This teacher teaches children with severe disabilities. She is a BAT. She is conscientious and devoted to her work. She was rated “developing,” which is one step above “ineffective.”
She writes:
“In my career (and this is every year), I am potty training, teaching self hygiene, teaching self regulation, executive functioning, how to SPEAK, for God’s sake.
“I teach children how to hold a pencil, write their name, the fundamentals that they need and more. On top of that, I teach a ridiculous curriculum, mandated by NYS, to a self-contained class of what has been Kindergarten through 3rd graders, sometimes all in one class. I have taught class sizes from 12 to 17, when there were only supposed to be 12. This past year, my class was a mix of children with autism, children who are emotionally disturbed and unmedicated, children with speech and language impairments, and children who are learning disabled. In the time they were with me, these children made progress beyond your wildest dreams and that is because of me and my team, not some ridiculous curriculum.
“According to my rating, my teaching was effective and the same went for my state measures. Where I apparently “fail” as a teacher is on my local measure. My children, as described above, were asked to take a writing exam in which they listened to and took notes on an informational text. From there they took their notes and were expected to write a paragraph or more relating to the topic. My children did as they were asked, to the best of their ability, when most came to me in the beginning unable to accurately write their name.
“I am not sharing this to garner sympathy or cry “poor me,” but rather to expose what this profession has become and how discombobulated this system is. I also want others to know that they are not alone when it comes to these ridiculous score adjustments.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for sharing her story. My teenager is very high functioning. The standards are an abysmal failure. She will never pass a grade level standardized test. It is criminal to subject her to ridiculous standards, content, and testing. It is equally criminal to judge her talented teachers based on those tests.
This sounds vaguely familiar…oh, right! It’s because I’m a special education teacher in Manhattan and have endured this same nonsense.
What will happen when all of these teachers are gone? Will these students just be sitting at a computer? It’s sad.
Fear not: Tech will be there to divert them with shiny devices, Pharma will be there to keep them docile and pacified, and Men With Guns will be there to incarcerate them in for-profit prisons if things still don’t go well.
Neoliberal capitalism has it all covered, and there’s not an injustice, affliction or human tragedy it can’t monetize. It’s a perpetetual motion machine and self-licking ice cream cone…
Exactly. In this system, human beings are treated merely as means. They have no intrinsic worth other that what profits can be made off of them.
I believe I remember some comments from the Cook County (IL) sheriff about the local jail population being overwhelmed with inmates with emotional disabilities. I’m surprised some entrepreneur hasn’t figured out a way to maximize profits off disabled offenders. Heck! Can’t we start our own third world factories and run them with the disabled? I’m sure some managers with a behaviorist bent could develop a fine “incentive” program to keep them under control. We could even give them third world room and board. Imagine the profits! I’m not sure what we do with those who can’t hack it, but to paraphrase our governor they are not his concern (speaking about his rabid support of charters).
When I started grad school (back in the 1980’s, a hundred years ago), I read a slim volume by Lawrence Lieberman who cautioned us that special education needed to be something other than “general education in small groups.”
When I became an administrator and NCLB rolled onto the scene, I predicted backlash from special education parent advocacy groups; after all, we had the audacity to label their children “disabled,” and yet still held them responsible for results on annual standardized tests. Well, the backlash didn’t happen as I’d predicted. Now, more than ever, I wish it had.
This teacher reminds me of the poignant story from Florida last year, where a significantly disabled student was asked to describe what it was like to eat a peach. (This was a test item on the Florida alternative assessment.)
However, the student is nonverbal.
And uses a feeding tube, so has never eaten a peach.
Here’s the story: http://neatoday.org/2014/03/05/high-stakes-testing-for-disabled-students-a-system-gone-horribly-wrong/
Lynn,
For reasons I don’t understand, the national organizations representing students with disabilities support giving these students exactly the same standardized tests so everyone can learn how far behind they are. When I met with Senator Tom Harkin, who was then the Democratic head of the education committee, he told me “the disabilities community LOVES NCLB.”
Funny you should mention that. A May 5th letter from The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights was the final straw for me. I had to start putting a special ed and public ed advocate voice out there. I started a blog with a letter I wrote to Wade Henderson. http://elfasd.blogspot.com/2015/05/jumping-into-fray.html Needless to say, I never heard back from him. The groups that signed on to that TLCCH letter were the who’s who of civil and disability rights groups in the US. I poked around and found that about half of them had taken grants from the Gates Foundation to the tune of $1.7 billion. Most of the disability rights groups took nothing. I, too, am at a loss. They sure as heck don’t represent my daughter, or me.
Diane,
I believe they see the state standardized assessments as a visible proxy for free appropriate public education (FAPE) in a least restrictive environment (LRE). It’s not that they like the tests in themselves, but are committed to inclusive participation in the schools .
