Greg Cruey's Blog
Posted by Greg Cruey
Can you name the eight planets?
Now before you get all snitty with me, I know there used to be nine planets. But for a few days now there's only been eight, officially. The International Astronomical Union decided last month to come up with a clearer definition of the term "planet." They look at two choices - one that would make for 12 planets and promote the asteroid Ceres to be the fifth planet in between Mars and Jupiter), and another model that would remove Pluto from the list of planets for being, well, too small. The second plan won. So now there are only eight planets (although there are a lot of Pluto-lovers in the world and the issue is far from settled).
I talked with my science class mixed group of 4th and 5th graders) about the news on Pluto and discovered that few of them could name all eight of the planets in order. So we came up with a type of acrostic together.
An acrostic is a string of words that help you remember something semantically unrelated based on the first letter of each word. The acrostic we came up with was this: My Van Exploded, My Jeep Stopped Underneath New York. (My students actually came up with all the words except for "Jeep," they couldn't think of the name of a car that started with "j" on their own). How does the acrostic help? The first letter of each word is the first letter of the name of a planet:
- My (Which starts with "m" and should help you think of Mercury)
- Van (Which starts with "v" and should help you think of Venus)
- Exploded (Which starts with "e" and should help you think of Earth)
- My (Which starts with "m" and should help you think of Mars)
- Jeep (Which starts with "j" and should help you think of Jupiter)
- Stopped (Which starts with "s" and should help you think of Saturn)
- Underneath (Which starts with "u" and should help you think of Uranus)
- New York (Which starts with "n" and should help you think of Neptune)
Why did this happen underneath New York? Beats me. But it works. And the kids think they know twice as much as they did a week ago because the class average was only four planets from memory before the acrostic.
And success breeds success...
Posted by Greg Cruey
On July 19 Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings went up to Capitol Hill to join some GOP lawmakers in proposing that $100 million be set aside to fund a voucher program for students whose schools consistently haven't lived up to the academic requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The program, dubbed America's Opportunity Scholarships for Kids, would pay private school tuition of up to $4,000 a year for children from failing schools to attend a private school.
The proposal itself is nothing new. Though this year's push is perhaps a little more concrete and forceful than in the past, the Bush Administration has asked Congress for funding for vouchers every year since 2001. USA Today quoted Spellings as saying that "The day of reckoning is coming. Accountability is hollow without real options for parents and without real options for kids," during her time on the Hill.
The prophetic tone of of Spellings' remarks reinforced the perception that Peter Laarman expresses so eloquently. Republicans are on an almost Biblical "crusade" to help "deliver" the American underclass from the "Egypt" of the American public school system. Laarman's July 19th Blog on the topic is entertaining. (Lest anyone think ill of me, I should make clear that I'm poking fun at voucher advocates, not God; I may teach in the Egypt of the public school system, but I'm a Baptist who spent 10 years in overseas missions before becoming a teacher...)
The real irony of this year's proposal is its timing. A few days before the Spellings proposal, the Department of Education's very own National Assessment of Educational Progress office (NAEP) released a report comparing public and private education. The report, Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, concluded that yes private school students get better scores on reading and math -- but that it was because of the students, not the teaching at private school. When factors like socio-economic status and disability were controlled for, private schools didn't perform any better than public school overall.
The NAEP report itself was embarrassing for voucher advocates. More embarrassing is the perception that Secretary of Education Spellings either was unaware of the report before she went up to the Hill to promote this year's voucher plans or, worse, tried to hide the report. National Public Radio has a good piece on that controversy...
Posted by Greg Cruey
No Dentist Left Behind is making the email rounds. Again. The story has been around for a number of years - since before No Child Left Behind became law. It was originally meant to ridicule a South Carolina state law designed to "bring accountability" to public schools. The parody, originally titled Absolutely the Best Dentists, was sent to every legislator and newspaper in that state when it was composed by a retired school superintendent.
Think about it. Shouldn't someone be telling us whether dentists are doing a good job or not? Shouldn't we have the right to compare dentists based on the only thing that really matters in dentistry: cavities? And if we're going to a dentist that's only "above average" (and not improving that rating every year), we should have the right to move our business to a practice where the dentist has at least an "outstanding" or "excellent" rating. Dentists who don't manage to prevent cavities should lose their licenses, don't you think...?
Some of the parody's comparisons have teeth (no pun intended). The idea that one day we'll rate all schools based on a single, statewide measure of mastery -- regardless of the different educational levels of individual communities, regardless of the value those individual communities places on education, regardless of the resources available to parents during the preschool years -- seems at least as ludicrous as rating dentists based on the average number of cavities their clients have regardless of whether a dentist's clients have access to fluoride in their water or understand how diet impacts their dental health.
On the other hand, dentists exist largely in private practice while schools are public agencies. And the sense of government intrusion that so offends the dentist in the parody is probably misapplied to in a school system setting because, well, schools (mostly) are government.
Is the parody a fair look at No Child Left Behind? I'll leave that to you, the reader...
Posted by Greg Cruey
And on top of that, the regs say that an eligibility committee can decide that a child has a specific learning disability if "the child does not make sufficient progress ...when using a process based on the child's response to scientific, research-based intervention..." which makes it sound like that without the Response to Intervention (RtI) model, it may be impossible under the new regs to identify learning disabilities.
We're going to take a closer look at the RtI model. We already have one article online about Response to Intervention that simply described the model.
Coming up in a couple of days we'll look at some of the problems the model will pose for identifying learning disabilities in particular. Quantifying the decision to place a child in special education looks set to become much more difficulty, which means that when parents disagree with the decision they will have a much harder time winning in the due process.
In just over a week we'll look at the benefits the RtI model brings to the school setting. RtI has the potential to help children that in the past simply went without help. The model could also bring the expertise of reading specialists and learning disabilities specialists together and make them find a joint approach to the problems that students have in the classroom.
And then later this month we're going to take a look at the evaluation process itself - particularly at the role of IQ testing in the future. The day may soon come when a school principal doesn't have to wait for a very busy certified school psychologist to find the time to spend half a day evaluating Johnny's "cognitive function." The decision that Johnny has a learning disorder may not require an IQ test anymore. But that's a point of contention we'll look at in some detail (and the truth is that only time and court cases are likely to provide the answer with any certainty).
