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 Bush To Sign 'Monumental' School Voucher Law Friday, December 30 , 2005 New York Sun By MEGHAN CLYNE WASHINGTON - President Bush will soon sign into law what is being described as the largest school voucher program in American history, providing about $1.6 billion in federal money for students affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Denver teachers opt for merit pay Judge: S.C. fails to fund poor schools Enrollment declines at City Colleges Stressed students find safe place in support groups |
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China's B-School Boom Friday, December 30 , 2005 Business Week Meet the new managerial class in the making Walk into any classroom at one of China's elite business schools and what you're likely to see isn't all that different from what you would find at Harvard, Wharton, ... Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs Approximately half of all students in Texas' state universities and colleges need remedial classes. America's Parents: Where is Your Outrage? Post your comments... Why American Students Know So Little American History and What We Can
Do About It |
| Arizona Republic College-prep program aids Latino teens A Latino college-prep program that recently started in Phoenix is already showing promise with students expertly navigating the college application process. Did all those Ph.D.s flunk U.S. history? Baltimore Sun Boston Globe Teens accused of being lesbians sue school Chicago Tribune Enrollment declines at City Colleges Christian Science Monitor Contra Costa Times Detroit News Stressed students find safe place in support groups Florida Times - Union Indianapolis Star-Tribune Inside Higher ED Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Times Writing your way into college New York Post New York Sun New York Times Palm Beach Post Schools start too soon? Give FCAT later in year Pasadena Star News Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rocky Mountain News San Diego Union Tribune College fees would be frozen under governor's budget plan San Francisco Chronicle San Jose Mercury Seattle Times St. Petersburg Times Washington Post International Articles The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Call for cap on expanding schools Scotland attracting more teachers The Globe and Mail The Guardian The Press New Zealand |
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Central Auditory Processing Disorder
Sun Dec 4, 7:00 PM ET
Jennifer, 9, seems to pay attention when the teacher works with her one-on- one. But when there are group discussions, she spends most of her time looking out the window. The teacher is complaining she doesn't participate in class and
is giving Jennifer lower grades as a result.
Shawn, 12, was supposed to be home in time for his dentist's appointment at 3:30 PM. But when he finally walked in the house at 5:00, he was surprised to hear about the appointment and that his mother had reminded him about it that
morning.
Normal kids? Or is something else going on?
Life is complicated these days, for children as much as adults. There's a lot to remember and a lot to do. But sometimes a child may seem to be more than simply distracted by a complex life. Although their hearing may be normal, kids
with central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) can't process the information they hear in the same way as others because their ears and brain don't fully coordinate.
What Are the Signs and Symptoms?
Symptoms of CAPD can range from mild to severe and can take many different forms. If you think there may be a problem with how your child processes what he or she hears, ask yourself these questions:
Is your child easily distracted or unusually bothered by loud or sudden noises?
Are noisy environments upsetting to your child?
Does your child's behavior and performance improve in quieter settings?
Does your child have difficulty following directions, whether simple or complicated ones?
Does your child have reading, spelling, writing, or other speech-language difficulties?
Is abstract information difficult for your child to comprehend?
Are verbal (word) math problems difficult for your child?
Is your child disorganized and forgetful?
Are conversations hard for your child to follow?
These, as well as other behaviors, may be signs of a central auditory processing disorder (CAPD). It's an often-misunderstood problem because many of the behaviors noted above may also appear in other conditions such as learning
disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and even depression. But kids with CAPD can have a coexisting disorder - the most commonly seen is ADHD. Although CAPD is often confused with ADHD, it is possible to have
both.
What Causes It?
The possible causes of CAPD are varied and can include head trauma, lead poisoning, chronic ear infections, and unknown reasons. Because there are many different possibilities - even combinations of causes - each child has to be
assessed on an individual basis.
How Is It Diagnosed?
Audiologists (specialists in hearing) can determine if your child has CAPD. Although speech-language pathologists can get an idea by interacting with your child, only audiologists can perform central auditory processing testing and
determine if there really is a problem.
However, some of the skills a child needs to be evaluated for central auditory processing disorder don't develop until 8 or 9 years old. The auditory center of the brain isn't fully developed at age 7, 8, and 9 - the most common ages
audiologists see for the central auditory processing test. These kids' brains just haven't matured enough to accept and process a lot of information. Therefore, many children diagnosed with CAPD can develop better skills with time.
Once diagnosed, children with CAPD usually work with a speech therapist. The audiologist will also recommend that your child return for yearly follow-up evaluations.
What Are the Problem Areas for Kids With CAPD?
Here are the five main problem areas that can affect both home and school activities in children with CAPD.
Auditory Figure-Ground Problems: This is when the child can't pay attention when there's noise in the background. Noisy, low-structured classrooms could be very frustrating to this child.
Auditory Memory Problems: This is when the child has difficulty remembering information such as directions, lists, or study materials. It can be immediate (i.e., "I can't remember it now") and/or delayed (i.e., "I can't remember it
when I need it for later").
Auditory Discrimination Problems: This is when the child has difficulty hearing the difference between sounds or words that are similar (COAT/BOAT or CH/SH). This problem can affect following directions, reading, spelling, and writing
skills, among others.
Auditory Attention Problems: This is when the child can't maintain focus for listening long enough to complete a task or requirement (such as listening to a lecture in school). Although health, motivation, and attitude may also affect
attention, among other factors, a child with CAPD cannot (not will not) maintain attention.
Auditory Cohesion Problems: This is when higher-level listening tasks are difficult. Auditory cohesion skills - drawing inferences from conversations, understanding riddles, or comprehending verbal math problems - require heightened
auditory processing and language levels. They develop best when all the other skills (levels one through four above) are intact.
If your child has CAPD, there are strategies that can be used at home and school to alleviate some of the problem behaviors associated with CAPD.
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Plucked From Africa, but Still Isolated in Their Classes
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: December 28, 2005
New York Times
SPRINGFIELD, Mass.
IDIRIS MAOW, 14, an eighth grader at Forest Park Middle School, is a refugee from Somalia who arrived here with his family in 2003. He is in his second year in an English language immersion class, yet can barely speak or understand
English and cannot read it. Asked in English how long he had been at Forest Park, he could not answer.