It has been a long time since segregation and warehousing of students with disabilities was commonplace but memories of those practices are deeply ingrained in the organizations and disability rights advocates. There is great suspicion of anything that hints of exclusion, even exclusion from standardized testing.
We know that the term students with disabilities encompasses a great diversity of individuals. There are children with significant disabilities who will not learn the same skills and concepts as their non-disabled peers. There are children with learning disabilities, Asperger’s, or emotional or behavioral disabilities who can achieve the same learning with the necessary services and specialized teaching. We also have twice exceptional children who might have a disability in one area accompanied by exceptional talent in another area. It seems strange that standardized testing is sometimes viewed as a signal of a high functioning student with disabilities being included in the universal program, but it is.
It also happens that there is sometimes a disharmony in expectations for the student. When a student’s IEP team agrees on a post secondary transition plan that specifically states a four year college as a goal, but the student is not participating in any courses either on an inclusion or pull-out basis that are college preparatory there is something to discuss. Should this have anything to do with standardized testing? No. But participation in standardized testing is sometimes seen as a way by some organizations and advocates to keep us in schools “honest.”
It’s also the case that technology and universal design principles have offered a promise that useful accessibility tools and accommodations can be built-in to online assessments. The reality lags what is promised but the idea that fair assessments for students with disabilities are possible is also out there.
Standardized testing is a visible indicator of inclusion for many organizations and advocates, which is why they support most students with disabilities taking the state assessments.
Our state use to give modified test to students with disabilities but they decided to eliminate that option. The modified test allowed the students to show growth and provided accommodations that were in line with their IEP’s. Although far from perfect, they were a better measure than the current practice of taking the same test as the rest of the population. In my state, gifted education falls under special education. What should be of great concern is that our gifted students are demonstrating very little growth on the CC aligned test. I am surprised that the gifted parents have not voiced concerns about the CC standards and testing.
Our children are suffering!
Our teachers are losing their careers!
Their parents carry tremendous pain – related to the disabilities AND the torture!
What is unforgivable is forcing children who have files and files of documented psychological assessments, physicians reports, medical diagnoses, achievement assessments, speech/language evaluations, eligibility reports and IEPs for specific services to be provided by trained special educators…legally binding documents specific to the school system’s responsibilities…
YET, Arne & Co. drive their 18wheelers right across the needs of these children, the recommendations of parents and teachers, ALL to VAM teachers and systems, force children to perform skills that are years beyond their reach – even on their DEATH BED.
AND, THE PROFESSIONALS, Professional organizations, CEC, UNIONS, pediatricians, CDC, American Psychological Association and hundreds of others KEEP SILENT! They look away, continue to drink the CCSS $M Kool-Aid while children squirm in their seats for months on in.
I am beyond OUTRAGED!
I cannot think of how much worse it needs to get for someone in power to stop the American Greed Pipeline of Billionaires and Legislators and FINALLY help our children, ALL CHILDREN. How many more children need to have their number 2 pencils pried out of their dying hands, before someone publically has the DECENCY to stop these 18 wheelers from trampeling our children, parents and teachers?
When for GOD’s SAKE?
I often think about what a cruel society we are especially to our women (many of whom are teachers) and children.
You are absolutely right, Hanna. It is unconscionable that these professional groups remain silent. Perhaps it’s time to start reaching out to them and specifically ask them to weigh in.
Where we are headed is the end of special education. More parents and teachers have to start speaking up.
Thank you H.A. I am currently finishing an M.A. in special education and will not practice in a public school because of these practices. They do not want my expertise, they want me to sign of on immoral plans that are detrimental to the students. The parents where I am at are not yet outraged because they have trusted the schools to do the right thing for their students. We will have to educate them. I plan on retiring soon and working in a counseling center that aids students with learning needs and foster care due to parental incarceration. Privately I can do what I wish I could do in the public schools. These S.O.B.s should be hopeful that I don’t follow Mr. Skeels into Law and then come after them tooth and nail pro bono. I may yet change my mind.
If the problem is in the local measure, I’m hoping the teachers’ Union can help. Through a stupid state ruling, an unwise district is harming teachers and students alike.
Sent from my iPhone
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I wouldn’t hold my breath about union help if I were you. With a few wonderful exceptions, such as Chicago and Seattle, unions have proved to be worse than useless in helping teachers. They’ve gotten too much money from the “reformers” to actually help teachers.
Directly from the president of my union- “This union will never go on strike for special education.” Good to know!
We were told repeatedly during our last contract negotiations that it was “historic” that our issues were even on the table. That’s nothing to brag about.
If I can’t get the president of my union to pay attention to the ed code regarding caseload caps, I don’t think she is going to give this issue the time of day.
This is the sad truth.
Wow. That’s awful.