While discussion of those topics is more or less set in stone this month, we may also eventually look at the tone of RtI. I've heard it said that the reponse to intervention model had to be implemented because so many learning disabilities were being caused by bad teaching. We may talk about that.
The RtI model also has the potential to change the way school districts think about inclusion. My guess is that there will be pressure on schools to move students who are self-contained back into the general education classroom to see if they respond to interventions there. Doing that could also free up instructional time for special education teachers to do some of the Tier II intervention work.
We look forward to having you here with us as we examine the impact of RtI over the next few weeks...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The new regulations have been a long time in coming. An official version will be published in the Federal Register on August 14. But they are available now in MS Word or as a PDF file online - all 1,705 pages of them.
The regulations are supposed to help implement the new law. There are also 19 new topic briefs at the Department of Education's website on a wife number of issues - including procedural safeguards, the individualized education plan, disproportionality and overidentification, discipline, and how the new version of IDEA aligns with the No Child Left Behind Act.
Having trouble sleeping? The appendices alone take up almost 100 pages....
Posted by Greg Cruey
Dr. Barton is an internationally recognized expert in dyslexia (and ADD/ADHD), the founder of Bright Solutions for Dyslexia, LLC and the developer of the Barton Reading & Spelling System. Her website gives a checklist of sorts to help parents and educators decide whether a child's reading problem might be dyslexia. Among the many indicators that should be watched for:
- Delayed Speech
- Problems with pencil grip and writing
- Problems telling left from right
- And (believe it or not) problems learning how to tie their shoes
Of course, none of these mean much in isolation. And the question becomes one of how many symptoms a child has from the list.
Dr. Barton's day with us was the most informative discussion of dyslexia I've ever attended. She has a number of free resources available, like her three free videos on the topic.
If you have a child that struggles with reading or if you're an educator who would like to know more about dyslexia, I encourage you to visit her site...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The Rotenburg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, uses electric shock (along with a complicated system of other rewards and punishments) to condition students. Suite101 began following this story with a feature in May and I discussed my opinion of the situation in a blog that month.
The State of New York will have three public hearings in August on the new regulations. The first will be on August 8th in Albany, in the Administrative Board Room of the Capital Region BOCES at 3pm. There will be hearings in New York City on August 14th (at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building at 2pm) and in Syracuse on August 15th (at Dr. King Elementary School starting at 3pm). Comments can also be sent to the State's Office of Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities in Albany until August 28. You can email your comments (put "Comments: Behavioral Intervention Regulations" in your email's subject line).
One of the best explanations of the new temporary regulations is available from Wrightslaw.
The actual regulations are also available online.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The journal JAASEP is available online.
The call for contributions to the upcoming issue of JAASEP was made jointly by Dr. Roger Pierangelo and Dr. George Giuliani, the executive directors of the Academy. The JAASEP is seeking contributions in the following areas:
- Feature Manuscripts - quantitative and qualitative research based submissions that address current practice issues in the field of special education. Feature manuscripts are major articles which make a new contribution to the field of special education.
- Professional Reviews - reviews of conferences and workshops, books, DVDs, and other relevant sources of information.
- Commentaries and Letters to the Editor - your voice on issues pertaining to the field of special education.
JAASEP is an online peer-reviewed journal. The deadline for article submissions for the Fall, 2006 edition of JAASEP is
October 15, 2006. To learn more you can contact JAASEP at editor@aasep.org
Membership in the Academy is available "to college and university professors, school administrators, educational evaluators, professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, directors of special education services, directors of early intervention agencies, infant-toddler service coordinators, transition service coordinators, speech and language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, and all other professionals in the field of special education," according to the Academy's website.
Posted by Greg Cruey
While we tend to think in terms of legislation when we consider the rights of special education students, the truth is that laws have consistently been passed by Congress primarily to catch up to what the courts have ruled must happen. Students with disabilities in America have a right to a free, appropriate public education (a FAPE), not because Congress made it law, but because the courts have said so - first in 1971 in the case Pennsylvania ARC v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and again the next year in the Mills v. the Board of Education. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA, later to become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA) was an attempt in 1975 to bring order and legal organization to the rights the courts had already recognized.
Consider this:
- When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that city and county school systems all across America would have to integrate their schools, not a penny in funding for the task was attached to the ruling.
- In 1972, when the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act (eventually to become known as Title IX) was passed requiring some level of parity in funding for sports for men and women, no funding was committed to that.
- When the Rehabilitation Act (including section 504, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities) was passed in 1973, not a cent was appropriated to help local government agencies comply with the new law's requirements.
- In 1990 the Americans with Disabilities Act was made law and extended still more civil rights protections to the disabled without a single thin dime of funding.
Rights are rights. And one of the most profound and fundamental values of American society is the idea that money can't buy you your rights. Neither can your lack of money cost you your rights.
So when Congress began, as part of the debate over passing EAHCA, to try and estimate the cost of educating students with disabilities in the public schools, the waters were muddied and clarity of thought on the topic has often been reduced as a result. The idea developed in many state and local educational agencies that the right of a severely retarded child, or of a blind and deaf girl, or of a Down syndrome boy to a FAPE was somehow contingent upon the degree to which federal funding could be used to secure that child's right.
A monetary value was placed on a basic right in American society.
It would be nice if the federal government thought that the value of educating the disabled was worth more. It would be nice, for that matter, if the federal government thought that education in general was worth a greater investment. I'd be for that - for money to lower the student-teacher ratio in American schools and to raises teacher pay so that salaries reflect the level or training and professionalism required to do the job. Instead the current administration's long term goal seems to be the privatization of education in America and the dismantling of Great Society programs like Title I.
The truth is that regardless of the federal government's willingness (or unwillingness) to fund special education in individual states from Washington's coffers, kids with autism or dyslexia, with emotional disturbances or traumatic brain injury have an unmitigated right to an education. A free education. An appropriate education. That's not to say that a disabled child has a right to the best available education; but they do have a right to an appropriate one.
The funding issue is simple, really. When a school system says that it can't provide that kind of education because, well, it can't afford to, it is offering to violate that child's civil rights. And it bears liability for that regardless of federal funding priorities in the current fiscal year....
(For a more complete discussion of the issue, take a look at this examination of the idea of "full funding" for special education, by one of America's leading legal minds in disability law, Reed Martin.)