His teacher, Andrew Soucie, works hard with Idiris, but without a Somali translator to clarify lessons, he said, there is little progress. "It's a disaster," Mr. Soucie said. "Idiris should be getting clarification every day in his
native tongue. I try to help him, but we can't communicate, and I'm never sure what he's thinking." Mr. Soucie said he asked his supervisors for translation help but "can't get a straight answer."
"If Idiris were my child, I'd be furious," Mr. Soucie said.
Somalian refugee families were brought to Massachusetts in recent years sponsored by local charities.
There are 90 Somalian children in the public schools here, but they are spread among 21 schools. Many, like Idiris, are the only Somalis at their schools. While their mostly Hispanic classmates have many teachers who are bilingual and
can clarify lessons in Spanish, the Somalis have received little or no classroom translation help during their two years here. Several interviewed at their homes one recent evening through a translator hired by this writer appeared to
be as lost as Idiris.
Abdikadir Kabir, a fourth grader at Lincoln Elementary, could say the English letters for the words "for" and "horse" but did not know how to sound out the words. He said he was embarrassed, since he was the only one in his class who
could not read. Adey, his older sister, in the ninth grade at the High School of Science and Technology, has a 1,066-page global history book and cannot read a word of it. For a take-home quiz on the Reformation, she guessed the
answers. Her responses to the short essay questions were a nonsensical mix of English, Spanish and gibberish.
Muslimo Sharif, the only Somali in an English immersion class full of Hispanics at Duggan Middle School, said her teacher instructed in English and clarified in Spanish. Muslimo said that she was the only one who could not read and
that when asked to do the first problem in the first lesson in her math book, she could not.
Indeed, several Somalian parents worry that their children are learning more Spanish than English. Ali Abdullahi, a third grader at Kensington, had one school book at home - a math workbook in Spanish.
Until a few years ago, Springfield would have been required by the state to provide transitional instruction in these students' native Somali language. But in 2002, Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley businessman, took his English-only campaign
to Massachusetts and got a referendum put on the ballot that banned bilingual education. As a result, while current state education rules "recommend" that schools have instructors to provide daily clarification in a new student's
native language, it is not required.
Springfield, which is near bankruptcy and is being run by a state-appointed control board, was sharply criticized in a Massachusetts Department of Education audit in February for "seriously deteriorated levels of compliance" in English
programs.
The district has hired two Somalian translators for 12 hours a week each to help the 90 children. But because the 21 schools are so spread out and the two translators rely on public buses that can take as long as two hours between
schools, some students are visited only once a month. One of the translators, Sudi Maow (no relation to Idiris), said so much time was wasted traveling, "I'm only spending an hour or two at the school, and half that time is the
teachers explaining the problems to me."
"I don't feel it's right," she said. "Because the kids don't understand, they become discipline problems. They're lost, sitting in classes off to the side, saying nothing."
In an e-mail response, a spokeswoman for the Springfield schools, Mary Beach, said that administrators had tried to hire more translators but that they were hard to find. She said the two translators worked only 12 hours because "one
had a part-time job and the other one is a full-time college student."
However, in interviews, both translators said they were eager to work more hours. Siat Bulle, the second translator, said he was available 40 hours a week.
For two years, local advocates for the Somalis - including Dr. A. B. Odutola, Doreen Fadus and Jean Caldwell - have repeatedly asked that the children be clustered in a few schools to maximize translation support and reduce travel time
for translators.
Springfield officials have given a variety of reasons for not doing so. Last spring, according to Mrs. Caldwell, school officials said that clustering too many Somalis at one school would bring down its scores on state tests and the
school could be labeled failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Mrs. Caldwell, a retiree who does volunteer work for several Somalian families, has filed a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights.
Dr. Beach would not comment on questions about the federal law. She said, however, that the 26,000 children in the district were reassigned to their neighborhood schools in the fall to save money on busing, and that since Somalis live
throughout the city, their schools are scattered.
IF that is so, it is hard to explain what happened to the four Kabir children. Hassan, a first grader, is assigned to Boland Elementary, while Abdikadir, a fourth grader, is assigned to Lincoln Elementary. Adey, a ninth grader, is
assigned to the High School of Science, while her brother Warsame, a junior, is assigned to Commerce High.
Asked about this, Dr. Beard said she could not discuss specific cases.
Sylvia Smith, a state Education Department spokeswoman, said auditors would return next month to review the city's English language program, including the treatment of Somalis. "We're aware of these issues," she said. "We'll be looking
at these things."
Mary Janeczek, the cochairwoman of the education department at nearby Elms College, has trained many of the city's English language teachers and is a former Education Department administrator. She believes Springfield is violating the
law. "If they're giving clarification in Spanish, they should be giving clarification in Somali, too; it's a question of fairness," she said.
Since coming here two years ago thanks to the sponsorship of Jewish Family Services of Western Massachusetts, the Somalis have struggled. Mr. Soucie, the teacher, said, "We're blatantly out of compliance, the way we're treating these
children."
"We need translation help," he said. "I need to know what Idiris is thinking."
Through a translator, Idiris said he was thinking how lucky he is to be in America after 10 years in refugee camps. But he said he was also thinking that he expected the schools to be better in America and he is thinking how hard it
will be in America without English.
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In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: December 27, 2005
The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is
coming at their children's expense.
Jennifer Freeman outside P.S. 166 on the Upper West Side, which one of her sons attends. Ms. Freeman, a freelance science writer, devotes considerable time to volunteering at the school. "It's a lot of work," she says.
Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for
admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency.
In interviews and at public meetings, dozens of parents from the middle class and upper middle class have complained of an increasing focus on standardized test preparation and remedial work, of a decreasing focus on science education
and the arts, of large class sizes and of the absence of a powerful mechanism for parental influence.
Take Heidi Vayer, a former public school teacher and guidance counselor. She decided to remove her two daughters this year from public school in District 2 on the East Side of Manhattan and enrolled them instead in an independent
school, Friends Seminary.
"I didn't see things getting better," Ms. Vayer said. "The school increased class sizes, and I felt no attention was being paid to middle-class students who were there."