After 20+ years in special education and seeing the really bad decisions being made locally and nationally, am I crazy to think that we are stepping decades back in time by removing services and opportunities for our differently-abled population of kids and adults? I’ve been in this long enough to know everything is cyclical, but this is starting to smell way too master race-ish for my liking.
Agree, I have stated before that I believe standardization is a step to eliminate special education. The spirit of the mandated law never matched the funding. School districts are struggling to keep up with the cost of special education which can range from $25,000 to $100,000 per student. http://lancasteronline.com/news/rising-autism-numbers-a-challenge-for-public-schools/article_88b0c58a-c729-11e3-939e-001a4bcf6878.html
There has not been significant federal increases to help districts cover the cost. The plan—Have all students take the same test, fire the teachers and replace them with technology and aides. The advocates need to start speaking out about this before it is too late.
I think that the for-profit folks will also use it to their benefit. Make our kiddos take the same test, and the school scores plummet. Use that to scare the parents of “general” ed to the for-profit charter. Eventually, our public schools become schools for special ed and kids nobody else wants, staffed by $10/hour aides and shiny laptops. (For the record, aides should be paid much more, but I hope you see my point).
Me too. When I entered teaching the children in now in special education were warehoused in state-run hospitals and “residential homes.” First job was teaching in a converted nightclub serving as a school for children with then segregated by “disabilities.” Ijustread an Education Trust report that reeks of the same odor of possibilities for perfected performances by all students if only teachers were fully compliant with the Common Core State Standards.
In my district they want for us to mainstream all special education students. That makes as much sense as buying all of them the same size shoes.
We are being told that this move is being made because of the low graduation rate among students with IEPs.
I told our superintendent that I shared his goal of raising the graduation rate for these students, and that in order to accomplish this I needed specialized teaching materials. He lectured me about providing my students with the least restrictive environment for learning (LRE) and told me that, in the interest of equity for all, I needed to give my students “access” to general education learning materials.
If I am going to provide specialized academic instruction, I need specialized materials. I am qualified to evaluate the materials that are available and determine if they are adequate for meeting the needs of my students.
IF THEY COULD LEARN AT THE SAME PACE AS THEIR PEERS THEY WOULDN’T HAVE AN IEP.
Many thanks to you and to the others who were the pioneers of special education. I am sorry that what you built is being dismantled.
It’s already happening here in Florida. An ALEC law passed 2 years ago requires all teachrs to complete an arduous Special Education update before renewing their teaching certificate.
The plan is to eliminate all standalone classrooms, no matter the differing abilties, and streamline (read:reduce) services.
As it stands now we share psychologists, social workers. speech and physical therapists, and other service providers among multiple schools.
The starting point for any student referral begins with accusing the classroom teacher of poor planning and poor lesson delivery, by default, and results in multiple observations by multiple outsiders not of the student but of the teacher.
Often after months of collecting data teachers are told it is the wrong data or the wrong collection method or the wrong intervention and everything reverts back to the starting place.
After months and months (sometimes years) of Tier II and Tier III interventions via RTI a child MIGHT be tested and then achieve an IEP and qualify for services but many move before that ever happens and the process must always start over again..
That delaying and deferring tactic is part of the Florida plan to harass and blame teachers, deny services to eligible students, and save money of special services providers. It is hideous, heinous, and harmful. It is commonplace and supported indirectly by the corrupt and politicized FLDOE.
God’ll get them for that! to paraphrase Maude.
Maude!!! You’re showing your age, Chris in Florida! I guess I am, too!!
RTI -the first time I heard that term I knew what was up – less services for students in need, saving money on the professionals that can help, asking a classroom teacher to deal with a child that needs more services than one can provide and then blaming that teacher for not getting the child up to grade level.
As Chris in Florida says “it is hideous, heinous and harmful.” Thank you Chris – I teach first grade also and I always read your impassioned posts – keep preaching !
This blog post sums up some of those really bad decisions. I will post the link at the end.
“Dr. Thompson finds this as ludicrious, and so he has put into more readable language what the US Department of ED decreed –and remember, this decree takes effect September 15, 2015:
1. All learning-disabled students can become grade level scholars with no differentiated learning– they just need great teaching and great supports.
2. The new testing (Common Core/SAGE) is valid for ALL students with ALL learning disabilities.
3. These new tests are so good that we don’t need alternative or modified tests.
4. The ONLY thing reading and math disabled students need, to become grade level scholars, are good teachers.
5. These new tests are so perfect that they were designed specifically to perfectly measure academic achievement in ALL learning-disabled children.