Posted by Greg Cruey
According to a report by The Edmonton Journal, the study will be published in the journal Pediatrics next month. The study is significant because Quebec began using only vaccines without thimerosal in 1996. So children raised in Quebec and under the age of ten have never been given a vaccine with the mercury-based preservative in it.
The Quebec study actually shows that the incidence of autism has been higher in the years since the use of thimerosol as a preservative was stopped. Of course, the incidence of autism has increased everywhere in the last decade, making Quebec relatively normal in that trend.
The relationship between thimerosol, autism, and childhood vaccines is complicated and confusing. Much of the current buzz began in 1998 when a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet suggested a possible link between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. The study was not intended to examine that relationship (it was looking for a connection between viral infections and intestinal disease in children, and at the possibility that such intestinal diseases could contribute to the development of autism), included only 12 participants in the study, and has since had its validity questioned by many of the original researchers involved.
Another British study published in 2002 also suggested a link between measles (the disease, but not necessarily the vaccine), intestinal disease, and autism. The study was designed in a manner that prevented the researchers from determining whether either measles or intestinal disease actually caused autism. That study had only 161 participants. The Lancet published a study in 2004 with almost 6,000 participants; the study concluded that the MMR vaccine itself did not represent an increased risk for either autism or other disorders under the umbrella of autism spectrum.
To add to the confusion, the Centers for Disease Control says that while the preservative has been used in a number of other childhood vaccines in the past, the MMR vaccine has never contained thimerosal.
The cause (or causes) for the rising numbers of autism cases is among the most controversial issues in both medicine and education today.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The June/July issue of The Reading Teacher, published by the International Reading Association (IRA), carried a brief piece on comments and views on NCLB expressed at the convention. As part of a panel discussion for the Reading Hall of Fame, Kenneth S. Goodman said that some of the programs and testing currently being used by NCLB was a "pedagogy of the absurd." Goodman is Professor Emeritus of Language, Reading, and Culture at the University of Arizona; he is also a member of the Reading Hall of Fame and a past president of IRA.
Goodman was not the only critical voice aimed at NCLB at the convention. Keynote speaker Michael Pressley lambasted NCLB for its overemphasis on testing, saying that "Every minute spent on testing is a minute not spent on instruction." His views were amplified by Opening General Session speaker Jonathan Kozol who pointed out that many schools spend as much as a quarter of their year simply preparing for tests. Pressley is a professor of educational psychology and teacher education at Michigan State University and spent six years as editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology. Kozol is an educational activist who won the National Book Award in 1968 for his book Death at an Early Age; he focuses on race, poverty and education.
S. Jay Samuels criticized the law for having unrealistic goals. He said that the goal of having all children (including special education students and English language learners) score at the level of proficiency is something that not even countries that rank at the very top of international educational assessments are able to achieve. Samuels teaches education psychology at UCLA and worked as co-editor on the book What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The Globe article was a follow up to several pieces it did on the Rotenburg school in May, covered by us here, as well.
While the Rotenburg school uses electric shock as part of what it calls aversion therapy to shock students for bad behavior, the New York report found that students are sometimes shocked for infractions as petty as nagging a teacher. The report also questions the safety of Rotenburg's practice of having some students wear the electrodes in the bath or shower.
The report is pretty damning. Students at the school live with "pervasive fears and anxieties." Rotenburg school appears to be more interested in punishing bad behavior than encouraging good behavior. Over 65% of personnel at the school involved in caring directly for students hold only a high school diploma which often "is not sufficient to oversee the intensive treatment of children with challenging emotional and behavioral problems." And 11 of the 17 clinicians responsible for mental health at the facility are a licensed in psychology.
Concerns were also raised in the N.Y. report over student nutrition; Rotenberg sometimes withholds food from students as a form of punishment. And, finally, the Globe said that "a surprise inspection that showed the school's practices are a lot different from written treatment plans for students."
The Rotenburg Center's lawyer, Michael Flammia, dismissed the report, saying that the findings were a distortion of the truth and reminding the public that the center is a facility of last resort for students who haven't responded to other forms of treatment or therapy. He pointed out that less than a year ago NY State gave the center high marks for safety in an annual report. Flammia attributed the current situation to bad publicity.
A vote in New York later this month should determine whether the state will restrict the use of pain as a form of punishment for students in (or from) the state. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center is located in Canton, Massachusetts but about two-thirds of Rotenberg's students are sent from New York.
Posted by Greg Cruey
Dr. Margaret J. Kay does. And she tells you online what should be in a psychoeducational evaluation. Her online document, How to Prepare a Psychoeducational Evaluation Report & Testify as an Expert Witness, gives all the components of a good report.
The psychoeducational evaluation is something a parent is supposed to be given a copy of as part of the process of deciding whether their child has a disability.
There will of course be some variation from one psychoeducational evaluation to the next because, after all, kids are all different, unique. And not everyone is suspected of having the same disability. Dr. Kay calls her online document a set of "best-practice guidelines."
"When a psychoeducational evaluation is well done, it can provide a virtual blueprint for the construction of the student's Individual Educational Program (IEP). In addition, test results obtained during the psychoeducational evaluation provide an indication of how the student has progressed over time and create a baseline against which to measure future educational progress," she goes on to say.
This online document provides you with a way of deciding if the psychoeducational evaluation done on your child is complete and appropriate.
- Does it discuss the reason for your child's referral?
- Is there a history (including a medical history) and some background information on your child?
- Does the report talk about how your child acted during the testing and evaluation process?
- Is there a list of the tests that were given to your child and a clear analysis of the results?
- Is there a summary of the results and some recommendations to consider?
Dr. Kay provides insight into the different sections of a psychoeducational evaluation. Among the most valuable aspects of the document is her mention of different tests in connection to their uses so that you can understand why particular tests may have been given to your child (or wonder why they were not given).
If you are entering into the evaluation (or re-evaluation) process for special education placement, Dr. Kay's online document, How to Prepare a Psychoeducational Evaluation Report & Testify as an Expert Witness, is an excellent resource to help prepare you for discussing your child's evaluation.