Her most particular concern was test preparation. "I felt, how could I be doing this to my own children?" she said. "I could understand if test prep was part of the curriculum, but test prep was all of the curriculum."
After particularly impressive results were recorded this year by fifth graders, principals and officials of the Department of Education said the improved test scores reflected real achievement, not high-pressure test preparation, and
stemmed from a variety of initiatives, such as expanded availability of pre-kindergarten schooling and increased spending.
Many parents say, however, that there are extremely limited public school options in the middle school years, and some chafe at how the new rules for gifted programs in the elementary schools and for certain select schools have made
competition for admission stiffer.
"My concern is that the mayor is driving families out," said Rose Ann Watson Ansty, whose son attends Public School 9 on the Upper West Side. "It's very frustrating."
Whether parents are doing more than complaining is hard to determine.
City officials say that judging by the number of children eligible for free lunch, the class divide in the system remains stable: About 80 percent of the children are poor, with no increase in middle class flight.
Yet Emily Glickman, a consultant who advises parents in the city on winning admission for their children to private schools, said, "The last two years the interest in private schools has exploded, as I see it with people coming to me."
Driving the anxiety is simple arithmetic. Even in some high-income ZIP codes, parents perceive neighborhood schools as academically substandard. That creates an extraordinary amount of competition for the select schools and the
programs for the gifted and talented.
Some of that competition is taking place now, with the latest round of applications for magnet and gifted programs just submitted and the kindergarten application process under way. The city has 239 programs for the gifted and
talented, and 69 schools offer opportunities for accelerated study or enrichment activities outside the standard curriculum.
"The Department of Education has one problem: There aren't enough good schools," said Tim Johnson, the chairman of the chancellor's Parent Advisory Council and a parent leader in District 2, which covers much of Manhattan. "That's why
parents are so possessive of the 'X' number of good schools. Everyone wants to protect a good school."
Issues of race and class are never far from the surface in this debate: The school system is overwhelmingly minority and poor, and many of the parents who have fared best at getting their children seats in choice programs are white.
Some say that middle class parents should not feel so aggrieved. "Nobody gets shortchanged the way the poor do," said Joseph Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College. "I'm sympathetic to the need to accommodate the
middle class community and the dilemma it presents, but the bottom line is that the people who get shortchanged the most are the people who have no options."
Even critics of the school system acknowledged that the city faced a difficult balancing act.
"I don't agree with a lot of what the chancellor has done, and I think in some ways he's made things worse," said Mindy Gerbush, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and serves on the District 13 Community Education Council, an elected,
unpaid panel of parents. "But in some ways it's like being in the role of Solomon: What do you do with the child?"
She continued, "What do you do for the middle class while providing for the tremendous needs of the non-middle class - after they've been forgotten for years?"
Michele Cahill, senior counselor for education policy for Chancellor Klein, said that the schools could straddle the class divide and that the department remained committed to the "twin and intertwined goals of equity and excellence."
"I think the chancellor has listened to the concerns of what I would call middle class parents and parents of students who are achieving," she said, "and he has responded."
Ms. Cahill said that the city had not only changed the rules for gifted programs, it had also expanded the programs, making good on an election-year promise by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to make such slots more widely available. She
also cited the creation of additional specialized high schools, and she spoke of the introduction of better options for teachers to accommodate advanced children with suitable learning materials.
"Our responsibility is to create a system that offers the most opportunity for every student at every level, and the priority has to be to address both," Ms. Cahill said. "We have to do two things at once."
Not everyone said the Bloomberg-Klein Education Department has been doing that.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers' union, faulted the administration for using a "Robin Hood" approach. "You have to simultaneously work to help your struggling students in particular schools and keep your middle class -
you have to do both these things at the same time," she said.
"When you do one at the expense of the other, you get the rebellion and revolt you see in District 3," she said, referring to the Upper West Side, where some parents have complained that their children were suddenly being shut out of
admission to top public school programs.
Part of the sense of grievance in the middle class comes from how much energy those parents typically pour into searching for schools and then, once their children are accepted, into working to support the schools. They organize
libraries. They donate toilet paper and crayons and cash. And when there's not enough, they raise funds for more.
Jennifer Freeman, for example, is not an employee of Public School 166 in Manhattan, but that would not be clear from her schedule. Early in the day and often late at night, she writes grant applications for theater props or for extra
science lessons, and she meets with teachers to offer help with field trips and art projects.
"It's a lot of work," said Ms. Freeman, a freelance science writer who has one son enrolled at P.S. 166, on West 89th Street, and another at Hunter College Elementary School, on East 94th Street. "I'm sure the money that I've lost by
remaining freelance and doing that is probably equal to a private school education."
But Ms. Freeman said she felt she had been able to have an effect on P.S. 166 and was content with her sons' education.
Ms. Gerbush of Brooklyn, who evaluates bonds on Wall Street and owns a restaurant, said that she could have afforded the annual $20,000-plus tuition bill at many private schools, but that she had wanted her son to experience more of
the "real world." That experience still came at a cost - not in tuition, but in her own time.
Even though her son has graduated from the Institute for Collaborative Education, a progressive middle and high school in the East Village that was given a waiver from the chancellor's uniform curriculum, Ms. Gerbush continues her
involvement with the schools.
I think he is a lot better for having had the experience, but I worked very hard to get the options that would work for him," she said. "A lot of people don't have the kind of time or knowledge to work the system."
The surge in discontent can be traced back about three years, when Mr. Klein exempted 200 top schools from the uniform curriculum - many with largely white enrollments in relatively well-heeled neighborhoods. Some parents argued that
the mayor was creating a caste system by allowing successful schools to do what they wanted, while others were forced into regimentation.
Others parents, who said their schools should have made the list, expressed resentment that their children would have to use the same curriculum as those in low-performing schools.
Aware of middle-class concerns, Mayor Bloomberg announced last February a significant expansion of programs for the gifted, bringing them to more corners of the city.
But on the Upper West Side in particular, two recent decisions handed down from Mr. Klein revived the outcry: the use of standardized citywide criteria for admissions to programs for the gifted, and the implementation of a lottery to
distribute coveted seats at underused but highly regarded schools.
