Arthur Getzel has been a teacher of special education in New York City since 1978. On his blog, he describes his preparations as the school year begins. It is his last year. He goes shopping for supplies and spends $200 of his own money for necessities. He cleans the classroom to get it ready for his students.
He knows everything is supposed to change this year because of Common Core.
But, he writes:
“Seriously, I do not plan to change the way I teach my students. I will do my best to teach them the skills that they really need to succeed. My goals are for my student to meet their IEP objectives. I care not one iota about this curriculum. I will not teach them goals that are unachievable. Whatever happens will happen. I plan to do my “personal best” as I have done since 1978. I know that for the last 35 years, I have been an effective special education teacher in which most of my career has been with high need students. I taught kids that had everything stacked against them. Yet, I do know many who have made it against all odds. One of my students is a supervisor for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (who has a learning-disabled adolescent) and another is presently a registered male nurse in a large city hospital after spending part of his life in a correctional facility. These former students are real people and not data driven numbers or some TFA made-up anecdote.
“I will tell you one thing. When I retire on July 1, 2014, I am not going to rest. I am just closing a chapter. I plan to begin anew. I plan a chapter in which I will adamantly advocate for disabled children and fight to save the public education system. We retired teachers will become an army to oppose the reformers and privateers. We cannot be intimidated and will not be afraid to speak truth to power.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t see the hammer coming down on Special Education. They are already being dumbed down in many instances. The number of kids in the category “learning disabled” is directly related to the amount of money available to “house them”. Special Education funding is a cesspool.
Ignorant comment!
I agree. Joseph Mugivan is also rude and ignorant.
I understand your comment. The services that each child receives truly should be based on need. The savvy parent with socioeconomic “creds” can weasel services that go above and beyond those needed. Depending on the district, there can be a push for students to keep 504 services, so they can get extended time on high stakes tests in preparation for college. Obviously, if you look at the demographics of the country, this is a small group of students. Certainly there are students in wealthier districts who would not receive services if they attended school in less affluent communities. That does not mean they do not have a disability; it just means that less affluent districts may have a larger population of students with disabilities that “trump” milder discrepancies. The disabilities of my students in wealthier districts needed attention, most often significant attention although those in need of self-contained instruction was small. In the struggling community where I taught, the self contained students were much further behind their peers. They did not have the support system either in or outside of school that was available to the students in the affluent communities. While the standardized tests were generally devastating to my kids and totally useless to me, I can’t even imagine someone attempting to test the severely handicapped children who also were in school. To my mind, that attempt says more about the IQ of those who mandate the tests than it does about the students. There are plenty of people that think that kids without visible disabilities just need to try harder. Ignorant as they may be, most of them can see the idiocy of mandating testing for students with clearly discernable disabilities.
2old2tch: if the poster in question were referring to the numerous educrats who game SpecEd for their own purposes—and have spent entire careers dumbing down and destroying a “better education for all”—then it would be a correct statement.
For example, students who have spent lengthy periods in juvenile detention [translation: jail for young people] inexplicably—inexplicably!—perform on standardized placement tests as if they were learning disabled [or whatever term you prefer]. A shock, no? Just goes to prove that they must be placed in SpecEd classrooms. Why, you might ask? Well, as a bitterly abusive and disruptive educrat once said, you have to keep tabs on them.
Control! That’s the name of the game. And the harm it does to children with genuine learning difficulties? And their teachers and aides? And the disrepute it brings to SpecEd in general when you treat SpecEd as a type of jailhouse remedial ed?
Hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking the eggshells, right?
Or destroying public ed.
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” [William Arthur Ward]
2old2tch: you have far more patience than I do. Thank you so much for this and other postings.
🙂
Thank you for this accurate assessment, 2old2tch. It is your voice, and the voices of all retired teachers, that can tell the truth to the American public, being now, beyond living in the teaching professions current culture of fear.
Joseph, Joseph….
those are strong words!
I will share with you a comment from a parent who was told something similar by a principal who was not supportive of special education and sped kids. Lots of sweeping generalities about the service. This parent looked at the beautiful family portrait on the principal’s desk and said: THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY CHILD AND YOURS COULD BE AN ACCIDENT ON THE WAY HOME! Silence!