Posted by Greg Cruey
Alba Somoza is the great-granddaughter of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García (1896-1956). Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who ruled Nicaragua from 1967 to 1979 before the [i]Sandinistas[/i] took control of the country, was Alba's great-uncle. She has cerebral palsy, is a quadriplegic, and cannot speak. Alba uses a computerized device to communicate by taping on a keyboard with a stick that is attached to her chin.
In 1993, Alba's twin sister, Anastasia Somoza, asked then-President Bill Clinton at a town meeting for help getting Alba admitted to a regular school. He did; and later he attended Alba's graduation from the NYC school where she was awarded a diploma with honors. Alba's mother, Mary Somoza says that Alba's transcript was falsified; Alba got a grade of 90 in a chemistry class her mother says she never attended.
While both Alba and Anastasia were born with quadriplegic cerebral palsy, Anastasia can communicate through normal speech. She is now a college junior at Georgetown University. When Alba graduated from High School in 2002 she enrolled in Queens College but it was soon obvious that she was not academically ready for college; NYC evidently agreed to cover the $1.2 million cost of remediating her for three years to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires that children with disabilities aged 3 to 21 be provided with a free appropriate public education, or FAPE. Now, at the age of 22, Alba's lawsuit seeks to compel NYC's department of education to continue providing remedial services (at an estimated cost of $800,000) for another two year. NYC says that they fulfilled their obligation to provide three years of remedial services after high school and that, because Alba is now 22 years old, IDEA no longer applies to her.
According to one news source, Alba read at the fourth grade level when she graduated with honors from the School of the Future in 2002...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The federal court ruled that Henrico Co. Schools "knowingly and repeatedly failed to provide a system of instruction suitable to a severely autistic child," according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In other words the child, Reid Tutwiler, did not receive a FAPE, (a Free Appropriate Public Education) as required by law.
Tutwiler is now eight years old. Specialists believed that Reid needed 20 to 30 hours a week of intensive instruction. When Henrico County determined that it would only provide 15 hours Reid's parents went to court and enrolled Reid in a private school - the Fasion School for Autism. The county is no liable for Tutiler's tuition there over the last four years (the time it took for the case to reach federal court); Fasion charges about $50,000 a year in tuition.
The ruling is just the most recent of a sting of court rulings on Autism this year:
- On January 30 U.S District Judge D. Brock Hornby ruled that a girl in York County, Maine, was eligible for special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The girl, who remains nameless in court records has Asperger's Syndrome - a condition usually grouped together with other developmental disorders under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder - and had been denied special education services by Maine's School Administrative District 55.
- On February 2 the parents of Paige Gaydos were awarded $700,000 by a U.S. District Court in California after they sued Cupertino Union School District and Karen Miller (a special education teacher) for the way their daughter was treated during the 2001-2002 school year. Paige, who now attends a private school, also has Asperger Syndrome.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The news stories about electric shock as a learning tool for some New York public school students has raised a lot of eyebrows.
I'm not really a Behaviorist. The approach is probably the most incomplete view of learning. It has the attraction of being simple. And (okay) I admit that I've reinforced desirable behavior in my students with positive stimuli ("anyone who gets all the math problems right gets a free snack"). But learning is more involved than that.
Positive reinforcement is one thing. As incomplete at the larger theory of Behaviorism may be, positive reinforcement works (and raises few serious ethical dilemmas). Aversive therapy is something else. Does it work? Can I extinguish an undesirable behavior (like, say, name calling) in a mentally impaired teenager by shocking them whenever they do it? Sure. It works with white rats and with monkeys, too. But does efficiency alone make it acceptable? Even in an environment where everyone is sincerely concerned for the welfare of the child and there are no other agendas, human judgment is sometimes flawed and behavior is sometimes more complicated than it appears.
The biggest problem with Behaviorism is simple; it functions on the assumption that what goes on inside a child's head is irrelevant - mostly because it can't be observed. But the opposite is probably more true. Mental states, emotions, and thought processes are more important to long term success with a student than Behaviorism accounts for.
The important questions in this debate are not about learning itself; they are about ethics. We shouldn't be asking if aversive therapies work. We should be asking if this is something we do to other people whether it works or not.
I agree with the words of Leo Sarkissian, executive director of the Association of Retarded Citizens of Massachusetts quoted in the Boston Globe: "We don't do this to prisoners in the criminal justice system, so we shouldn't be doing it to people with disabilities."
So if you live in New York, sign the petition...
Posted by Greg Cruey
NFL quarterback Doug Flutie has decided to call it quits after 21 seasons in pro football, according to a recent USA Today article.
While Flutie has made football history in the past decade, many people are less aware of his contributions to the world of special needs education. Flutie founded the Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation for Autism, named after his autistic son, to help in the fight against autism. The foundation's mission is to aid financially disadvantaged families who need assistance in caring for their children with autism; to fund education and research into the causes and consequences of childhood autism; and to serve as a clearinghouse and communications center for new programs and services developed for individuals with autism.
Doug and his wife, Laurie, first began raising funds for autism in 1998. In 2000, they established the foundation. They've raised more than 7 million dollars for autism.
Flutie will work as a college football analyst fro ABC and ESPN during the coming football season.
Posted by Greg Cruey
One of No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) major selling points was that there needed to be stricter teacher qualification standards - that America needed "Highly Qualified Teachers." The law establishes new, tougher guidelines about who can teach what and what kind of training and experience a teacher needs to teach core academic areas like math and social studies.
The Boston Globe this morning is reporting that all 50 states will fail to meet the law's Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) goals. At least nine states have done badly enough that the will incur penalties under the law. On that list: Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Washington, as well as both Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Another 12 states (including both Virginia, where I live, and West Virginia, where I teach) are still under review regarding penalties.
So the question becomes, "Are the standards set by NCLB realistic?" When the law was proposed many of its accountability and quality control ideas seemed idealistic - an effort to achieve a perfect educational world. Now more and more they simply appear to be extreme and not well thought out.
Special education has become a prime example of the problem. NCLB wants a teacher who works with students who have learning disabilities to be qualified in that disabilities area. But then the law also wants the teacher to eventually be certified in the content area they teach, just like a general education teacher. The result has been that special education teachers all over the country are either
- Ignoring the law (which means that eventually their school districts will have to declare them to be unqualified despite their expertise in dealing with disabilities)
- Or taking on the burden of additional certification programs and pay (often out of their own pocket) to go back to college and obtain additional credentials that don't always come with any pay or salary advantage.