In both cases, individual schools had established their own rules for admission, and many parents within the schools were generally pleased with the results, because, for instance, the schools often gave preference to siblings,
allowing families to stick with one school, and there was a preference in admission to gifted programs for families who lived near the schools.
But even those who supported modifications to the admissions process were left feeling angry, saying they had been largely ignored in the decision-making.
"I volunteer and I go to all the Community Education Council meetings that I can, and it's very frustrating that you find out they're going to do these things at the meetings and they're telling you instead of asking, 'Do you think
this is a good idea?' " Ms. Ansty said.
Ms. Ansty said that she was considering applying to parochial schools for her two daughters, who are not of age to attend school yet, and taking her son out of P.S. 9.
That sort of disillusionment, if it translates into an exodus, would be difficult for the city. "It's the middle class that makes the New York City school system better than Philadelphia or Chicago," said Eva S. Moskowitz, a District 2
parent who is chairwoman of the City Council's Education Committee and will be executive director of a new charter school in Harlem. "If we become a school system of the exclusively poor, we are going to be in big trouble."
There are moral reasons to address the educational inequity that exists for the poorest students, but there are also moral and pragmatic reasons to focus on those who are better off financially, Ms. Moskowitz said. The Bloomberg
administration, she said, has not confronted the "problem of the top quartile with the zeal that it should."
And some, like Ms. Vayer, are opting out. "This was not an easy decision," she said. "We really tried to make a go of it."
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School That Gave Easy Grades to Athletes Is Closing
By DUFF WILSON
Published: December 24, 2005
University High School, a correspondence school in Miami being investigated for giving fast, high grades to qualify high school athletes for college scholarships, is going out of business Dec. 31, its founder, Stanley J. Simmons, said
yesterday.
"It's a disaster," Simmons, 75, said in a telephone interview from his Miami home. "I'm finishing up everything, and I'm going back into retirement."
The National Collegiate Athletic Association yesterday named 17 people to a panel to study correspondence high schools and other nontraditional routes to college athletic eligibility and scholarships. The move is a response to
questions about the legitimacy of the academic credentials of some high school athletes.
Myles Brand, the N.C.A.A. president, said that he wanted the panel to propose tighter rules by the summer.
University High School offered degrees for $399 to high school athletes having grade problems, as well as to the older dropouts and the immigrants who were its main clients.
The school had no classes or instructors and operated virtually without supervision. Florida state law prohibits oversight of private schools.
The Miami-Dade state attorney's office was awaiting returns from subpoenas in its investigation of the school over possible fraud, the spokesman Ed Griffith said. It would not know if a crime was committed until it gathered more
information, he added.
Elite athletes in Dade County said they received study guides with open-book tests and got quick A's and B's. The N.C.A.A. and college admissions offices accepted those grades.
Twenty-eight high school athletes sent University High School transcripts to the N.C.A.A. eligibility clearinghouse in the past few years, according to a University of Tennessee report. The New York Times identified 14 who had signed
with 11 Division I football programs: Auburn, Central Florida, Colorado State, Florida, Florida State, Florida International, Rutgers, South Carolina State, South Florida, Tennessee and Temple.
Brand said in a news release yesterday that he expected the N.C.A.A. panel to focus on the process for reviewing nontraditional courses and to tighten the eligibility rules. The panel, which includes three college presidents, is
expected to issue preliminary recommendations in April and a report in June for rule changes effective in 2007.
In Miami yesterday, a leasing agent said University High School had vacated its unit in an office building. The small space was available for $1,300 a month. The school name had been removed from the building directory and a sign that
read "Enabling homeschoolers nationwide - University High School" had been removed from the office door.
Simmons, who founded the school in 2000, said he had sold it about 14 months ago to Michael R. Kinney, 27, of Miami, who had operated it for him for years. Simmons said Kinney defaulted on his monthly payment after The Times wrote
about the school last month, prompting state investigations.
Simmons said the school was "totally mismanaged - probably more than mismanaged" - and also that Kinney was responsible for the venture to help high school athletes qualify for N.C.A.A. scholarships. "There's no way that I would
consider remaining in the business," Simmons said.
Simmons wrote a letter for the remaining students, telling them to pay their fees and finish their tests before Dec. 31. The letter concluded, in all upper-case letters, "If you are serious about receiving your high school diploma, we
recommend that you act now!"
Simmons, who holds a master's degree in education from the University of Michigan, taught in Miami schools and a community college before opening a series of correspondence schools beginning in 1976. He served 10 months in a federal
prison camp after pleading guilty in 1989 to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, a felony, in connection with a diploma-mill university. Since then, he has operated correspondence high schools.
Kinney could not be reached and has repeatedly declined to comment. "He caused all these problems," Simmons said of Kinney.
Simmons added that the N.C.A.A. had written Kinney to say he needed to respond to N.C.A.A. questions or be dropped from the N.C.A.A. Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse. Simmons said he had lost the letter but did not plan to respond
anyway, because he was going out of business.
Diane Dickman, the N.C.A.A.'s managing director for membership services, who oversees the clearinghouse, said yesterday that similar letters have gone to three to five other correspondence high schools.
The N.C.A.A. panel was asked to focus on four subjects, of which only the first applies directly to University High School:
The N.C.A.A. criteria and the approval process for high school academic core courses. The N.C.A.A. had many specific criteria and a staff review process for courses before 2000, when it deregulated the system to allow principals to
certify that their courses met broad criteria, such as access to instructors. That change coincided with the N.C.A.A.'s first allowing correspondence school credits.
Time limits on core courses. Dickman said some athletes took a 13th year of school before entering a university.
The adequacy of core courses at preparatory schools. Dickman said these were schools with actual classes aimed at elite football and basketball players.
The requirements for reporting ACT and SAT scores to the N.C.A.A.
