This post reminds us that literature speaks to us about life in ways that informational text can never do. That is why a story like Yertle the Turtle resonates with us long after we first read it and long after the informational text has been forgotten.
The post is about a kindergarten teacher. He is worried about how the Common Core will affect the children with the greatest needs.
The Edwin F. Mandel Legal Clinic of the University of Chicago and a major law firm sued the Chicago Public Schools in federal court on behalf of students with disabilities and African American students. The closing of their schools, the lawsuit claims, has a damaging and disparate impact on these students.
In one lawsuit, the lawyers state:
“In violation of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the defendants propose to carry out the closings of 53 elementary schools in a manner that does not permit a timely and orderly process either for the proper review and revision of the individualized education programs (IEPs) for the plaintiff children and over 6,000 other children in special education programs or for the extra services and counseling such children require to make the difficult transition to unfamiliar schools and unfamiliar teachers and students. By putting off their decision on the closings to the eleventh hour, or the very end of the school year – for the largest closing of public schools in American history – the defendants place the plaintiff children and other children in special education at far greater risk than their non-disabled peers. The late date makes it impossible to conduct the closings without significant disruption to the programs in which these children participate and without adequate provision for the special safety risks faced by children with disabilities. In violation of federal law, this late, ill-timed, and ill-prepared program for the closing of 53 elementary schools will have a discriminatory impact upon the plaintiff children and other children with disabilities, compared to their non-disabled peers.”
The second lawsuit charges the school board, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, and the city not only with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, but engaging in racial discrimination:
“I]n violation of Section 5 of the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003 (ICRA), 740 ILCS 23/5, and by repeatedly selecting African American students to bear the costs of the closings, the defendants have unlawfully used “criteria and methods of administration” that have the “effect” of subjecting the plaintiffs’ children and other African American children represented by the plaintiff parents to discrimination because of race. In conducting closings since 2001, the defendants have used various shifting criteria that they allege to be race neutral but that always have the effect of singling out poor and marginalized African American children to bear the educational and human costs of the closings. For the 72 schools that defendants have closed to date, African American children make up more than 90 percent of the displaced children; and in currently proposed closings, they make up more than 80 percent of the displaced children. Yet African American children constitute only 42 percent of the children in the public schools.”
A reader in Michigan insists that the for-profit charter operator in Muskegon Heights obey the law protecting students with disabilities. If every activist did the same, it would force the charters to serve all children. She should get the ACLU to help her.
“If you look up Michigan legislator in the thesaurus it directs you to “stupidity” with a footnote to see the Term Limit fiasco of 1992. That being said, for those against the Charter movement MI charters were delivered a fairly major setback this past Thursday.
“I filed a formal complaint this past January against the Mosaica-run Muskegon Heights Public School Academy (first all-charter district) pursuant to alleged violations to the IEPs of every student age 3-26 and on 10 substantive violations. The soup to nuts (or rotten eggs) of special education violations. The MI Dept. of Ed found NONCOMPLIANCE for ALL 10 allegations. The director of special education was fired 6 weeks ago over this complaint (and a second for children, birth to age 3 that will be out in several weeks) and corrective action that includes compensatory education for the students has been ordered.
“This complaint highlights (or lowlights) the complete failure of Mosaica and these Charters to deliver even a semblance of a free appropriate public education. I will next file a complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Ed Office of Civil Rights and allege the denial of FAPE. So while I have never met a parent in this regurgitated emergency manager-run district…score a victory for the children…and those of us fighting for public education.”
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregation of the races in public school was unconstitutional. At the time, segregation was the law in 17 states and many districts.
For years, the states where segregation was outlawed resisted the court decision. Their favorite ploy was school choice. They knew that school choice would preserve racial segregation because whites would choose to stay with whites, and blacks would be fearful of applying to white schools, where they would face a hostile climate, harassment, and even violence.
The Supreme Court and lower federal courts overturned the many strategies enacted to evade the necessity of desegregation.
But that was then,and this is now.
Now, billionaires proudly sponsor segregated schools. Now, cities and states authorize all-black, all-Hispanic, all-white charter schools without embarrassment.
The UCLA Civil Rights Project says that racial resegregation is on the rise, for blacks and Hispanics.
The federal government–most especially, the U.S. Department of Education–doesn’t care about racial segregation any more. Nor does it have an active interest in discrimination against students with disabilities. When the ACLU recently won a ruling against voucher schools in Milwaukee that excluded students with disabilities, it went not to the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, but to the U.S. Department of Justice. When the U.D. Government Accountability Office issued a report criticizing charter schools for their mall proportions of students with disabilities, James Shelton of the U.S. Department of Education said something like, “we’ll have to look into that.” That was the last heard from this Department.
Those who care about the resegregation of public education and discrimination against students because of their disabilities will have to wait for another administration that also cares about fairness, equity, and the principles enunciated on May 17, 1954. This one does not.