6. States and ground-level teachers have denied proper instruction for divergent-learning students; therefore, we no longer need individual states to make special tests, because now special education students will be saved by the new Common Core Standards.”
https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/fake-research-used-to-remove-authority-from-states-over-special-education-testing-and-curriculum/
The injustice seems so obvious…it only goes to show what an amazing dupe-job/propaganda blitz the reformers created and are continuing to morph as we push back. Most of the public are brainwashed zombies reading regurgitated cud from rag newspapers bought and controlled by reformers. Wake up America-the truth this teacher speaks is happening in every burg, hamlet, village, town and city across the country!
What an absurd requirement even for “normal” kids. Most kindergarteners and even quite a few third graders would be unable to take notes and then write a paragraph like that. Expecting it of special education students just exponentially drives up the nonsense factor. How have we gotten to the point that we collectively allow this sort of nonsense?
I was in the same position as you the last few years I taught and could not do it anymore. First of all I had a Masters in Reading and had been a Reading Interventionist and was placed in that class trying to make me quit because I was experienced and out spoken about all of their ridiculous test prep. I made great gains with the kids. I had K-5th grade and they kept piling more and more severe kids in my class ended up with 13. After two years of it I could no longer keep up with all the testing and take care of the kids and I baled in Jan. before I had to give another ridiculous test.
The same ridiculousness is being forced upon our English Language Learners in New York State. This year the legislature enacted new regulations. Now we have students who just came from Yemen sitting in an ELA class reading Hamlet. Why – because the regulations say they must spend time sitting in an ELA class. We have a mother coming to our school in tears because her daughter is having panic attacks. Last year, the daughter was a happy student because she had a safe place to go for part of the day.
All we hear from Farina and the new deputy of bilingual, ELLs, ENLs (or whatever they’re calling it this year) is how they sat in the back of the room when they were newcomers to the U.S. Guess what – we’re back to students sitting in the back of the room.
They tell us to “co-teach” – What are we co-teaching? Am I “scaffolding” Hamlet for students who don’t know the English alphabet? I’m not sure. Maybe someone from the legislature can come in and model this for us.
They tell teachers to “differentiate”: – Differentiation is not 2 separate lessons. Again, can someone from the legislature model this for us? I have a copy of Hamlet they can use. Maybe they can tell me to use sentence frames from Hamlet for students who don’t know the word “cat”. Huge help!
Don’t get me started on the big names in educational research who are cashing in on the common core nonsense like Kinsella and Walqui. What a travesty! Again, I invite these “experts” to come to my classroom and model for a month.
Thanks for the vent.
In Utah, we HAVE no stand-alone ELL classes. We’re all supposed to get ELL “endorsed,” which is only a few classes and a state-wide joke. I have students come into my general ed. U.S. history class in middle school who have literally just arrived in the country and speak NO English. We have to have kids who also speak the language translate for us and try to get paperwork translated (often using Google translate). I feel terrible for these kids, and I try to help as often as I can. The problem is, that I generally have 33-36 students a class, and it’s really hard for me to give the ELL students as much time as they need. It breaks my heart.
Oh, and there are no paraprofessionals in Utah secondary schools, except to help the kids with severe disabilities, so no one else is there for ELL kids, either.
I am still waiting for any of the rheephorm shills and trolls that visit this blog to vent their spleens—
Why this isn’t a clear cut case of child abuse and abandonment that benefits only rheephormsters and their enablers and enforcers.
Their silence is compliance.
😡
Even they know when they would look like absolute idiots. Can you imagine an auditorium filled with parents, teachers and their disabled children/students strapped in wheel chairs or perched on their chairs rocking and shaking, punctuating their movements with random grunts? Which idiot is going to accept the honor of standing at a lectern explaining the absolute necessity for these children to take tests that will never assess anything remotely important in their lives?
I remember several years back now when our state changed licensing of special education teachers that magically made us qualified to teach a much wider range of disabled students than our original certificates. Then, of course, came the push for inclusion and co-teaching, not all bad, but opening the door to narrowing the ability to differentiate instruction in an appropriate setting, at an appropriate level, and of appropriate content. The standardized tests are bad enough but now the classroom has degenerated into a skill enhancement assembly line where the purpose is to compare the quality of product to rigid benchmark standards.
I think we may need to start calling it “child abuse”. When I was in my old district, the admins told me to put a 7th grader (who had worked on a 1st grade or so level) in a 7th grade math class. When I said that he could not add or subtract, they said to give him a worksheet where he could color in circles while everyone else did pre-algebra. When I asked if, maybe, that wouldn’t be kinda bad for his self-esteem, the principal just sort of blinked at me.
The boy’s grandmother/guardian was pissed enough to pull him from the district but I still sometimes wonder how he would have felt sitting in that classroom coloring circles.
I am on The ARC’s mailing list (as you may already know, The ARC is a well-established, national disability rights non-profit) and they are, as mentioned above, very committed to having almost all children with disabilities held to the same standards, and put through the same testing gauntlet, as their typically-developing peers.