Kevin Lennon, the N.C.A.A. vice president for membership services, will be the chairman of the panel. Its members, announced yesterday, are Mike Alden, the athletic director at Missouri; Dick Baddour, the athletic director at North
Carolina; Thurston Banks, a faculty athletic representative at Tennessee Tech; Drew Bogner, the president at Molloy College; Jim Castaneda, a faculty athletic representative at Rice; Jim Haney, the executive director of the National
Association of Basketball Coaches; Jay Helman, the president of Western State College; Carol Iwaoka, an associate commissioner of the Big Ten Conference; Robert Kanaby, the director of the National Federation of State High School
Associations; Judith E. Leonard, the vice president for legal affairs and general counsel at Arizona; Mary Lisko, a faculty athletic representative at Augusta State; Bernie Machen, the president of the University of Florida; Dan Ross,
the commissioner of the Ohio High School Athletic Association; Greg Sankey, an associate commissioner of the Southeastern Conference; Calvin R. Symons, the director of the N.C.A.A. Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse; Grant Teaff, the
executive director of the American Football Coaches Association; and Charlie Whitcomb, the vice provost for academic administration and personnel at San Jose State.
Sankey had helped SEC officials prepare a Nov. 2 letter to Brand warning that the legitimacy of some nontraditional high schools was "a matter of national consequence." Yesterday, Sankey said that the letter was prompted by concerns
within the conference about University High School, but that the issue was broader.
"We obviously saw the correspondence work as a problem that drew a lot of attention this year, but there have also been these persistent conversations about what are the strategies to get around fulfilling the expectations of the
N.C.A.A.," he said.
"I'm hopeful there will be a pretty broad discussion about some of the weaknesses or gaps in our current structure and work to close those, so we can move closer to assuring every student-athlete really does the work expected of him to
be prepared for college."
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Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds
By SAM DILLON
Published: December 16, 2005
The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.
The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the
2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.
The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose
texts.
Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily
identifiable information in short prose.
Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent
years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.
"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.
Among blacks and Asians, English literacy increased from 1992 to 2003.
About 29 percent of blacks scored at either the intermediate or proficient levels in 1992, but in 2003, those rose to 33 percent. The percentage of blacks demonstrating "below basic" literacy declined to 24 percent from 30 percent.
Asians scoring at either the intermediate or proficient levels rose to 54 percent from 45 percent in 1992.
The same period saw big declines in Hispanics' English reading skills. In 1992, 35 percent of Hispanics demonstrated "below basic" English literacy, but by 2003 that segment had swelled to 44 percent. And at the higher-performing end
of the literacy scale, the proportion of Hispanics demonstrating intermediate or proficient English skills dropped to 27 percent from 33 percent in 1992.
"These are big shifts," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the Department of Education that gave the test.
"The Hispanic population in 2003 is radically different than in 1992, and many of the factors that have changed for Spanish-language immigrants make learning English more difficult," Mr. Schneider said. "They are arriving later,
staying in the U.S. for a shorter period, and fewer are speaking English at home."
The 2003 test was administered to 19,000 people 16 and older, in homes, college housing and in prisons.
A test conducted in homes across New York State in conjunction with the 2003 national test found that New Yorkers were less literate in English than their national counterparts. Eleven percent of New Yorkers performed at the proficient
level in reading prose texts, compared with 13 percent nationally. And 19 percent of New Yorkers scored "below basic," while only 14 percent performed that poorly across the nation.
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Is It Legal to Send Kids with Disabilities Home Early?
"In my district, special ed kids are sent home from school early - 30 minutes to an hour earlier than 'regular ed' students. This doesn't seem right. When I asked about this , I was told, "All special ed students are released early -
that's the rule." Is this legal?
Wrightslaw Answers
No. When your district says, "All special ed students are released early - that's the rule," they are discriminating against these children and violating the law. What can you do?
When the parents unite and work together, they are a powerful force. Here's how one group of parents tackled the problem. A group of parents in Tidewater Virginia formed a parent advocacy group called PIER.
PIER knew that their school district routinely sent disabled kids home early. Working together, members of PIER came up with a Creative Solution to the "transportation problems" in their district. This is how they handled it.
An OCR Complaint
In December 1998, PIER filed a compliant with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Download the OCR COMPLAINT:
http://www.wrightslaw.com/law/pleadings/va.vabch.pier.ocr.pdf
Note to Readers: This OCR Complaint is a very large (27 page) document in PDF. We suggest that you "right click" the link, save the document on your hard drive, then print it (remember where you put it!).
In their Complaint, the parents alleged that Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) discriminated against students with disabilities. Here are some excerpts from the Complaint:
"Students with disabilities were routinely dismissed from school before the end of the instructional day, required to use separate bus loading and unloading areas, arrived to school late in the morning, rode segregated buses, and
endured unreasonably lengthy bus rides."
"Students with disabilities who are dismissed before the end of the school day are given no meaningful opportunity to cover or makeup the instruction, knowledge or benefits they have been denied due to early dismissal."
"Consistent with School Board policy, nondisabled students receive a minimum of 6.5 hours of instructional time per day. In violation of this same School Board policy, students with disabilities are guaranteed only 5.5 hours. "
The Evidence: Parent Observations
PIER supported their claims by conducting a series of observation at the schools:
"To document the early departure of students from schools, members of the community conducted organized observations of school bus departures from school property at 39 randomly selected VBCPS schools.
Documented observations by PIER and data provided by VBCPS revealed that at 35 of the 39 observed schools, school buses transporting only students with disabilities departed from schools before the ending time of the instructional day
. . "
PIER advised the school district that they were making these observations:
"Throughout the observation period, PIER kept the VBCPS administration appraised of the fact that observations were being conducted. In late spring VBCPS was verbally reminded that PIER intended to file a complaint regarding the early
dismissals. Final observations were scheduled, and occurred on June 15, 1998."
"The morning of June 15, PIER telephoned VBCPS to inform the school district that observations would be occurring that day."
The Cover-Up That Failed
At that point, Virginia Beach school administrators initiated a "cover-up." Their "cover-up" backfired:
"When PIER observers arrived at the schools on the afternoon of June 15, they observed buses being rerouted back to school parking lots by security guards and heard announcements on PA systems and bus radios that buses were not to
leave school property until the general education students were dismissed."
"Students with disabilities were observed to be waiting outside of the school building or sitting on buses for up to thirty minutes until the end of the school day for nondisabled students."
