about what he would do about NCLB, but he also registered his displeasure with it.  The questioner should have taken a hand vote of who liked NCLB and would repeal it.  Sixty seconds is all they could give this important topic.  Shame on FOX, shame on the candidates.

 

Achievements: Getting the Lame to Walk

I know I have sometimes gotten down and negative here, as I often use this as my own personal forum to vent various frustrations.  But this is also a good place to tell about stuff I’ve accomplished to any would-be future employers out there who are looking for a special education teacher.  Remember, I AM HQ!

I had a student who came to me in a wheelchair.  This is not unusual, since most of my students nowadays seem to be in wheelchairs.  However this little guy was different because he could, in fact, walk.  He had an irregular gait due to his particular syndrome, but he could walk and get around pretty well.  And that was kind of the problem.  He was getting around TOO well.  And he would get into everything and destroy whatever he got his hands on.  He was all hands and all active.  And he knew how to drive his chair probably better than he could walk.  So containing him and keeping him out of trouble involved finding some elaborate way of blocking the wheelchair up so he couldn’t move it.  This was easier said than done as he was also fairly clever and persistent.  The wheelchair was basically used by everyone as a restraint device.  Keep in mind, he was seen as unmanageable all the way through middle school.

And within 2 years, I got the boy to a place where he could be put just about anywhere and he would basically stay put.  He would still occasionally want to wander off, but he was easily redirected.  He went from being my most unmanageable challenge to being one of my best behaved students.  And he no longer needs or uses the wheelchair.  Not at school, not on the bus and not at home.

I’m not going to get into all the behavioral techniques used to getting him to that place.  I will just say that perseverance and determination were major factors toward getting him where he is today.  I’m not to proud to say that when he first came to me, I didn’t want him in my room.  I thought we were already overcrowded and understaffed.  Haha!  Little did I know what was to come!  But I had no choice but to bite the bullet and dig in and teach this student how to conduct himself in a classroom without wrecking the place.  He will still wreck things if he gets his hands on them, but I have little toys and things he can use to keep his hands busy.  He’s still very active, but he can be active in his own space.  While there are still a whole lot of things he can not do, he can now be maintained without his wheelchair.  This is a relief for his family who previously had to cart the thing around everywhere they took him.  It is less bother for the bus, as they no longer have to mess with the lift.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention that this accomplishment in no way affected the school’s test scores, graduation rate or AYP.   At no time did teaching him how to control himself address a state academic standard.   And there is no part of the Georgia High School Graduation Test that measures whether or not a student requires a wheelchair. None of this will appear on the Georgia Alternate Assessment.  I took time out from academic instruction in order to address this students needs, which pretty much violates whatever tenets are set by NCLB.  There is no way to align the goal of not needing a wheelchair to any state standard.  And it also was not explicitly stated as a goal in his IEP.  Our beloved governor has not offered any merit pay to teachers who can get a child to not need a wheelchair anymore.  There are no incentives offered by the state of Georgia to recruit or retain people that can do this.  There is nothing on any evaluation instrument for teachers that says this is even a worthwhile activity.

Despite several who told me this endeavor was a waste of time, I did it anyway.  And while I have no test scores, enhanced pay, accolades, awards, or anything from other people that says this is at all important, I do have an empty wheelchair in the corner that has not been used in a very, very long time, except to hold a coat or a bag.  And I have the audacity to feel pretty good about that!

Lots of my fellow teachers do stuff like this all the time and we don’t talk about, because it doesn’t address a state standard.  It isn’t recognized or rewarded because it doesn’t result in a college scholarship.  And this student can’t give me a recommendation to an employer because he can not read, write or talk.  But he can walk, which is how he gets around now because he does not need a chair to restrain him.  He has learned to control himself to some degree.

The story of this student is not over, as he continues to progress.  He has a long way to go, and I hope he continues to progress.  But it will have to be with someone else.  Perhaps there are other students in other schools that need to learn self control.  It would save some poor high school teacher’s hair if more kids could learn that skill in middle school.  And that is sort of where I’m aiming at the moment.  I would like to get into a smaller community and with a younger set in order to see if I can apply some of this experience earlier on.