The only thing I can figure is that they are stuck in time. They remember when children with disabilities weren’t allowed to enroll in public schools and were warehoused instead. The fight then was to have each child, no matter what their level of ability, treated like everyone else.
So they are still fighting to have everyone treated the same, no matter how insane “the same” is. They also seem to operate under the illusion that IEPs have super-powers and protect our kids from everything untoward.
I’ve tried talking to our state’s staff person and he just refuses to get it. I don’t know what can be done.
I was following NCLD on Facebook until they came out supporting this nonsense. It’s appalling.
I can’t help but think that they are focusing on the definition of LD according to the discrepancy model- the student has average intellectual ability, so theoretically, given the proper support, they should be able to perform at their ability level. Except that we are not given the basic materials and conditions that we need in order to accomplish this. We certainly aren’t going to accomplish this by giving our students nothing but push-in support, which is what we are heading towards.
I need a lower caseload so I can offer more instructional time to my students, and I need specialized materials and high-quality professional development so that I can give them research based interventions and *teach them how to read.*
I’m a resource specialist. I’m not tenured yet. I’m sure that pretty soon, someone is going to come at me with my students’ scores on the SBAC and grill me on why my students are not performing at grade level.
I administered the SBAC last spring. My students couldn’t read it.
They are reading, on average, two grades below grade level. That is why they are with me.
All I am allowed to do to help them is say, “Do your best.” I had a student in tears over an five paragraph essay he was supposed to write about a porcupine, after reading a huge wall of text. Which he can’t read.
I told him “Do your best.” Finally I whispered to him, “Just write something about a porcupine, okay?”
He wrote, “I like a porcupine.” This is where we are at. This is how they are going to measure how effective I am.
As far as what we can do about all of this, in my district special education teachers are organizing with parents outside of the schools and outside of the union. We are showing up at school board meetings. We are circulating petitions. We are going to the media.
We are not going to stop. 🙂
Again, I say that if parents could see what is happening to their children in these classes, they would be heartbroken.
‘ I told him “Do your best.” Finally I whispered to him, “Just write something about a porcupine, okay?” ‘
YOU BROKE TEST PROTOCOL!!! 🙂
Any self respecting special education teacher has to find ways to be subversive. Unfortunately, the powers that be are getting better at spying. Some of those “wonderful” computer programs allow administrators to track your data to make sure you are following all protocols whether they useful to you in your class or not.
Model this for k-1 teachers as well please. Write an informational or oppinion or personal narrative paragraph. This includes a topic sentence with three supporting sentences and a concluding sentence, Seriously? My single advanced outlier can’t do this! This is a time when children are focusing on decoding the alphabet, working on blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, learning sight words and figuring out how to form letters on a page. As they progress, they have to figure out how to connect those letters into word strings having no concept of spaces between words or punctuation. They do this using the little bit they know about letter/sound combinations. Deciphering a first grade sentence is like reading Russion or Greek. First graders do not understand vowel blends, consonant blends schaw sounds or inflectional endings. They have had no introduction to grammar. They have no concept of what a sentence is, let alone a paragraph. It’s just a bit developmentally inappropriate.
So I am told to do interactive writing. I write the paragraph with input from the group. I find this to be helpful for the children and often hilarious for me. I wish I could remember what was said in the topic jump that happened Thursday. We were talking about things we do at school and one of my darling kiddos began talking about how pets learn at school.
As I waited for the children to catch up with me (they write in their own journals as we discuss the topic copying what I have written on the board), I walked around the room. Several children have finished writing the date (a first grade tested skill). A few of children have drawn pictures on the page but no letters. I redirect them. Two children have nothing but one of them has managed to eat half the pencil and shredded his eraser. Another has the first letter of the date covering the whole page. He is not being flippant. He really struggles with letter writing. I am working with him on this issue. One child is hiding under her desk in an attempt to avoid writing, she is capable but doesn’t wish to write. It looks too hard. I have another who asked to use the bathroom 20 minutes ago and has not yet returned. When he asked to go several others wanted a turn as well. I only allow one at a time as you can probably invision what would then happen in the bathroom. Not one of those children has asked a second time. They were too late to get in on this easy distraction. And I have one more child who cannot pull the letters from the board to his paper. I sat down next to him to help him follow the sequence of letters and words. This is not an unusual problem for young children. They simply lose their place and with their inexperience, they can’t find it.
I find value in this practice, but it will be quite a while before the children can write any of this independently. Even second and third graders do not have enough schema to Cope well with this demand.
agree, agree, agree … what is being asked in the primary grades is ridiculous….
“I find value in this practice,…” but only for those children who have demonstrated they are ready for it. You have clearly differentiated your expectations but the fact that you feel compelled to use this exercise as a whole group activity is disturbing. It must be a real challenge to assure the children that their inability to do the task is not a sign of poor performance.
