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....