In the middle and high school setting where special education teachers have traditional taught several core subjects during the course of a day, this can means that a special education teacher needs to be certified in learning disabilities, mentally impaired, middle school math, middle school social studies, middle school science and middle school language arts all at once to teach at a small school that can't afford to have a different special education teacher for each subject. (I recent look at obtaining certification in middle school math and discovered that it will take me about two years of part time college work).
On "solution" has been to push students with learning disabilities out of special education classes and back into a general education reading or math class. That way a school can say that the child is being taught those core subjects by someone who is highly qualified (even if that math or English teacher knows almost nothing about disabilities). The special education teacher can, of course, be in the room with the general education teacher and the disabled student - if the special education teacher's schedule allows that. But often the schedule doesn't allow for that.
Is the situation likely to get any better? No for special education. President Bush is planning to shrink back even further from meeting the federal funding burden for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the next budget cycle...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has a great page online listing nine things that parents should see as just bringing an Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting to a grinding halt.
Among the conversation stoppers:
- "The general education teacher could not be here today."
- "Your child can't participate in academic classes if he can't pass the state assessments."
- "Your child's behaviors are disrupting the classroom."
- "Our district doesn't put technology into the IEP."
The law requires that the general education teacher be there unless a.) their area of involvement in the child's education isn't going to be discussed and b.) the invitation to the meeting say they've been exempted from the meeting. NCLD points out that an IEP meeting should never be the first time you hear about problems with your child's behavior. And with technology, what services you child receives should be based on their needs, not on the district's available resources.
What do you say when conversation stoppers like these come up? The NCLD's page tells you!
IEP meetings are already stressful enough without being jerked around.
Started by Pete Rozelle and his with, Carrie, in 1977, the National Center for Learning Disabilities was originally called the Foundation for Children with Learning Disabilities. According to their website "the organization provided leadership, public awareness and grants to support research and innovative practices in learning disabilities."
An IEP is a program of instruction designed specifically for a particular child in special education. Each year a document (also called an IEP) is put together in an IEP meeting to plan that program of instruction for the coming academic year. The group of people at that meeting are responsible for deciding how to provide your child with a FAPE, a free appropriate public education...
Posted by Greg Cruey
Is there specific a place in most people's brains where words are recognized as whole units (as opposed to being seen as groups of individual letters)? Apparently, yes...
At least that's the conclusions of a group of researchers headed by Laurent Cohen of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, according to Science Daily. The group of researchers is studying a 46-year-old man who lost his ability to recognize whole words after surgery to relieve his epilepsy created lesions in a particular area of the brain. The report was published in Neuron magazine as a case study. The case is important because most people with lesions in their brain have them in several locations. But this patient's lesions are located only in the area thought now to involve word recognition.
The research could have profound implications for the study of reading disorders like Dyslexia. While technical definitions exist for the term "dyslexia," almost all reading disorders have come to be subsumed under that label in common usage. This case study may help researchers finally distinguish between disorders involving word recognition and disorders involving letter-sound association and decoding. The patient in the study can evidently still sound out words; but he has lost his ability to recognize sight words (words that are recognized immediately without the reader going through some analytical process to identify them).
"Word blindness" is sometimes also called alexis or visual aphasia.
Posted by Greg Cruey
Joseph Murphy has a disability; that's court record. Arlington Central School District wasn't providing him a Free Appropriate Public Education; that's also clear from court records. Jospeh's parents put him in a private school and, eventually, sued the school district to reimbursed for tuition. In the course the lawsuit the Murphy family paid $29,350 to an educational consultant to help them win the case. And they won the case. Should Arlington Central School District have to reimburse them for those fees? That's the question now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. And you can read a summary of the Oral Arguments online.
Posted by Greg Cruey
For those of us with an interest in Autism, one of the most interesting sites available on the web is Autism Radio One. The site hosts radio shows on a variety of issues related to Autism. Many of the shows recur on a weekly basis with new content and guests. Most are archived. That means that you can search recent content by looking at their archive page and then when you click on a particular piece of content like, say, the Life in the Asperger Lane show that first aired on April 8, you get taken to a page where a little cassette player-looking gadget is waiting for you to click play. When you make that click, the show starts...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The Associated Press yesterday released the results of an AP-AOL poll that shows that most teachers doubt that the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind program will achieve its goal of "getting every student to succeed in reading and math" by the 2013-14 school year. About 80% of parents, on the other hand, thought their child's school would achieve the goal.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in a case that may change the face of special education in America. Wrightslaw has a good overview of the case online; Murphy v. Arlington Central School District examines the question of whether the fee shifting provision of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires school districts to pay for the cost of expert witnesses use by parents when they the school district loses a case. If the Justices rule that the cost of such experts falls under the law's provision, expert testimony could become much more common in special education court cases.
Posted by Greg Cruey
Can you name the eight planets?
Now before you get all snitty with me, I know there used to be nine planets. But for a few days now there's only been eight, officially. The International Astronomical Union decided last month to come up with a clearer definition of the term "planet." They look at two choices - one that would make for 12 planets and promote the asteroid Ceres to be the fifth planet in between Mars and Jupiter), and another model that would remove Pluto from the list of planets for being, well, too small. The second plan won. So now there are only eight planets (although there are a lot of Pluto-lovers in the world and the issue is far from settled).
I talked with my science class mixed group of 4th and 5th graders) about the news on Pluto and discovered that few of them could name all eight of the planets in order. So we came up with a type of acrostic together.
An acrostic is a string of words that help you remember something semantically unrelated based on the first letter of each word. The acrostic we came up with was this: My Van Exploded, My Jeep Stopped Underneath New York. (My students actually came up with all the words except for "Jeep," they couldn't think of the name of a car that started with "j" on their own). How does the acrostic help? The first letter of each word is the first letter of the name of a planet:
- My (Which starts with "m" and should help you think of Mercury)
- Van (Which starts with "v" and should help you think of Venus)
- Exploded (Which starts with "e" and should help you think of Earth)
- My (Which starts with "m" and should help you think of Mars)
- Jeep (Which starts with "j" and should help you think of Jupiter)
- Stopped (Which starts with "s" and should help you think of Saturn)
- Underneath (Which starts with "u" and should help you think of Uranus)
- New York (Which starts with "n" and should help you think of Neptune)
Why did this happen underneath New York? Beats me. But it works. And the kids think they know twice as much as they did a week ago because the class average was only four planets from memory before the acrostic.