Pay for Performance

And other disasters inaugurated by our beloved governor. The Atlanta Journal’s blog asked a question: did Governor Perdue leave education better off than he found it? In order to be fair we have to remember what it was like when he came into office. Governor Roy Barnes was often called “King Roy” because decisions were made without any input from educators. He came up with what he termed the “A+ Initiative” which did limit class sizes but was also a call for accountability. It was an early precursor to No Child Left Behind, and Barnes would go on to lead the Aspen Institute which called for a continuation and strengthening of NCLB. And anyone reading me for any length of time knows how I feel about NCLB. When Barnes left, Georgia was a state that was a bottom feeder in state rankings by almost any measure in education. So it is safe to say that the state of education in Georgia was pretty bad at the time Perdue took office. Personally, I did lose my job at the state hospital because of cuts made during the Barnes tenure, so no love was lost when he lost.

So now we have our current beloved governor. How has education fared under him? First off, Georgia is still a bottom feeder using any objective measure of educational level or achievement. He pushed for and got the legislature to stop funding pay supplements for teacher who were National Board certified. His response was to replace it with a master teacher program which tied the credential to student achievement i.e. test scores. He also succeeded in getting a measure passed that would help recruit science and math teachers by allowing them to start at a higher salary step. And now he has his pay for performance scheme. These final three initiatives; Master teacher certification, recruitment of shortage teachers and pay for performance all have one thing in common. They each and all explicitly exclude me and those who teach students with severe disabilities.

This is great for job security as there are so few incentives for coming into a field with such a massive shortage that opportunities should abound. Not so good if you are a parent of a child with a disability. The students and their parents are the biggest losers from the Perdue legacy. Teachers do fare worse than they may have otherwise. Choosing between our current governor and the one he replaced would be most difficult, but right now democrats have a golden opportunity.

Pay for performance is a total loser as far as what I currently teach. It is why the master teacher certificate is not accessible in my field. Daniel Willingham has an excellent video that explains why merit pay is such a difficult and tricky issue.

Teachers simply do not have enough control over all the contingencies that are involved in student outcomes. In my case, students progress so slowly as to defy any quick, cheap or reliable measure. Also they are all different. The idea is to reward the best teachers, but there is no standard of comparison between students in my classroom and any other students. Right now I have 9 students which is more than twice the size of any other comparable program in the district. How could there be a fair comparison? Secondly, my students are with me for the duration of the day for the duration of their school career. There is no standard of comparison there, either.

One provision the governor included was for classroom observation to be a part of the determining factor as far as whether a teacher would get performance-based pay. I have no problems being observed by an administrator, and showing them what I do any time. One problem is that not many administrators have any idea of what I do or even what I should be doing. They walk in once or twice a year for about 5-10 minutes and then leave. That’s if I’m lucky. For the past several years, observing me consisted of watching me feed one of the students during lunch! Again, I have no problems doing this and demonstrating it as it is an important part of what I do and crucial to the student. But it isn’t part of the Georgia Standards and is not going to apply toward ANY of the school’s stated improvement goals.  What I do is important, but it is not given value by any accountability scheme envisioned by any politician.

One more note about the pay for performance scheme outlined by the governor is that he references a survey taken by some 20,000 educators, 80% of which supposedly said they wanted to be evaluated and paid on the basis of student performance and observation.  I never saw any such survey, unless it was this one.  in Georgia.

Performance-based pay is a mine field. But if they people advocating this succeeded in designing something that was fair to me and the students I teach, I guarantee it would be fair for all. The reverse is decidedly not true as demonstrated by the Master Teacher debacle that leaves me behind.

Advancing Miracles

One of the reasons for my frustration, is that I am forever looking to advance my students along.  The current economic and political realities seem bent on thwarting those efforts, and I suspect every teacher feels this way.  We want to keep moving forward, but get bogged down by forces beyond our control.

But we still do it and we succeed in spite of public policies, like NCLB.  And so it is, I’m blogging the student teacher I said I wouldn’t blog about.  Well, this is noteworthy and deserves to be published and promoted!

I have several students who have profound intellectual disabilities, meaning they rely almost totally on caregivers to meet their needs.  It’s one of the reasons why the adult:student ratio is so critical.  If there isn’t an adult around to meet a need, it is not going to be met.  Period.  However, any move in the direction of independence is a monumental one, considering that these students are all in high school.  If they have not learned something by now, it isn’t likely they will, especially since the adult/student ratio is cut in half as soon as they exit middle school.

But having a capable and motivated adult can really help move things along.  In this case, the student teacher has been working with one of my students who has PID as well as being mostly physically disabled. She has to be fed, like most of my students.  She can move her hands and arms, but just doesn’t very much.  Until now.  We started off teaching communication skills, geting her to push a Big Mac switch in order to say “more” meaning she wanted more food.  She quickly caught on to this, as eating is highly reinforcing to her.