"PIER faxed a handwritten note to VBCPS the next morning, after being unable to reach VBCPS Administration by telephone the afternoon before. The note informed VBCPS that PIER was halting observations because of the hardship placed on
the students with disabilities the day before while waiting outside in the heat and on stifling hot buses."
"Apparently, instructions had been sent by VBCPS Administration to schools on June 15 informing the schools not to allow buses to leave the school property early. However this directive merely stopped buses from leaving early, not
students with disabilities from being dismissed before their nondisabled peers."
"Predetermined Policy"
In their OCR Complaint, PIER alleged that:
"VBCPS has a predetermined policy that students with IEPs will have a 5.5 hour program as evidenced by the VBCPS's current IEP form that states, "All students should have the availability of receiving a full (5.5 hours) program if
determined appropriate by the IEP committee and included in the student's IEP."
"Parents are not advised during IEP meetings or at any other point that their children with disabilities are entitled to a school day of 6.5 hours as provided to nondisabled students."
"VBCPS discriminates against students with disabilities by applying a more limited length of the school day for students with disabilities as compared to the length of the school day provided for nondisabled students . . . "
"The majority of students with disabilities need intensive remediation and services in part due to prior mis-education and denial of equal educational opportunity . . . With this intensive need it is inappropriate to shorten the school
day for students who perform poorly on State-based testing . . . Indeed a strong argument can be made under Section 504 that these students are entitled to additional, supplemental services in order for them to attain outcomes expected
for all students."
Virginia Beach Schools Agree to Resolve Allegations of Discrimination
(from Press Release of November 8, 1999)
On November 8, 1999, PIER issued a Press Release about the case. A portion of the press release is quoted below.
"Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) has entered into an agreement with the federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to address allegations of discrimination of students with disabilities. Protecting Individuals with disabilities
Education Rights (PIER), a local community group, filed a complaint with OCR in December alleging VBCPS systemically discriminated against students with disabilities who required transportation services."
"Students with disabilities were routinely dismissed from school before the end of the instructional day, required to use separate bus loading and unloading areas, arrived to school late in the morning, rode segregated buses, and
endured unreasonably lengthy bus rides."
"In 1998 PIER conducted observations at 39 randomly selected schools. Ninety percent of these schools dismissed students with disabilities before the end of the instructional day. PIER observed 347 incidents of buses leaving school
before the end of the instructional day. VBCPS provided documentation indicating that all of these buses were used to transport students with disabilities."
"VBCPS has agreed to take additional steps to resolve the complaint."
"The agreement with OCR requires VBCPS to modify the school district's individualized education program procedures to include a particular written plan to address transportation issues, to provide transportation information to parents
through a newsletter, and to develop a brochure to notify families of transportation requirements."
"The agreement by VBCPS to resolve the complaint closes this phase of the OCR investigation initiated in February that included a four day on-site investigation by OCR staff in May."
"Some students with disabilities may need separate transportation services, a shortened school day or other special transportation services. PIER fully supports the right of parents to have these needs met through the IEP
(individualized education program) process."
"The resolution agreement between OCR and VBCPS will advance the civil rights of students with disabilities. PIER is pleased that VBCPS has agreed to resolve the complaint rather than continue with an even more lengthy and expensive
OCR investigation. Cooperation by VBCPS with parents will result in more dollars being spent on education and fewer dollars being used for administrative and legal fees. Children with disabilities have won a significant battle to
receive equal educational benefits."
"Parents of children with disabilities who continue to experience discrimination can contact PIER at 757-461-8007 or OCR at 202-208-7670."
Lessons from this Case
If you work in the system, be careful that you don't become a lightening rod for conflict. My assumption about the people calling the shots is:
They don't know any better, or
They've gotten away with it for years and think they can continue to get away with it.
You may want to print this information and take it the school, saying "Gee, this is what happened in Virginia when they sent kids with disabilities home early."
As you see with this OCR Finding, the practice of sending kids with disabilities home early is illegal. If your district has information that they are acting illegally, they are "on notice" that they need to "mend their ways" - now
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Articles for November 2005
Poll Says Even Quiet Divorces Affect Children's Paths
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: November 5, 2005
Even in a "good divorce," in which parents amicably minimize their conflicts, children of divorce inhabit a more difficult emotional landscape than those in intact families, according to a new survey of 1,500 people ages 18 t0 35.
"All the happy talk about divorce is designed to reassure parents," Elizabeth Marquardt, author of the study, described in her new book, "Between Two Worlds." "But it's not the truth for children. Even a good divorce restructures
children's childhoods and leaves them traveling between two distinct worlds. It becomes their job, not their parents', to make sense of those two worlds."
Ms. Marquardt, 35, is an affiliate scholar with the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan advocacy group that strongly emphasizes marriage. She is, she says, the first child of divorce to publish a broad study on how divorce
affects children.
It is no small question. The nation's divorce rate reached record levels in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and Norval D. Glenn, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, said that about a quarter of all Americans age 18
to 35 were not yet 16 when they experienced their parents' divorce.
There are no reliable national statistics on divorce, but most experts say that even with divorce rates edging down, about three-quarters of a million American children see their parents divorce each year. The new survey, based on the
first nationally representative sample of young adults, highlights the many ways that divorce shapes the emotional tenor of childhood.
For example, those who grew up in divorced families were far more likely than those with married parents to say that they felt like a different person with each parent, that they sometimes felt like outsiders in their own home and that
they had been alone a lot as a child.
Those with married parents, however, were far more likely to say that children were at the center of their family and that they generally felt emotionally safe.
In the study, all those from divorced families had experienced their parents' divorce before age 14 and had maintained contact with both parents. Most of the time, Ms. Marquardt maintains, children with married parents need not concern
themselves with their parents' thoughts and feelings while those with divorced parents must be more vigilant, more attuned to their parents' moods and expectations, more careful to adjust to the habits of the parent they are with - and
more concerned about looking or acting like the other parent.
The debate over how divorce affects children has long been polarized, with many researchers focusing on statistical data emphasizing that most children with divorced parents do fine in life and many clinicians emphasizing the emotional
distress that many of the children feel.