And success breeds success...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The Doug Flutie Jr., Foundation took a break last year from its annual roadrace in Natick, Mass., after the property where the race is held changed hands. This year, however, the race it back on! The MetroWest Daily News out of Farmington, Mass., ran a story on the foundation's race in yesterday's paper. The race is five kilometers adn starts and ends at the Belkin Family Lookout Farm in Natick. Since 1999 the race has raised alomst $200,000 for autism research.
Posted by Greg Cruey
I knew kids at school had asthma, but I didn't know how many. Until I ran across a Kids' Health article today on the subject: some nine MILLION school-aged kids in the U.S. have asthma. They miss 14 million days of school each year because of their asthma. The article goes on to give some tips for handling asthma flare ups.
Posted by Greg Cruey
I stumbled across a piece by Léonie Watson at Web Pro News today and decided to share. The piece takes a brief look at five different pieces of assistive technology (AT). Watson looks briefly at five different types of AT: Mouth or Head Wands, Speech Enabled Websites, Screen Magnifiers, Voice Recognition Software, and the Internet Web Browser (who'd a thought it, right?). Watson's piece is a good introduction to the concept of AT if you're not very familiar with that area.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a skin patch for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) for kids age six to 12, according to the Associated Press. The patch, called Daytrana, is meant to be worn for up to nine hours. The patch is intended for children who have difficulty swallowing pills. Not everyone is happy about the development. Dr. David Katz, a medical contributor to ABC News' "Good Morning America" questions whether the patch will add to what he sees as over prescribing of ADHD drugs. According to Katz, one in every ten 12-year-old boys in the U.S. is on an ADHD drug. While Katz acknowledges that ADHD is a real condition that needs treatment, he thinks the medications are being used much of the time as a treatment for "rambunctiousness."
Posted by Greg Cruey
Autism is costing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention some of its credibility, according to an article yesterday in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At issue is the role that mercury (in the form of thimerosal) plays as a preservative in many vaccines and the failure of the CDC to look more closely at the issue. Mercury is toxic and many autism advocacy groups think that the rise in diagnosed cases of autism over the last decade is due to the use of thimerosal in the vaccines that children receive early in life.
Posted by Greg Cruey
The New York Times thinks so. In an article today in the NYT, Michael Winerip talks about the negative impact that Presdient Bush's education policies have had on gifted progrograming for elementary schools. No Child Left Behind's accountability focus on achieving basic mastery for all students or else has pushed many schools into abandoning elementary programs for the gifted.
Posted by Greg Cruey
I'll probably be in college for the rest of my life. The current atmosphere in education has led to the practice among teachers of collecting certifications. I have a colleague who is certified to teach elementary school but could also work as a Middle School Social Studies teacher if he wanted to. Another colleague teaches at my elementary school but could teach science in a middle school if she had to. Many of the teachers I know have more than one certification: math and physical education, special education and art. You get the idea. I suppose I am on my way to becoming collector of certifications, as well. In
Lesson Plans #6 (How teachers spend their summers...) I reflect on what this coming summer holds for me as I do that...
Posted by Greg Cruey
Is autism on the rise? THAT is one of the most controversial and emotive questions in the field of special education today. The answer is a big fact "it depends." A recent article in the Journal Pediatrics.
Autism statistics, the number of students actually being diagnosed with autism, are up. The increase, measured in percentages of the last 10 years, is so large that many find it alarming. Words like "epidemic" are being tossed around. The data problem, according to Paul Shattuck, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Waisman Center, is that the numbers are down by about the same amount in other special education categories like learning disabilities.
Shattuck's journal article examines special education numbers nationally for autism and draws the conclusion that numbers are "confounded" by the fact that each state has its own definition for autism; a child that is autistic in one state might be relabeled as mentally impaired or having a learning disability if it moved to a neighboring state.
The wire service story on Shattuck's article is interesting reading, but the issue is likely to remain controversial for some time to come. The question "is autism on the rise and, if so, why?" is going to remain one of the hottest questions in the field for some time to come.
Posted by Greg Cruey
I love teaching kids to write. But by the time they get to me, most kids seem to think that writing is a form of torture that teachers force on them because, well, teachers are basically mean (or something). There are a number of reasons for that. The overemphasis of spelling a grammar rules with kids with disabilities can pass on a constant message that they're wrong when they write - regardless of the ideas or the creativity. Spelling and grammar are important, but if the kid likes to write you get a lot more to work with. There has to be a safe writing environment for the student, or writing becomes a dry chore to be lived through. In Lesson Plans #5 I talk some about teaching writing, and about the fun it can bring with it...
Posted by Greg Cruey
March 28, 2006 -- The HOUSTON CHRONICLE has a story today on sixteen-year-old boy who has been blind now for two months and the path he is taking from general education to the services offered by special education. The story is enlightening.
To Joseph Fleeks, new to life as a blind person, the testing process and timeline of special education seem intolerably drawn out. For example, after two months of being blind, no one is teaching him to read braille yet. But educators and administrators feel that they are well within the legal requirements of how quickly things are supposed to get done.
The story gives some insight into the tensions built into the special education placement process...
Posted by Greg Cruey
The South Carolina state legislature is debating a bill that would require insurers to pay for Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) for autistic children, according to a recent article in The State. The issue is controversial for a number of reasons. Among them:
- The treatments are costly -- up to $100,000 per year for preschool-aged children.
- Less than half of children with autism would benefit from the treatment.
- The bill would accentuate the difference between those who have health insurance and those who don't.
But about half the children with autism who undergo ABA can often enter a general education first grade classroom on time.
The progress of the bill will be interesting to watch...
Posted by Greg Cruey
Spiral curriculums are gaining influence in the world of education. And that's ESPECIALLY good news for children with special needs. Curriculum issues tend to be assumptions for most teachers. That is to say, they are sometimes not even aware of them - simply teaching what they've been given to teach. The most important aspect of this change has to do with expectation. In the past teachers expected that students would "get it" - right now, this time. If they didn't, that was failure. But the concept of readiness to learn has brought a lot of teachers to the point of understanding that many student won't get it this time, but may next time. And the idea the repetition is the heart of learning is gaining ground. It's not how hard we beat this or that into the kids this time; it's how many times the kids are exposed to it over the course of years. That's the heart of learning. In Lesson Plans #4 I talk in more detail about using spiral curriculums.