However, this student did not stop there.  At some point the food wasn’t coming fast enough so she grabbed the teacher’s hand and brought it up to her mouth.  This was HUGE!  We hadn’t seen this before, but then we never had time to look.  Feeding time is something we generally do as quick as we can to get it over with, like any other task we have to do.  However, we made a break through, past the communication exercise.  I showed the student teacher how to hold the spoon and help facilitate more engagement and learning in the feeding and within a couple fo days, the girl was beginning to feed herself.  It is still a very sloppy process, but we are off and running!

It’s been awhile since we had a breakthrough like that in our room.  It looks downright miraculous.  It’s mostly good teaching involving consistency and persistence.  And it is also a good shot in the arm for all of us, morale-wise.  It will be interesting to see if we can sustain it over the course of the year, even after this student teacher leaves.

Here’s the thing: This is a gigantic leap forward for this one student.  Feeding herself with the spoon.  It is monumental, significant and practical.  But it is not even a blip on the NCLB radar screen.  It carries NO weight to anyone outside of this girl’s life.  It does not improve a test score, does not improve the graduation rate or any other measure devised to measure “accountability.”  It is not something I could use to become one of Georgia’s Master Teachers.  The resounding message from the outside is that what we do doesn’t matter, when in reality, what we do totally matters!

But I have no idea how on earth to convey that to the people who make decisions about our staffing.  Those folks never darken my door and they miss these miraculous victories.  Having key people in the key spots matters, but I don’t get to choose who is in my room with my kids.  Sometimes I am very fortunate.  Sometimes, less so.

Anyway, I simply had to blog it and make whatever political hay I can out of it.  Unfortunately, these things do not happen every day and few times do they happen in such short amounts of time.  It’s also good for a new teacher to get this boost very early in her career as  those are the memories that sustain us over the longer and leaner times.

Making Waves

No, not yet. But I have made waves before and know that the day will come (and might be overdue) when I have to do it again.

In 2000, I can into this county as some one with some experience in special education, but none with the severe and profound disabilities. I had worked with mostly LD and EBD settings, albeit very restrictive in a psychoed and state hospital. But what I lacked in experience, I more than made up for with the fire in my belly from just recently having my oldest son diagnosed with PDD-NOS at the age of 18 months.  I had some extra motivation that needed an outlet, and fighting injustice was just the thing.

The situation I walked into was pretty appalling. We were getting students with more and more severe disabilities, but there was no changing area. We had one student who we had to catheterize and change and we did it on a computer table in our little office area. The school nurse was prohibited from helping us with catheterizations. There were no accessible drinking fountains. The conditions we were working in showed me that there was a very clear pattern of discrimination, exclusion and prejudice. So I amazed and shocked my new administration by detailing several of these injustices in writing, listing all of them as recipients and then filing it with the county special education director as a list of section 504 violations. Looking back it was an extremely audacious thing for me, a new hire, to do.

The special education director did come out to the high school to meet with us in order to rectify several of the issues. While she was amused at my boldness, she was supportive and worked with us to address my grievances. Not all of them were addressed right away. Some of them were never resolved. But we made gradual headway and progress. The administration seemed to be genuinely interested in meeting the needs of our students.

NCLB has not been good to students with severe disabilities. In fact, it has totally thrown all of us under the bus. Sure, there is lip service toward ensuring that all children have a quality education delivered by highly qualified teachers. But with the constant drumbeat of accountability and test scores, these students and their teachers are totally marginalized and alienated. It is all about college preparation. What does someone with an IQ of less than 20 have to do with a college prep curriculum and diploma? And what does that say to those who really work hard to get one if they just give one to these kids by virtue if their GAA and staying until 22? Administrators all over the country, faced with tough economic choices are following their keenest business instinct; getting “the most bang for the buck.” That means test scores. That means NOT my program. That means disproportionate overcrowding.

Consider this:

The state sets various limits on class sizes for various grades, as well as disability categories. The limit for a PID class is 5, with at least one para. For a regular high school class it has been around 30. This means 1 student with severe disabilities is about equal in support to 6 regular education students. So what if I have 8 in my class? An administrator might see this as still being a small class. Numerically, it is. But support-wise, it is equal to increasing a regular class to 48! Even under the toughest of economic times, I do not know of a single regular teacher who is expected to be with 48 kids for one class period, much less being with all of them all day long all year long. Even with extra para support, there is a limit to how many one teacher can handle, no matter the level of experience or competence.