I spent 40 years serving children in SpEd. I have experienced every innovation, change and legal demands. I have learned that there are always people who insist that the only way to “cure disabilities” is the sink-or-swim method. Well, we’ve had it now under NCLB & RTTT. We have not “cured” those kids, and now…we are also not adequately educating them, because we insist that EVERY CHILD MUST BE COLLEGE READY. Who truly has a problem learning and comprehending the reality of disability/ability/super able?
I’ve had that very conversation, not only with admins but with other parents who were complaining about the extra money it costs to educate my child. Given that she has TBI, that comment truly stops people in their tracks…especially the ones whose kids play every form of sport known to man!
Thank you to Mr. Getzel, for your long service to our kids!
Arne Duncan wants Special Ed students to take the high stakes state test. You can comment until Oct. 7th. Please do so. https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/08/23/2013-20665/title-i-improving-the-academic-achievement-of-the-disadvantaged.
Obviously this man has never been is a self-contained Special Ed classroom. Anyone who has watched a student with severe cognitive impairment take the alternate state tests knows this is an exercise in futility and stupidity.
“Anyone who has watched a student with severe cognitive impairment take the alternate state tests knows this is an exercise in futility and stupidity.”
Not only for severe cognitively impaired students is this “an exercise in futility and stupidity” but it is so for all students. And not only “futility and stupidity” but also an exercise in unethicalness. Noel Wilson has proven that all the logical errors and psychometric obfuscations render the educational standards, standardized testing, and the resulting sorting and separating process that is labeling/grading students completely invalid.
To understand why read his never refuted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Duane, I appreciate your learned posts. Your pedagogy and insights are always on the mark. Please consider running for public office, particularly for your states State Supt. where you would have broad clout.
Yes, the grades are internalized and affect personal estimations of self worth forever, be it the A student (leader) or the F student (failure)…and definitely the C student who never feels anything but mediocre. And as we see with Steven Hawkings, the body can be failing/failed, but the brain can be sparkling and an asset to society.
ellen–I agree with you RE: Duane!
Ellen that is totally correct. My cousin, Marty MimMack, looks normal from the neck up. From the neck down he is a mess. Born with no arms, one foot 2″ shorter than the other one, born without sockets in his hips and one side is different than the other and getting more different as he ages. You do not want to be looked at the way people look at him. However, he is brilliant and is a certified teacher who has taught every grade from K-university. Right now LAUSD is planning on shutting down their special education centers for the moderate to highly disabled students. This is a tragedy in the making. They already tried to place their highest functions students with physical disabilities into regular schools and within one week they were back it was so bad at every level.
Do not forget the destroyer RTI. Many do not care about special education students. Districts show this all the time as at LAUSD. Only a sociopath could make this plan. If they ever visited and talked with the teachers, psychologists, principals and students they would not do this. They do not care. It is destroy everything and then we will see what happens as they have obviously not planned a thing except destruction. We are worried about the future effects on their self worth if they close the special ed centers in LAUSD or anywhere. These children need the special attention and services that are only in these specialized schools. We are doing video right now to put together a clip that will rip your heart out of your chest when you watch it. If you cannot take care of the least amongst you you cannot take care of anyone.
George–glad to see you back. And, yes, R.T.I. (Response to Intervention) is simply a tool to keep kids from receiving special services–I saw that from its inception. In fact, I and some others took pleasure in “short-cutting” the hot mess–one way, telling the parent to request an evaluation. Said request could not legally denied in our state–parent requested, child tested, child placed.
Volia!
These are wonderful, true comments. I am a retired special education teacher who is focusing on special ed. advocacy, and have been involved in many meetings, conferences and state hearings. I applaud Mr. Getzel for his work and for his future commitment. All of us who are retired educators need to become child advocates, teacher mentors and public education supporters. Make sure to go to Patricia Hale’s link above. Get your state special ed. organizations (such as the Council for Exceptional Children and Learning Disabilities Assn.) to make formal statements opposing this latest insanity (more ka-ching for Pear$on) over testing (“standardized,” high-stakes) EVERY special education student. I’d like to SEE SIGNED LETTERS from parents who are protesting their sp.ed. students NOT taking the high-stakes tests, purportedly stating that the bar is being lowered for their children. And–WHAT is going on with Easter Seals insofar as their advocating for this? (I have always been doubtful RE: National Council on Disabilities, which is why I’m not a member of that organization, while I belong to others.)