I thought I was done with blogging for the day but then I read a comment on an earlier post. It was very disturbing. If true, it’s frightening to think that the Obama administration plans to “monitor” special education by test scores and to reduce the number of people on the ground.
“For-profit higher education is a $30 billion industry, and it has the wherewithal to call off the regulators.” Exactly. DoEd will reform (translation: eliminate) OSEP’s compliance procedures assuring IDEA and special education IEPs are effectively working for children with disabilities. OSEP director Melodie Musgrove told us at the Council for Exceptional Children’s international convention (CEC) in April, 2012 that they will be monitoring “achievement data” (translation: standardized test scores) from Washington and cutting back on state compliance officers (translation: firing). Her “vision” for OSEP is “results driven accountability” and to “reward teachers who work with sped students.” (translation: TfA exploiting the SPED teacher shortage).
OSEP’s shift from compliance to monitoring sets back 40 years of special education progress in assuring all schools provide a free appropriate public education for children with disabilities.
Musgrove signaled that DoEd and OSEP would essentially ignore IEP violations.
This is a huge gift to the for-profits. Shifting away from school compliance on IEPs means schools will not be accountable to parents or teachers for providing individualized educational services. You know, all those expensive services like smaller class groupings, collaborative teaching, inclusion, transportation, psychological support, speech therapy, OT, PT, etc. that the profiteers don’t want to pay for.
Musgrove said we could call her anytime a 205-245-8020 or e-mail her at melody.musgrove@ed.gov. She added, we might not like what we hear…
If you are the parent or child of a child with special needs, or if you care about children with special needs, you should get in touch with Musgrove.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ms Musgrove,
My son is 28 now and no longer part of the K-12 world. He graduated under an IEP program in 2006. He had a severe brain injury at 17.
His intellectual abilities and healing process required a very unique IEP. No standardized test was capable of effectively tracking his accomplishments
or rate of attaining skills. His special education team from Sparta HS in Sparta Nj had to develop unique programs that could both engage and work as catalyst for improvement.
My son is capable of understanding string theory but still has difficulty with division.
I am afraid the program proposed by your department in the US DOE does not allow for the best utilization of educational tools and disabilities challenges.
Please restructure your proposal before proceeding further.
Regards,
Details here: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-announces-new-effort-strengthen-accountability-students-disabilities
Diane, I’m a sped teacher who believes the focus on compliance is insane. I spend my days doing paperwork to meet compliance mandates while my paraprofessional works with kids in small groups. At least once a week, I’m at school for 2 hours after dismissal completing paperwork. Our IEPs are 17 pages long – for EACH student. I want to teach. I’m sick of sitting at a computer all day long.
I agree that monitoring achievement data for sped kids is crazy and can see how that will just lead to even more paperwork. But if it means no more 17 page IEPs, I’d be happy.
From a parent perspective, that IEP is a once a year shot at trying to ensure our child gets the help needed to access curriculum. Yes, the meetings can be tedious and yes, there is a lot of compliance paperwork that needs to be done. Lack of funding has caused districts to cut the trained clerks who should be assisting you with this.
Families need the data to make informed decisions and to measure progress, not to make your life miserable. The legal protections are necessary for the child. If our leaders decide, because some charter foundation supporters don’t like to be accountable, that compliance is less effective than “monitoring”, then we will start seeing the great “warehousing” of students with disabilities in the future.
I’ve collected data for years in LAUSD. Charters don’t enroll moderate to severely disabled students. Forcing regular public schools to take these students, thus create “program improvement” situations with lower scores – these schools will be ripe for take-over by charters and our students will be dumped into facilities, group homes or places other than educational settings.
Mant charter backers are developers. This is a land-grab of epic proportions as our public school property is seen as an “opportunity” to create more wealth. Look what happened to the banking system. Our schools are next. Charters use “Teach for America” kids who know squat about special education. They are set up NOT to take our children and have never intended to. I recently found a Green Dot “Special Education Handbook” with specific instruction to administrators to review IEPs by the second week of the start of a school year and decide whether to send the student “back to LAUSD”… before an IEP team meeting and without parent involvement. It’s written policy and against the law. Proof these charters have NEVER intended to take our students with moderate to severe disabilities.
If families don’t have oversight and compliace, then IDED means nothing. Many of our students will never “improve” by general test assessment standards and should have alternative means to measure their individual lrogress based on thier goals. We’re going down a slippery slope here and our children will suffer for bad decisions made by greedy, clueless men.
Sonja ~ we are of the same cloth!! Friend me on FB please
Nancy Linley-Harris
I wish I only spent a couple hours a week after school working on paperwork! I am usually at school until 9 or 10 pm completing paperwork for my special education students. They have so many different needs that trying to assess them in just a “monitoring” situation would be nearly impossible. I have SLD kids who are often in the General Education curriculum for many of their classes, and yet are not successful there without the accommodations and modifications that we as a team have decided on for the IEP. They cannot be monitored solely by standardized tests!
I would think you would be more frustrated with fellow gen ed teachers who ignore the IEPs after all the time you invested in writing it and attending those meetings. Once the annual review is over, the parent –with the least amount of input– becomes the only harbinger of the IEP as the team & school develop a don’t-ask-don’t tell policy (with parents) re whether the IEP is being adhered to or not. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be the only *team* member who cares about the IEP once school and admin believe they’ve fulfilled their end of the process.
The changes in the provision of special education services that were just approved by the PEP in NYC are a frightening example of reforms which are designed to save money being presented to parents as something good for their children. The real reason why the special education graduation rates are so low probably has far more to do with a narrow curriculum which has been designed for students who intend pursue higher education.Student’s interests and talents are never explored or developed.