Numbers alone never give an accurate picture of anything. IQ is not a measure of character, worth or how much dignity a person deserves. And yet, this is the climate that is driving more and more decisions that routinely leave those who most need support and care into situations that are rife with neglect and abuse. It’s time we push back before we get run over.

A Few Comments on the Supreme’s Ruling

Earlier this week, the SCOTUS made a ruling concerning special education and private tuition reimbursement.  you can get a quick summary from the Washington Post here.  You can also get a summary from the SCOTUS blog and read up on it in a couple of posts from Jim Gerle’s Law blog.  He’s also got a link to the pdf file of the decision slip.

I first want to correct the first line of the washington Post article:

Parents of children with disabilities may seek reimbursement for private school tuition even if they have never sent their children to public schools, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a decision with wide-ranging implications for Washington area school systems.

That is not necessarily the case.  Basically, this case involved a student who was entering high school and his parents were concerned about the student’s lack of academic success.  So they made a referral for services.  The school counselor did some testing and found that the student was not eligible for services.  As such, no IEP was written.  The parents were still concerned during the student’s 10th grade year but the student was still not deemed eligible for services according to school testing.  So the parents eventually obtained a diagnosis for learning disabilities and ADHD.  They withdrew him from his high school and placed him in a private school that specialized in providing services for students with LD and ADHD.  It was during this time that they began filing for due process against the school for failing to provide FAPE, and sought reimbursement for the private school tuition.

The student finished his junior year at the private school and graduated from there the following year in 2004.  Yeah, this case has been dragging on for six years! And for most of that time, the student was pressing the case forward since the parental rights trnasferred to him at 18.

The school argued that the law provides for the reimbursement for students who have already been served in special education for at least one year.  But this student was never served in special education.  The WaPo article leads the reader to believe that the student never attended the public school, but in fact he did for most of his school career.  But he never received special education services and never had an IEP.  One major argument given by the prevailing side in this case was the fact that a school district could easily avoid all special education costs by simply not identifying students, which clearly flies in the face of the intent of the IDEA.

The school district argued that having to reimburse tuition for students who never had received services and whose parents unilaterally put their child in a private school would place an undo burden on the system financially.  Private schools serving special ed. students are not cheap.  This one attended by this student was a residential school, so we could easily be talking over $100,000 for this one student.  So, yeah, the district is going to fight!

Will this result in bankrupting school budgets?  I doubt it.  Remember that by the time this thing settled, the student was probably graduated from college! The time and persistence in getting through all the legal proceedings routinely takes several years.  By the time this case got only to district court level, the student was already done with school.  But the school does have a case that parents might be more aggressive about pursuing their rights.  Given the time it takes to get resolution on a case like this, a parent needs to start early in order to be assured of getting their child needed services.  Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to be an attack dog on a school system because the culture of discrimination and prejudice runs so deep and is so pervasive.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the Atlanta Journal Constitution blog on the subject and read the comments.  Students with disabilities are routinely scapegoated in the comments, whether or not that is actually the topic on this blog.  They actually got off kind of light, here.

Another reason why the impact of this is going to be somewhat minimal is the simple matter of there not being very many private schools who are willing to take and cater to students with special needs.  Georgia already has a law that offers a $10,000 voucher/scholarship for any student that wants one and very few ever take advantage of it.  And you can simply forget about any of my students ever being included in anything like that.  The impact on my students and their parents because of this ruling is ZILCH because there is not a private school anywhere that is going to take them, even if parents wanted to take advantage of any scholarship.  And no private school would house a student through their 22nd birthday.

You’ll hear a lot of noise from both sides of this issue, but I think it’s mostly a zero-sum game.  Parents aren’t going to be able to get tuition reimbursements whenever they want.  Even if they did get a favorable decision, it would likely be several years and several thousands of dollars after their child started a private school.  A parent would need the means to afford the tuition well in advance of challenging a school district.  The district still has the upper hand, but with stakes a bit higher they have more of a reason to work with parents instead of blowing them off.

The RTI and POI procedures, if they are followed and implimented correctly will also head-off a lot of these sort of challenges.  These procedures were not widely implimented in 2003, if at all, so there is already a procedural safeguard with documentation that is built-in to the process.  Today, there would be more than just one test and a one-time procedure for getting additional help.  IF it is implimented.  That’s a big “if.”