And given the political overtones, many scholars who study family diversity have been concerned that focusing on how divorce hurts children could lead to efforts to restrict the availability of divorce.
"Life is filled with trade-offs, and I worry that it's so easy to slip from descriptions of problems to one-size-fits-all prescription," said Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College in Washington and the author of
"Marriage, a History." "There will always be couples who need divorces."
Ms. Coontz and others acknowledge the growing consensus that most children with divorced parents grow into successful adults - but say that the process is difficult for them.
"The key is to separate pain from pathology, " said Robert Emery, director of the Center for Children, Families and the Law at the University of Virginia. "While a great many young people from divorced families report painful memories
and ongoing troubles regarding family relationships, the majority are psychologically normal."
Mr. Emery's own smaller, local studies have had findings similar to Ms. Marquardt's. About half of those from divorced families agreed that they had a "harder childhood that most people," compared with 14 percent from married families.
"The effects of divorce may not seem so important in a hard-nosed statistical analysis of outcomes, but in a subjective way, they may be very important," said Andrew Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University. "Many
adults with very successful lives still carry the residual trauma of their parents' breakup."
Ms. Marquardt's book paints a detailed picture of the kinds of tensions children live with, using examples both from her own life - her parents separated when she was 2 - and from interviews with 70 other young adults.
A chapter on secrets begins with her memory of being 10 years old, at the kitchen table with her father and not knowing what to answer when he asked, "Is Paul living with you and your mother?"
She recounts her efforts to remember that in her mother's house, it was all right to say "screwed up" while in her father's she would be corrected to "messed up."
The lonely task of reconciling two worlds is a constant theme. One young woman in the book describes moving between her mother and stepfather's home, where thrift was a high value, and her father and stepmother's, where money flowed
freely and abundance was valued. She took her mother's rules so seriously that even at meals with her father, she ate far more than she wanted, getting a stomachache in her effort to make sure there would be no leftovers to throw out.
She never told her parents about her inner conflict, for fear that it would be rude.
"Children of divorce feel less protected by their parents, and they're much less likely to go to their parents for comfort when they are young, or for emotional support when they are older," Ms. Marquardt said. "They often feel a need
to protect their mother emotionally."
"I think we need to recognize these things," she said. "In one women's magazine, a mother wrote that she'd told her 7-year old-daughter she didn't need protecting, but that her daughter just does it anyway. Saying those words isn't
helpful to the daughter. It just makes her look silly, like it's her problem that she feels she has to protect her mom."
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Articles for October 2005
10 Tips: How to Use IDEA 2004 to Improve Your Child's Special Education, you will learn how to use IDEA 2004 and the No Child Left Behind Act to ensure that the needs of children with disabilities are met, while also improving
educational outcomes and results.
1. Use the Findings and Purposes in IDEA 2004 to Establish a Higher Standard for a Free, Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).
2. Use IDEA 2004 and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Obtain a Better Individualized Education Program (IEP).
3. Include Research Based Methodology in the IEP.
4. Ensure That Annual Goals are Comprehensive, Specific and Measurable.
5. Use New Evaluation Procedures to Monitor Academic Progress and Progress on IEP Goals.
6. Give Consent Only for Evaluations or Portions of the IEP to Which You Agree.
7. Insist that the Child’s Regular Education Teacher(s) Participate in IEP Meetings.
8. Avoid Three-Year IEPs Like the Plague.
9. Challenge Suspension or Expulsion if Child’s Behavior was a Manifestation of the Disability, or if the Alternate Placement Does Not Provide FAPE.
10. Avoid Due Process Hearings if Possible.
Articles for September 2005
I.B.M. Unveils Plan to Train Employees to Be Teachers
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: September 17, 2005
Faced with a chronic shortage of science and math teachers, American education officials have long blamed the country's lucrative high techn
ology industry for luring potential teachers to higher-paying positions in business. But yesterday, I.B.M. announced a new program intended to begin to reverse the cycle by paying to train some of its veteran employees for second
careers as teachers. I.B.M. officials said they hoped other companies would follow suit.
The program, "Transition to Teaching," was announced yesterday at Public School 19 in Manhattan by Stanley Litow, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City schools who is now president of the I.B.M. International Foundation.
Mr. Litow said that the program would be geared to I.B.M. employees in their early 50's who are preparing to retire, but he said that it would be open to all employees with at least 10 years of experience and some prior community
service work.
In an interview, Mr. Litow said that after he unveiled the program he received e-mail messages from about 50 people interested in participating. He said the company would begin the program with 100 employees in New York State and North
Carolina, two states where I.B.M. has a large number of employees.
"There are a lot of people who are interested in teaching, and they didn't make that choice the first time because of economic circumstances," Mr. Litow said.
I.B.M. employees accepted into the program will continue to work for the company while completing coursework required to become a certified teacher and will be granted a paid leave of absence to complete three months of student
teaching.
I.B.M. will pay up to $15,000 per employee for tuition and stipends. To be eligible, employees must have worked for I.B.M. for at least 10 years, have a bachelor's degree in science or math or a higher degree in a related field and
experience as a teacher, a tutor or a volunteer in a school or other children's program.
Mr. Litow said the program would help place the newly trained teachers in public schools.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, joined Mr. Litow during yesterday's announcement.
"New York needs more people with math and science skills to meet the growing job demand, but we need more teachers to make that happen," Mr. Mills said in a statement.
New York City officials said that about half of all new science teachers and three-quarters of new math teachers came through alternative certification programs, in which people who did not formally train as teachers can qualify for a
license.
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Education Rights of Homeless Children
by Michael A. O'Connor, Esq.
Hurricane Katrina has rendered more than 1 millions persons homeless, including well over 200,000 school age children (over 135,000 in Louisiana alone).
As families leave the most devastated areas, they will disperse to friends’ and relatives’ homes across the country. Others may be truly homeless,
or be placed in temporary housing at hotels, motels or military bases by FEMA. For children who have been traumatized by the loss of home, friends, and perhaps death or injury of family members, returning to school is not only
important for educational purposes; attendance at a school becomes an oasis of normalcy for them.