In an earlier post, a teacher in Tennessee wrote critically about the PARCC assessments of the Common Core. The teacher said that the assessments did not permit accommodations for students with disabilities.
Chad Colby of Achieve, one of the organizations responsible for developing the Common Core, says that these claims are wrong.
He writes:
“The information presented in this post is factually incorrect.
“Students with disabilities will have access to accommodations on the PARCC assessment. A draft accommodations manual is currently out for public comment: http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-releases-draft-accommodations-manual-public-comment and we encourage parents and educators to review and give feedback.
“Also, IEP teams will still determine what accommodations students with disabilities should receive. It’s the law.
“From the Individuals with Disabilities Act Regulations:
http://idea.ed.gov/download/finalregulations.html
“In §300.320(a)(6), it states that the IEP must contain:
(6)(i) A statement of any individual appropriate accommodations that are necessary to measure the academic achievement and functional performance of the child on State and districtwide assessments consistent with §612(a)(16) of the Act”
Chad Colby – Achieve
(202) 419-1570
(202) 297-9437 cell
Louise Marr sent this from her book:
**********£*******
“Every spring, the Philadelphia public school students take the standardized tests, or PSSAs. (Starting in 2013, the district has switched to a different test called the Keystone Exams.) These tests are a huge part of how schools are evaluated and rated. It is from these scores that Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) is determined. There is a big push to prepare the eleventh graders for the tests from the beginning of the year to test day, usually after the first of the year. This particular year at Vaux, the students took the test over a course of several days. They were divided into several different classrooms for three to four hours in the morning, with two teacher proctors per room. All eleventh graders take the test, even the SPED students. Schools across the country take statewide tests very seriously, because of the implications that they present. In the five high schools where I have taught, there has been a common atmosphere at test time: the school is quiet and rules must be strictly enforced. In the classroom that I proctored at Vaux, it was sometimes a challenge to maintain the serious atmosphere.
There were five students in the room I proctored. Four were SPED students. One was MMR, and read at first grade level. He was given the same test. After a few minutes, he put his head down, because he did not understand the reading. Teachers are not allowed to help, only to say, “Do the best you can.” He didn’t even bother to ask.
Takierrah and Courtney were working on their tests, until Courtney looked up and caught Takierrah looking at her.
“Stop looking at me!”
“You’re ugly, I will f*** you up.” “I can’t stand your black ass.” “You’re black too!”
“No, I’m light-skinned.”
“You’re still ugly.”
“I’m cuter than you.”
“Get outta my face.”
“I’m not in your face, because if I was, I would f*** you up.”
They did manage to settle down without a physical confrontation,
but this scene made a huge impression on me. These tests would be used to evaluate the progress of our school. They were obviously way above the comprehension level of the Special Education students, yet the students were not given any accommodations at all. When I asked an administrator about this, she just shrugged, “That’s just the way it is.”
From the book, “Passed On: Public School Children in Failing American Schools”
by Louise Marr. Chapter 3: No Longer a Special Education
Responding to a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Department of Justice warned voucher schools in Milwaukee to stop excluding, counseling out, or otherwise discriminating against students with disabilities.
“The state cannot, by delegating the education function to private voucher schools, place students beyond the reach of the federal laws that require Wisconsin to eliminate disability discrimination in its administration of public programs,” DOJ officials wrote in the letter to Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers.
Voucher programs across the nation–now operating in 20 states–will be affected, and states are now obliged to monitor voucher programs to be sure they are in compliance with federal laws protecting the rights of students with disabilities.
The ACLU contended that the voucher program excluded students with disabilities, and if they were admitted, they were systematically expelled and/or pushed out. This practice led to a very large percentage of students with disabilities in the public school district even as its funding was declining due to loss of enrollment to vouchers and charters. Consequently, the so-called “failing” district cannot possibly recover because the private schools don’t accept students with disabilities and the public school has to accept all comers. And despite their exclusion of students with disabilities, the voucher schools in Wisconsin DO NOT outperform the public schools.
A statement issued by the ACLU warned of the danger of choice programs:
“Publicly-funded voucher programs have the effect of setting up a separate escape hatch for only a few, leaving the majority of the poor students in schools that are even less likely to succeed than they were before the voucher program or tax credit began. Furthermore, the private schools that spring up to educate a child for $6,500 are producing results that are no better than the public school district – in Milwaukee, for example, three years of comparison test scores show they are performing worse than the public system. We also know that the Milwaukee parents who take advantage of these programs tend to have higher education levels and children without disabilities, leaving the public school district with a higher percentage of children with disabilities and parents with less education. There are few checks in place to ensure that all of the schools accepting vouchers are more than glorified day care providing convenient hours for parents.”