Posted by Greg Cruey
My kids just have to learn to write. HAVE TO! Of course, that doesn't make them any different from other 4th and 5th graders. But it does make for some fun. One of my favorite approaches to writing is to be practical and concrete. With 10-year-olds, if you ask a kid to write about their philosophy of friendship you don't find out what they think about friends, you find out whether they know what the word philosophy means. Ask them to describe their dog; there's not that much to think about then. Or ask them to tell you about the characters in their favorite television show. It's much easier than explaining world peace or why you do or don't believe in global warming (especially if you're 10). In Lesson Plans #3 I talk in more detail about how to make a sandwich - or at least how to write about how to make a sandwich...
Posted by Greg Cruey
With the issue in the news recently for a number of reasons, I came across a New York Times article that examines the legal concept of wrongful birth. The artcile looks first at a 2004 court case that ended in a multi-million dollar settlement. The woman who sued argued that if her doctors hadn't neglected to perform certain tests on her she would have learned that she was going to have a severely handicapped child -- and she could have and would have aborted it...
Wrongful birth is legal grounds to sue a doctor in a about half the states in the U.S. Personally, I think the concept is an oxymoron. For my own reasons - multiple and complex - I think that all human life is valuable. And I think that a HUMAN life (and the rights inherent therein) starts well before birth. I can state unequivocally that I don't believe ANYONE (not even a mother) has the right to simple end a human life except perhaps in the context of a capital crime. But I am aware that not everyone agrees with me.
The Times article examines some rough issues - issues I suspect we'll hear much more about in the next few years as the balance of the Supreme Court shifts.
One of the most interesting quotes from the NYT article is this: "No matter the legal context, terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one's first choice, but for the time being at least, when faced with a fetus that will become a severely handicapped child, ALL THE CHOICES ARE BAD. ... As Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, has noted, in prenatal cases, often the only way to cure the illness is to prevent the patient." (Emphasis added.)
I have to wonder if ALL the choices are bad when you find out that your unborn child will have a disability, a handicap, or a predictable flaw. I don't think so...
Posted by Greg Cruey
If I had more time I'd do more. But then, I suppose, if I did more, I'd probably need more time. It's a cycle. And the classroom is like that, too. As standards get raised (or spelled out in more detail, at least) teachers seem to end up with more and more to teach a room full of kids; but they don't get any more time to do it in. And there are deadlines (I have to have the kids ready for the writing assessment by the second week in February. The Social Studies Fair is next month. Report cards go out in two weeks. And so on. It seems like there's always something. But worse than that, it seems like time comes in chunks that aren't always the right size. A fire drill cuts my math class by 28% one day. Or a snow day means that the week loses a day (which can really throw a weekly lesson plan off). What do you do with that kind time? I talk about that some in Lesson Plans #2...
Posted by Greg Cruey
March 5 - Chromosomes come in pairs. Humans have 46 pairs of chromosomes in their the genetic code that tells their bodies how to develop and function. But people with Down Syndrome have a third chromosome on their 21st set of chromosomes. So to celebrate the genetic uniqueness of people with Down syndrome, Down Syndrome International has picked March 21st as World Down Syndrome Day. The event will kick off in Singapore where there will be events on from the 20th through the 22nd.
Posted by Greg Cruey
March 2 - The Boston Globe published an article yesterday on the number of special education students in the Boston public school system who spend the majority of their day in classes where ALL students have some disability. The Globe said that over 40 percent of Boston's special education students were being scheduled this way - compared to a statewide average in Massachusetts of just 16 percent. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that students with disabilities be education together with their non-disabled peers to the greatest extent reasonably possible. Massachusetts' State Department of Education has warned Boston that it needs to correct this situation...
Posted by Greg Cruey
March 1 - March is Epilepsy Awareness Month in Canada. That struck me when I saw it today in part because I have epilepsy. While I've been seizure free now since the late 1980's, there were periods of my life (late high school and much of college) when I averaged 30 seizures a month. While I occasionally had convulsions, most of my seizures were complex partial temporal lobe seizures. I didn't lose consciousness, but I didn't remember anything. I suppose I might have been a special education student in school if such things had existed in my day; I graduated high school just as the Education of All Handicapped Children Act was beginning to be implemented.
Epilepsy Canada and its partners have adopted a lavender ribbon and flower to symbolize the cause for the third year now. The group plans an education campaign.
Posted by Greg Cruey
A friend of mine sent me this. The story is inspiring enough to stand alone. So I don't see the point in saying much. Enjoy the video from CBS News...
Posted by Greg Cruey
Looking for a past blog? Here's a link to it. Blogs dating back to my first blog on February 23, 2006.
- ARTICLE - Maine Asperger Ruling - March 15, 2006
- Lesson Plans #3 (How to make a sandwich...) - March 14, 2006
- Wrongful Birth? An Oxymoron... - March 8, 2006
- Lesson Plans #2 (Finding time...) - March 7, 2006
- ARTICLE - Guydos vs. Cupertine School District - March 6, 2006
- Coming Up: World Down Syndrome Day March 21 - March 5, 2006
- Boston Barriers to Mainstreaming - March 2, 2006
- Epilepsy Awareness Month in Canada - March 1, 2006
- ARTICLE - What is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)? - February 28, 2006
- Lesson Plans #1 (A weekly personal note) - February 27, 2006
- Blogging - How it works... - February 26, 2006
- Interesting Case: Restraining Order Against Down Syndrome Pupil - February 24, 2006
- Florida Educators in a Tizzy Over Merit Pay Plan - February 23, 2006
- ARTICLE - The Disconnect - February 23, 2006
- ARTICLE - Soon: a Test for Dyslexia - February 17, 2006
Posted by Greg Cruey
February 27 - NOTE: Each weekend for work I do lesson plans (at least while school is in session) and the task seems to bring together for me a mixture of instructional issues and personal feelings as I <I>contemplate</I> the task of teaching my individual students. This is a weekly blog note designed to examine that mixture of considerations...