A narrow curriculum is no better for students who intend to pursue higher education than it is for any other students. Colleges require a well-rounded education. This is not about educating kids. It’s about raising test scores to appease the politicians and corporations that believe tests are the be-all and end-all of education and have imposed the business model, because they are not experts in child development, learning and teaching. If the education leaders in this country were actually educators, they would recognize that each student has his/her own constellation of strengths and needs, that teachers must be able to nurture each child’s talents, that schools should be encouraging students to follow their interests, and that each child progresses at his/her own rate of development. Instead, politicians and their corporate sponsors have reduced education to an assembly line which expects schools to create uniform widgets that fit a narrowly defined template and “product” success is measured by the same formula that corporations use to calculate profits and losses.
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I am a retired teacher of the deaf, and I could not be more appalled at this latest assault on true teaching and learning, whether of students in the general population, or special needs students. Standardized tests do not provide meaningful information for many special needs students. They are presented in such a format that the students cannot show what they actually know, in large part because they are required to test at grade level, and due to the many ramifications of their learning challenges, they are not typically reading at grade level. These students need to be taught in small groups with teachers who are knowledgeable and highly qualified to meet their constellation of needs. They just cannot be taught on the cheap. Meaningful assessments are time and labor intensive, and often need to be done on a on-to-one basis, not in a mass administration. They do make progress, but in ways that do not translate to the narrow extraction of data that the standardized tests provide. The IEP is a federal mandate that was very long in coming. I cannot believe that the National Association of the Deaf and other disability groups will not be fighting these shameful changes tooth and nail.
[…] From the discussion on Diane Ravtich’s blog on “reforms” to special education compliance… putkidzfirst […]
I thought that SPED had already taken a backseat with the implementation of RTI? It appears that schools now are much less likely to refer a kid for SPED, probably because it was Bush’s demand under NCLB to reduce the number of kids who are in SPED, so the number of SPED kids in a school also factors in whether a school performs or not.
And of course, there’s a company that makes money on the development of the RTI program and materials. http://www.rti4success.org/
“Criticisms point to delays in identifying students needing special education (which was also a concern in a 2010 OSERS Memorandum[19]), difficulties in accurately determining the presence of a learning disability,[20] the amount of training needed by general education teachers, and the lack of resources devoted in most schools to all the technical requirements of RTI.
Great stress can be experienced by some educators who have little or no experience teaching students with learning disabilities, and who have difficulty meeting their needs in the classroom and searching for research-based ways to help them. RTI can require additional work for teachers, and a potentially significant change in expectations represents a great source of resistance toward RT” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_to_intervention#Response_to_RTI
They’re already doing it. I’m in Los Angeles, a 15 year member of our Special Education Community Advisory Committee that represents 83,000 students with IEPs. I was recently elected to the Chair position for the 2012-14 term and have been helping families for many years by providing free advocacy service at IEP meetings. I’ve been to two in the last couple of weeks that had blatant violations of IEP procedure and IDEA law. I called OSEP for clarification regarding one example of non-compliance where the entire team had agreed upon placement. The facilitating administrator went out of the room to make copies, but also make a clarification c.ll to the main office of LAUSD’s Division of Special Education. She came back and stated that one administrator, who was NOT present at the meeting NOR a participating member of the IEP team, had voided the teams agreed upon decision for the student (the student was present and agreed as well). I was stunned and never had anything like that happen AFTER a decision was made by a team.
Due to budget cuts, I was not given a copy of the IEP – the mother took home the only copy they were allowed to print. When I called OSEP they claimed that the final decision is determined by HOW the IEP is written, not what the team decides. Since I didn’t have the final paperwork in front of me and their answer seemed to focus on the paperwork, not the actual meeting proceedings, I received about 15 minutes of “waffling” language without committing to a simple “yes” or “no” answer to “is this a violation of IEP procedure and IDEA law?” The person on the phone finally admitted the procedure was in violation, but ONLY after I stated: “Say I DO have the final paperwork with language as determined by the team. If the TEAM agrees, puts it in writing on my paperwork, closes a meeting…THEN makes copies and puts a call into an administrator who WAS NOT PRESENT and undermined the entire team (including the student) decision…is THAT a violation?” I finally got a “yes” answer.
I then asked why we should even bother with an IEP TEAM meeting if only one person, who was NOT present at the meeting at all, can veto it? I was not given an answer to that one either. Why bother? What is the point of creating a law that is so blatantly violated by district personnel who are placed in positions to provide the oversight for compliance procedures that they don’t follow themselves? What kind of message does it send to families of students with disabilities? Why are we all wasting our time on meetings if the team decision is not honored?
What’s most bizarre about the total kiboshing of our IEP team decision is that I proposed a placement that was identical to one that district personnel, with help from outside agencies, agreed to provide for my son two years ago. I can only assume that the reason the team plan was vetoed is due to budget constraints, not what was in the best interest of the student. Funding issues should not be a consideration when developing an IEP, yet this appears to be what happened. The district is now forcing the family into a due process situation that will only put money into the pockets of lawyers while the student rots in “stay-put” until all the expensive fighting is over. The students needs are less than a few billable attorney hours, yet the district is fighting on principle, wearing down a family and wasting everyone’s time rather than provide what the student needs….which we thought was the purpose of the IEP in the first place.
This same thing has happened to me as well!!! Although what happened is my Districts IEP Programmer rewrote and removed half my daughter’s IEP Goals without a meeting during what should have been a resolution time to come to agreement on any changes. The changes to a Due Process IEP doc was changed without parent participation. It’s all so craZy out there what districts and States are allowing to happen!!