Even more ominous is the specter of segregation academies in the south:
“…some private schools in states like Georgia and Alabama, where tax credits have recently been put into place, were founded as segregation academies to thwart federal integration efforts. While the program in Milwaukee and its school district serve almost entirely students of color, as “school choice” spreads around the country, the stage is set for these programs to become even more exclusionary and segregated. We know this because Milwaukee’s voucher program already excludes students with disabilities and segregates them into the public school district while at the same time stripping the district of much needed funds to educate them. If we permit this to continue, we are condoning separate schools for a number of groups of students, including racial minorities, students with disabilities, religious minorities and LGBT students. What we have known for the fifty years since Brown v. Board of Education is that separate is not equal. School voucher programs and tax credits do not provide a choice for everyone. They create publicly funded separate schools.”
This comment from a teacher who read the post “For Shame, Commissioner King.” That post described how the state commissioner in New York requires special education students to take examinations they can’t read.
The teacher writes:
“I am often asked to proctor extended time testing on our all-too-frequent assessment days (quarterly interims, ACTs, PSAEs, practice for all of the above, etc.). I have been told it’s because I “get it” by our very talented, also very frustrated, special education team. By “get it,” they mean that, as a traditionally-certified teacher (in a charter network which favors TFAers) who attended an actual school of education, I have taken a few required classes on student learning differences and understand that not all kids can be lumped into a mediocre average and expected to achieve the same baseline level of understanding given “optimal input” and prison-like management. My husband works in mental health, so I am also inappropriately (illegally) consulted on student psychological issues far outside my job as a Latin teacher. It amazes me how clueless, or maybe worse, how careless, our schools have become with these students. Our school has an AMAZING special education team, yet they are ignored, forgotten about, and not consulted when it comes to the students they know best. Many have left or are leaving to take their talent elsewhere, and who could blame them?
“When I proctored my first extended time interim (a totally unnecessary in-network assessment incentivized by bonuses for both students and teachers whose scores compete with other schools in our network), I was shocked and appalled at what we do to our kids who already struggle to stay focused on one narrow task and sit still in their normal 45-minute class periods. We put them all in a room together, and make them sit still and silent for four hours. It was miserable for me, and I can only imagine how miserable it was for them. One student managed to pull a dollar bill out of his pocket, and studied it intently for a good 10 or 15 minutes during his math exam, no doubt running out of time when it came to actually completing the test. Knowing this student, I’m sure something in his exam inspired some spark of curiosity that he couldn’t ignore. This type of exploration might have been acknowledged positively, could have lent itself to a “teachable moment” to help students see some cross-curricular connections between printed money and history or culture (I’m going to pretend he was reading the Latin). But instead, I was expected to silently discipline the student after the test for not “focusing hard enough” on his pointless, soulless, disconnected interim exam.
“I hate where we are headed. I hate how little schools are allowed to appreciate real, connected learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. I hate to see brilliance stifled by enforced mediocrity. I feel so lucky to have attended schools before this wave of “reform,” but heartbroken for so many of my students who trust their futures to a system that is ultimately failing to help them reach their human potential, because being human is too messy, too hard to assign convenient numerical values to, and apparently undesirable to our policymakers and their corporate sponsors.”
From a reader:
Libbie, my daughter with Rett Syndrome, could not talk or use her hands functionally to communicate, yet she was forced to go through the state testing every year. Her IEP “accommodations” forced her teacher to work with her 1 on 1, and ask each question so Libbie could eye-gaze at her chosen answer, as an “alternative assessment”. In 5th grade, she figured how to “opt-out” on her own. She would simply close her eyes and refuse to participate. Her teacher frantically called me to somehow remedy the situation, but I only smiled with pride at my silent daughter’s wise choice. She took a nap, rather than take a test.
Libbie passed away 3 years ago, due to complication from Rett. In my grief, I have become so angry at how much time she spent in school being tested, precious moments of her already difficult life completing meaningless tasks. I hate standardization of all children, especially our beautiful ones with special needs.
If you want to know how No Child Left Behind has injured our society’s most vulnerable children, read this heart-breaking story about the sanctions imposed on the Rhode Island School for the Deaf.
Written by a recently retired teacher at the school, it describes how the standardized testing regime struck the children and the school like a sledgehammer, causing it to be labeled Persistently Low Performing.
The story begins:
“I recently participated in the inspiring and informative webinar “How to Organize a Grassroots Group” put on by the Network for Public Education and the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education. I am a retired teacher of the deaf, having retired from the Rhode Island School for the Deaf in the fall of 2011 profoundly dismayed by the unreasonable sanctions placed on the school by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), headed by Deborah Gist (Broad Superintendents Academy 2008).”
Read this post and ask yourself how anyone associated with the punishments inflicted on this important school can sleep at night or look themselves in the mirror every morning without grimacing.
And the next time you hear a pundit or think tank jockey praise NCLB, tell them about the Rhode Island School for the Deaf.