This. And many 6 year olds have not developed the eye muscle coordination and agility to look at the board and then look at their paper in order to copy. I always provided help for these kids through pre-written sentence frames, word banks, etc., all frowned upon nowadays for their lack of rigor.
I guess a 6 year old just needs to develop the grit to make his eye muscles and eye balls perform something they haven’t yet grown into doing. And while they are forcing their eyes to be rigorous maybe they can also develop other superpowers? It’s the modern, David Coleman version of eugenics, if you ask me.
Welcome to requirements in Utah. First Grade Monkey hasn’t mentioned that she/he probably has 30-35 first graders in that class. Most people have no idea what teachers go through here. We’ve been dealing with “reform” for 30 years now.
Thank you for the support. It is a required classroom activity. It used to be that I could just do the scribing, but to add rigor all the students are required to copy. Our reading program also includes filling out graphic organizers. These are also generally copied after group discussion. I try to use one or two word summaries rather than sentences for this. I got high marks on my observations for this practice. I agree that more differentiation for student readiness would be nice. But even my small group intervention time is district directed.
I have had 30 first graders in the past. This year I currently have 26. It will not surprise me to add at least two more before the year is over.
Thank you for this. I am getting it from many sides as well. I teach K-2 SDC, on avery low income school. Our Director of Special Education insists we use an extra, very time consuming program to write our lessons so we stay in line with Commom Core. I finally conceeded and spent 4 hours on 3 goals for a student, without success. Met with the Inclusion Specialist who assured me I was using the program wrong, then proceeded to find that goal after goal would not match because they were Commom Core, so I would have to write my own lessons to match those goals. Hmmmmmm! How about the team look at our students, we review their needs and we create goals and lessons based on that?
I’m a resource specialist. All the goals in our goal bank are “common core aligned.” I wrote my first IEP of the year, and all the goals that used to be in the second grade goal bank are now in the first grade goal bank.
A lot of goals are just not realistic, or have too many skills rolled in together. “Revise a paragraph by adding, deleting, consolidating, or rearranging text.” I’m just trying to get my guys to stay on topic, use capitalization and punctuation, and correct their spelling. That is where they are at now, but that isn’t in the goal bank.
“Use various methods to represent math reasoning.” How about “Choose the correct operation to solve a word problem?” That is what they really need.
My coach was an RSP for 40 years and can’t understand why I don’t just write my own goals. 😦 I agree- they should trust us to look at our students and their needs, and create goals and learning plans based on that.
Come on, virginiasp or whatever your name is, come and tell all these folk to stop complaining and go raise the scores!
Exactly why I chose to leave! By NO means do these ratings or test scores define us teachers nor our students as to what they can accomplish! Oh yeah not to mention, not everyone is going to college! We have to find a way to change this broken system!
howardat58: I am surprised you hadn’t heard…
He is exercising his right to opt-out.
¿😳?
You know, besides opting out of accurately presenting the POV of others (e.g., Audrey Amrein-Beardsley) so that he can claim they actually agree with him but haven’t the courage to admit it, and opting out of admitting he eviscerated the teaching claim-to-fame of one of his maximum heroes (i.e., Michelle Rhee), and opting out of explaining just how useful or helpful or accurate test scores are in assessing genuine learning and teaching, and the beat goes on—
He now chosen the greatest opt out of all. He can do what all those SpecEd kids (and so many others) can’t do. Just refuse to have—in his own bidness-minded lingo—his ability and aptitude and grits and determination tested.
Why? Because the unexamined clichés he regurgitates and wants us to live by, e.g., If he had what it takes, if he was in it to win it, if when the going gets tough the tough like him get going—
Are revealed to be nothing more than the same old same old from the sneer, jeer and smear crowd. The same sad triad: Double think. Double talk. Double standards.
But in this case he has hoisted himself by his own petard. Or as Joe Louis, the great boxing champion once said: “He can run but he can’t hide.”
A word, if you please: perhaps you mistake his distracting noise and name-calling and seemingly endless bag of diversionary tricks for something even more stunning and deafening:
Silence is compliance and speaks louder. Let those “non-strivers” (Michael J Petrilli) and “uneducables” (Rahm Emanuel) at least show up and try to do when he deigns to avoid. He is completely comfortable with that. Riffing off the Queen of Mean of yesteryear, Leona Helmsley, having to actually do anything (useful or not) is “for the little people.”
But not to worry. If he will feels any pain he’ll drown his sorrows at a dive called No Guts No Glory Hole-In-The-Wall. It’s where all the folks kicked out of Pink Slip Bar & Grille go when they want to be surrounded by people they think are even bigger losers than themselves. It soothes them no end to make themselves feel that, no matter how pathetic they are, well, just look at that bunch over there…
‘Nuff said.