I encourage anyone interested in special education law to read the case, as it isn’t often a special education case makes it in front of the Supremes.  I’m betting against this being a big decision that changes the game, but I could be wrong.

The End of NCLB!

YES!  You read that right!  No Child Left Behind is officially coming to an end!

The long nightmare is over!

Well, okay.  Not exactly, but it is a start, I suppose.  However, I do not forsee any substantial changes coming along anytime soon.  In fact, the Obama administration has pretty much come out and said that they are just going to be looking to change the name, dispite some of the promises he made while campaigning.  So as far as the feds go, it is still business as usual.  And it is still going to be the same in the state of Georgia, too.  Even when the state legislature tried to make room for some choice within a district, the rules imposed by the DOE pretty much make it impossible to happen, for good or ill.  Basically, the Georgia DOE has proven itself to be more and more of an enemy to public education that anything coming out of Washington!  I’m repeatedly amazed at how they manage to bungle up legislation passed by our elected officials, or block legislation designed to fix their blunders.

And pretty much all of it is hostile towards individuals with disabilities as well as the rest of the student population.  When our students increasingly demand a costumized education, the state and the feds are doing everything they can to homogenize it. When the world cries out for creativity and innovation, the educational system forces conformity and uniformity.

The rebranding of NCLB is simply repainting the same rundown shack and giving it a new name.  According to the WaPo article above, it is almost literally window dressing as the red schoolhouse is replaced by pictures hung in the windows of the building of children doing various activities.

At any rate, it is still lovely seeing the crowning jewel of the GW Bush legacy added to the ash heap of history.  Even so, the stench of its consquences still remains as a sort of toxic haze choking off any meaningful education inovation and reform.

Before moving on to other topics, I do want to elaborate just a bit on my contempt for NCLB.

In 2002, I was actually an advocate for this legislation or at least a large part of it.  I wanted highly qualified teachers and accountability.  I wanted all students to learn and I was all for using research-based instructional methods and materials.  I never believed that more money was the answer, so as a tax payer, I thought it was a good idea to make funding contingent on getting some results.  But I never really dreamed that my SID/PID students would be caught up in this.  And then I started seeing how NCLB was being implimented and it became harder and harder to defend this law.  Basically, it turned our national curriculum into “Test Prep.”  Basic bench marks and minimum requirements suddenly became some sort of gold standard, and mediocrity became the ultimate goal.  I’ve never seen antything wipe out and destroy student creativity and and teacher innovation more effectively than this law.

So while many of the things that I wanted while supporting NCLB were noble, it was a serious error putting such an important task into the hands of the federal government.  I was very wrong, and over time that wrong-ness has been reinforced every single time our own state DOE interprets this terrible law and makes it an even more hideous monstrosity.  The ideals espoused by the people peddling this law and the actual execution of it are very, very far apart.  As a former supporter of this law (and the president who wants to take credit for it) there is a very, very deep sense of betrayal.  When it became obvious that this thing was stripping autonomy away from local school systems and causing a collapse of creative and independent thought in favor of the Test Culture, it should have been scrapped or at least something new developed to take its place.  But we have nothing to show for it, an imminent meltdown in 2013 when every school fails to make the 100% AYP mark, and an entire generation that has been left behind while the rest of the world is learning how to think creatively, independently, competetively, globally and collaboratively.  And there is no plan on what to do next.

Many of you probably saw the light long before I did, and I want to apologize to you for my slowness.  I know there were people who saw much further down the road than I did, and I should have listened more carefully.  I do feel a bit of guilt for starting out on the wrong side of this issue.  But I’m speaking now.  Here’s a few ideas:

1. First, I believe that every single person involved in the architecture of NCLB should be dismuissed, and placed far away from any influence in educational policy.  Put them in a SID/PID classroom.

2. Second, a new strategy should be develped from scratch.  That means we need to start on it right away.  But the conversation should be as inclusive as possible.  The capacity for involvement are much greater today than they were in 2000.  Let’s use those tools.

3. No plan should be set in stone.  We need to be mindful of changing conditions.  NCLB was written and implimented for the 1990’s educational syatem.  The world is changing and the capacity of teachning and learning are also changing.  And they will change again.  Flexibility needs to be built in.

4. Start removing the teeth from NCLB now, so that the damage becomes less and less so that by 2013, the impact will be minimal.

5. Make student motivation part of the converation when discussing student performance.

Those are just a few of my ideas.  Feel free to make up your own, put them in a comment or better yet, send them to your favorite (or least favorite) legislator or governmental entity.