Math is perhaps the most interactive point in my day. I like math. My students like math (I think). We interact. Kids come to the board. We do more modeling, more scaffolding it seems than in some other subjects. But there is one problem. And for some reason it is a problem that becomes more obvious to me during math instruction...
A man by the name of Martin Seligman (a Psych Prof at the University of Pennsylvania last I heard and a former President of the American Psychological Association) put a name to the problem back in the 1960's. He called it learned helplessness. It works like this:
1. FAILURE brings with it some level or emotional pain (embarrassment, etc.).
2. Students who do a lot of failing develop the idea that they are not capable of succeeding.
3. Students learn, probably without giving it much thought at first, that since failure seems certain and since pain is a bad thing, there is no reason for TRYING.
4. Students decide that NOT trying is the safest thing to do.
This week I'm teaching the relationship between fractions and decimals. I have to convince my students that one-fourth is the same as 0.25 (not 0.14, as many will guess since there is both a one and a four in the fraction). I have to develop in them the skill of converting the fraction "one-half" into the decimal "zero point five" and the fraction "one-fifth" to the decimal "zero point two" with some level of consistency.
My challenge is two fold:
A. to make them feel that they can succeed, that they ARE making progress.
B. to make it clear that I EXPECT them to make an effort, to do their best.
Otherwise they think that there is no reason to try...
Posted by Greg Cruey
February 26 - What is a blog? The term comes from the compound word Web log. Take off the "we-" and combine the syllables. You get "blog." One definition I saw says that it is "an online journal."
I should stop here and say that blogging on this topic, Special Needs Education, is hard for me. Not emotional difficult, but technically and legally problematic. You see, I hold in my keeping the privacy of a dozen or so small and fragile souls this year - all of them valuable human beings. Morally, they are not mine to share with you; but it is difficult to talk about MY EXPERIENCE with this field without talking about them. Technically (and legally), FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, prevents me from compromising many details about my students. You understand my dilemma...
Blogs are supposed to be personal. And because I teach, a lot of the news I see on education IS personal to me. When I read about pay plans in states like Florida that strike me as silly, and perhaps offensive, it's personal. I may decide it's worth writing about because the information is important to others. But my ideas about it are personal and my interest in it is personal.
So almost everything you see under "Bulletins" on my page is a blog. It's there because it struck me PERSONALLY as important to talk about - important to me as a professional and/or as a caring human being.
Life, after all, is personal...
Posted by Greg Cruey
1
Posted by Greg Cruey
- Coming Up: World Down Syndrome Day March 21 - March 5, 2006
- Boston Barriers to Mainstreaming - March 2, 2006
- Epilepsy Awareness Month in Canada - March 1, 2006
- Lesson Plans #1 - (A weekly personal note) February 27, 2006
- Blogging - How it works... - February 26, 2006
- Interesting Case: Restraining Order Against Down Syndrome Pupil - February 24, 2006
- Florida Educators in a Tizzy Over Merit Pay Plan - February 23, 2006
Posted by Greg Cruey
February 24 - So far I've never had to file a restraining order or take legal action against a student. So I find this story in a Maryland weekly newspaper, the Gazette, interesting. The story is about a student with Down syndrome at an elementary school in Frederick County, Md. The student has been "disruptive" in the school's program for disabled students. The restraining order prevents the student, William, from coming to school while the school system and William's mother try to resolve a due process hearing. The school says it thinks that William is a danger to himself and other students; they want to move William to a different school - one that only children with disabilities attend. The mother thinks William could benefit from mainstreaming, or being in class with students who aren't disabled. Down syndrome is a genetic disorder that usually leaves students with a distinctive appearance, some health issues, and moderate mental retardation (although IQ in Down syndrome individuals can vary widely). A due process hearing is a legal procedure designed to provide a way to resolve disagreements between a student's family and a school system. While they don't have to, due process hearings eventually progress to the point coming before an actual judge in court. One of the things that makes this case especially interesting is its geography: a due process hearing from neighboring Montgomery County, Md., made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court last year. In that case, Schaffer v. Weast, the Supreme Court made a monumental decision by placing the burden of proof in a due process hearing on the plaintiff - which is usually the disabled student and family...
Posted by Greg Cruey
February 23 - The public and educators in Florida are in something of a tizzy. The state's Board of Education passed a new pay plan for teachers Tuesday - a plan that provides bonuses based on student test scores and ties salaries for individual teachers to student achievement. The Orlando Sentinel broke the news Wednesday morning: board members meeting in Miami "voted unanimously for the plan," even though one state teacher's union was already opposing the plan in court. Among the most controversial components of the plan: teachers in each school district would have to be ranked on their performance. Teachers who are in their district's top 10% at the end of the year would receive a 5% bonus - and they'd keep getting the bonus if they stayed in the top 25% of their district's teachers. Performance would be measured by how well their students did on the FCAT - the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. And everyone from English and math teachers to art teachers and librarians would be ranked. Among the biggest concerns is the question of exactly how, under Effectiveness Compensation (or "E-Comp," as the plan is being called) school districts would arrive at a ranking for teachers whose content areas aren't tested by FCAT. Funding is another issue; E-Comp would cost the state an estimated $53 million a year. Today the Sentinel released a poll showing that Florida voters are against E-Comp by a two-to-one margin. performance based merit pay is an especially controversial issue for teachers whose students have disabilities.
Posted by Greg Cruey
<UL>
<P><LI>Epilepsy Awareness Month in Canada - March 1
<P><LI>Lesson Plans #1 - (A weekly personal note) February 27
<P><LI>Blogging - How it works... - February 26
<P><LI>Interesting Case: Restraining Order Against Down Syndrome Pupil - February 24
<P><LI>Florida Educators in a Tizzy Over Merit Pay Plan - February 23
Posted by Greg Cruey
Past Blogs:
- Coming Up: World Down Syndrome Day March 21 - March 5, 2006
- Boston Barriers to Mainstreaming - March 2, 2006
- Epilepsy Awareness Month in Canada - March 1, 2006
- Lesson Plans #1 - (A weekly personal note) February 27, 2006
- Blogging - How it works... - February 26, 2006
- Interesting Case: Restraining Order Against Down Syndrome Pupil - February 24, 2006
- Florida Educators in a Tizzy Over Merit Pay Plan - February 23, 2006