😎
I just wrote a long letter to our state representative. My comments concerned the basic axioms and postulates upon which a philosophy is built and how vitally important these are.
One of the questions: What is the value of any human being to society? In a time of plague which is more important, the medical doctor or the garbage collector?
A woman I know well quit high school, was not academically gifted. When her uncle got cancer and no one else could or would help him, she changed his colostomy bag, gave him the great care he needed etc etc.
“Special needs” sometimes give special care.
Too: what about the “idiot savant”? Do we really know what intelligence entails? By what yardstick do we measure the worth of ANY human being? By their written test scores? What a fallacy?
Reblogged this on The Withering Apple and commented:
A poignant account from a teacher in the trenches of the War on Public Education.
I am a retired teacher with a severly disabled daughter with speech and language impediments. At age 46, my daughter is unable to consistently spell her four letter name correctly. She cannot read the letters of the alphabet, does not understand the number concepts that 1, 2, 3… represent.
I cringe that in today’s punitive VAM environment her teachers who helped her with kindness and considerable special-education skills would be held responsible for her “academic skills.”
Barbara: I personally believe ARC’s position is pressure from parents who are convinced that the next intervention will “fix” their child. I remember those early days when I believed this. The next thing we do will make her alright and put these developmental problems behind us.
I totally agree with H.A. Hurley’s comments.
I guess that I, too, am a BAD teacher because I would go the ends of the Earth for my students who are Special Ed, but I will not robotically put them on a ridiculous Pacing Guide which is insane for even the best students. To this BAD teacher I say : I hear you and I am in your corner. We must stand together and fight for what is right for our children!!
I caught the St. Louis Post Dispatch having two diametrically opposed letters…one from former Ferguson Florissant board president Carl Peterson—his letter was great, and I included this special education teacher’s account in the comments to reinforce it. the pd was much more enthused in the way they presented mary Danforth stillman’s letter about her all girls charter school, and their urging of more federal money for charter schools……I put both letters in a current affairs forum…..I know it is a long shot, but Peter Greene noticed a story by the elitist PD which caused him to write a comment about it….you have no idea how bad the reporting is in st. Louis…..a comment or two from anybody, anywhere…….honestly expressed based on your comparing the two letters would be extraordinarily helpful. http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1132432&p=15331677&sid=6c2ab0112be1733d73737c6a4a5b694f#p15331677
To the educators that have commented on this thread—
I worked with many SpecED teachers. I am proud to have done that. And I know in my heart that you are referenced in this well known quote from Mother Teresa:
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
With all due apologies, I would add that the edubullies that are hammering you—that know the price of everything and value of nothing—are incapable of understanding the true worth of what you do everyday for so many.
Thank y’all from the bottom of my heart.
😎
KrazyTA, let me thank you back. Every special ed teacher who is lucky enough to have a KTA knows what a difference the presence of skilled paraprofessionals can make in a class.
Amen!
Are you a para? I always say that if you really want to know what’s going on, ask the paraprofessional! My aunt was a paraprofessional in deaf and hard of hearing SDC classes for 25 years. You all are the backbone.
Thank you.
The most notorious American abolitionist, John Brown, was not easy to love. He died on the gallows. Pointed questions about the value of human life and purposes of education (beyond the slogan of “college and career ready”) have not entirely vanished from the intellectual landscape but keeping that focus is hard. I keep returning to the epic poem (250 pages) by Stephen Vincent Benét, and this passage:
“The law is our yardstick and it measures well,
oh well enough when there are yards to measure.
Measure a wave with it, measure fire, cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content.
You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough,
but how and in what balance do you weigh John Brown?
The economists do have a metric for human life and it is increasingly used in the medical insurance industry. The metric is called quality of life years, or “Qaly” Here it is:
“A quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) takes into account both the quantity and quality of life generated by healthcare interventions. It is the arithmetic product of life expectancy and a measure of the quality of the remaining life-years.
A QALY places a weight on time in different health states. A year of perfect health is worth 1 and a year of less than perfect health is worth less than 1.
Death is considered to be equivalent to 0; however, some health states may be considered worse than death and have negative scores.
QALYs provide a common currency to assess the extent of the benefits gained from a variety of interventions in terms of health related quality of life and survival for the patient.
When combined with the costs of providing the interventions, cost–utility ratios result; these indicate the additional costs required to generate a year of perfect health (one QALY).
Comparisons can be made between interventions, and priorities can be established based on those interventions that are relatively inexpensive (low cost per QALY) and those that are relatively expensive (high cost per QALY).
QALYs are far from perfect as a measure of outcome, with a number of technical and methodological shortcomings. Nevertheless, the use of QALYs in resource allocation decisions does mean that choices between patient groups competing for medical care are made explicit and commissioners are given an insight into the likely are given an insight into the likely benefits from investing in new technologies and therapies.” http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/qaly.pdf
It does not take much imagination to see that this thinking about QALYs has migrated to policies for public education. There is a striking parallel between the use of QALY scores and the use of scores in VAM—to calculate the “value added” by teachers, principals, and schools to the “academic performance” of their students. There are even similarities in the demand for specificity in metrics for what the patient can and cannot do…and what students must “know and be able to do” with the Common Core where verbatim use of the standards and code numbers for every standard is expected.
Economists are literally producing metrics on the value-added to the life outcomes of children who have a “high quality” pre-school program. A high quality program is, among other things, planned to reduce the need for special education for “minor” behavioral problems and “correctable” developmental delays before children enter Kindergarten.
Venture capitalists are paying for such programs on the promise of about 5% return on their investments…provided that the contracts with “service providers” include rigorous evaluations of the outcomes for the treatment group, called the “payout children” versus a control group, children who are excluded from the program.
So trafficking in the lives (and families) of young children—valuing the education of some more than other others—is really just a normal part of doing business in educaion.
These new financial products are called SIBs for “Social Impact Bonds,” or they are called Pay-for-Success contracts. You can see how the monetary values are assigned to a high quality preschool program in NYC at Robinhood.org metrics. They take pride in their “Relentless Monetization“ of the value added to lives by the programs they sponsor.
The last time I looked at Robinhood’s formulas, the value of high quality preschool was $53,000 per year for child per year, extended through high school graduation into college completion and/or workforce participation.
One of these pay-for-success preschools contracts is up and running in Utah, another in Chicago. Obama allocated $200 million for SIB startups. Several hothouses are nurturing these private for-profit contracts for social services into existence. One of the biggest hothouses is the Harvard SIB LAB. The nation’s first Social Impact Bond experiment organized as a financial product by Goldman Sachs was intended to reduce the rate at which juvenile offenders returned to Rikers Island. The program didn’t work but gee… the private investors have the data and their investments were backed by philanthropic largess—Bloomberg in this case.
So there it is. Current policies in education mirror the thinking of economists, and of insurance companies, and the privateers in education, who rarely, too rarely, deal with the larger moral issues in “accounting” for the value of life and non monetary value of education and the work of teachers.
These public-private partnerships that Obama and other neo-liberals think are wonderful often turn into snake pits of government-corporate collusion leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill. The service is usually worse and more expensive, not less. http://www.projectcensored.org/privatization-of-free-market-industry-costs-billions-more-than-public-services/
Agree
I happily voted twice for Obama, but he will be judged for all of this.
I am waiting to hear Bernie Sanders speak on these issues. Someone needs to press the candidates on this. We need more than platitudes.
A bunch of people are running things who know the cost of everything and the value of not one thing.
This discussion should be printed and bound and delivered to each prospective SE teacher for perusal before s/he signs the contract to teach.
None of us would pay attention, but I agree.
I agree with the posts. I am not a special education teacher but I see the tremendous amount of work that goes into a special day class. It is hard getting non-challenged students on board with curriculum, classwork, pacing, assessments, etc. I can’t imagine the work that goes into a special classes. We need to let teachers make the decisions in education, not special interest.
I teach Community Based Training. Which is a self-contained classroom. In the state of Arizona it is hard to find Educators to fill our positions because not only do we have to possess a Special Education Cross Categorical certification we also have to be highly qualified in Elementary Education. I say this to say that it must be understood that the population we serve may be 21 but their academic level can be as low as first grade. I am a firm believer that all kids can and will learn if given the opportunity. What they learn is based on their own individual levels. Rather a student receives special education services or not standardized tests are not a good tool to gage a students intellectual level.
Wow! I could have written this myself. The only difference was I was almost written up for insubordination when I tried to explain why I should not be considered “developing.” Guess my frustration showed. I have a Masters degree, national board certified, and ten years of experience. I too am a BAT.
The novel “1984” and the film “Metropolis”. Here we are now, living both of these stories.
Florida, the capital of major corruption, needs to go back to basics, and the leaders need to get their hands out of the education pot, both in laws and in money.
Miami-Dade County, home of the international Third-World Class city, has 15% of its Teachers being sacrificed (by having upwards of $13,000 of agreed-upon pay stolen from them) so that 85% can have a raise.
This, the product of negotiations from the Teachers’ union (UTD)!!! Some supporting entity!!!
The main reason that poverty exists, is simply the greed of those that want more than their fair share, AT THE COST OF SOMEONE ELSE. When a person is willing to take from someone else for their own gain, not only are they corrupt, but a criminal as well. It is true that a bad apple can spoil the barrel. Unfortunately we are governed by bad barrels left and right.
I wish that this blog were reporting on special education issues all the time. I have enjoyed all the comments on this article. Please keep these issues in the forefront.