Although media reports have suggested that schools across the country are welcoming such children, some parents may encounter problems. The lack of identity papers, immunization documents, school records, and lack of proof of prior
residency in the Gulf Coast area may cause some school districts to resist admitting children.
The lack of an IEP or 504 Plan for children may also cause some delays in admission or provision of appropriate services. This memo briefly summarizes basic education rights of all “homeless” children, and also reviews rights of
children with disabilities. Websites at the bottom of the memo offer more detailed information.
McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires that all school districts make special accommodations to ensure access to school for children whose families are “homeless.”
The definition of "homeless" includes not only the classical notions of living in a tent or car, but also families that lack a regular abode (e.g. in a refugee type settlement, or placed in a motel/hotel by FEMA or other agency) or who
are temporarily doubled up with another family.
A homeless child must be promptly enrolled, provided full access to classes, be afforded transportation if needed and cannot be discriminated against, or placed in a segregated school, based on their status.
Some displaced families from areas other than New Orleans may end up in locations not far from their original residence, but outside the boundary of their home school. The McKinney Act expressly provides such children the option to
attend their home school (if it is still operating).
State education agencies (SEA’s) have responsibility to ensure compliance by local school districts, and each state has designated a coordinator of homeless education of children and youth. The coordinator’s office should be helpful in
correcting any barriers or other problems that arise in local school districts.
Problem Solving Strategies for Advocates
Generally, the process of problem solving or advocacy should start with the principal and case manager in a school, then the school district administration, then the SEA coordinator, then U.S. Department of Education (see list of
regional offices below).
Advocates should also inquire about state and local policies and procedures, many of which are posted on agency web sites. For example, the Chicago Public Schools website has a 92 page manual setting out procedures for serving homeless
children (Chicago Coalition for the Homeless)
Recourse to more formal advocacy may also be necessary. Federal courts have ruled McKinney provisions to be enforceable under 42 U.S.C. §1983, and advocates have successfully enforced McKinney Act provisions in State courts. Also, it
may be helpful to monitor the web sites of the Louisiana Department of Education which reports efforts to provide electronic data bases to schools to help with the enrollment of displaced children.
Children with Disabilities Who Are Homeless
Children with disabilities who are homeless were expressly recognized in the reauthorization of IDEA in P.L. 108-446. IDEA now incorporates the McKinney definition of homeless children. Child Find and Surrogate Parents
Also, the Child Find obligations imposed on school districts to identify, evaluate and provide services to all children with disabilities, no matter how severe, has been expressly extended to homeless children. IDEA 2004 also requires
that “unaccompanied youth,” (that is a homeless adolescent not accompanied by a parent or guardian) should have a surrogate parent appointed.
Homeless Children Who Have No IEP
There will most likely be unique challenges arising for children with disabilities who seek to enroll in a school, but lack an Individualized Education Plan ( IEP) or any documentation of the nature of their disability.
Moreover, many children, including those not previously eligible for special education services, will have such emotional scars from their experience that they will be in need of social work and/or psychological services, which the
school should promptly identify and provide as needed.
The burdens and costs of conducting adequate evaluations of children will be a strain for many school districts, and many children will be at risk of not receiving prompt evaluations and specialized services.
School districts and state agencies may propose waivers of various requirements, which may be necessary in the short term. However, because many displaced children will likely remain in that status for an extended period of time, such
waivers should not become the status quo and unreasonably deny children educational services in the long term.
Unique Challenges of Displaced Children
Some urban areas, especially those within 400 miles of New Orleans, will experience a large influx of displaced children, and will likely present unique challenges.
If systemic problems are encountered, members of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) should link up with legal aid programs, Protection and Advocacy agencies, and private law firms providing pro bono representation.
COPAA will provide more information about these emerging networks of resources as they become available.
More Information
McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act
The McKinney-Vento Act - Educating Children and Youth in Homeless Situations - information about law, policy and practice.
McKinney-Vento Act from Wrightslaw - Reformatted law so it is easy to read, print, and distribute to schools, social service agencies, shelters, child advocates, and others who are responsible for educating homeless children.
Title VII-B of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act - Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program - as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
U. S. Department of Education Regional offices
Education of Homeless Children
National Association for Education of Homeless Children & Youth - a national grassroots membership association, serves as the voice and the social conscience for the education of children and youth in homeless situations; connects
educators, parents, advocates, researchers and service providers to ensure school enrollment and attendance for children and youth whose lives have been disrupted by the lack of safe, permanent and adequate housing.
National Center for Homeless Education (funded by U.S. Department of Education) - provides research, resources, and information to a
ddress the educational needs of children and youth experiencing homelessness. State Coordinators for Homeless Education - Every state is required by federal law to have a State Coordinator for Homeless Education. This person is
responsible for ensuring the understanding of and compliance with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act in public schools throughout the state.
Homelessness and Students with Disabilities: Educational Rights and Challenges published by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (Jan. 2004)
National Coalition for the Homeless - Organization that focuses on four areas: housing justice, economic justice, health care justice, and civil and voting rights by grassroots organizing, public education, policy advocacy, technical
assistance, and partnerships.
Louisiana Department of Education - includes links to information for displaced children and teachers on first page of site.
Texas Homeless Education Office - includes information about enrollment and services for services from hurricane disaster areas.
Mississippi Education Hurricane Disaster Information Page - includes frequently asked questions for displaced students, families, school personnel, contact info, phone numbers.
Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
Legal and Advocacy Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) - An organization of attorneys, advocates and parents whose primary mission is to secure high quality educational services for children with disabilities.
National Center on Homeless and Poverty – The Law Center monitors and enforces compliance with the McKinney-Vento Act, the federal law that provides a wide array of educational rights to children and youth in homeless situations. We
provide technical assistance to attorneys, service providers, parents and educators across the country to ensure that homeless children gain access to public school. We also work to strengthen and enforce national, state and local laws
and policies that affect homeless children and youth.
State Protection and Advocacy Agencies for Persons with Developmental Disabilities, Mental Illness and the Client Assistance Program. The Protection and Advocacy (P&A) System and Client Assistance Program (CAP) comprise the nationwide
network of congressionally mandated, legally based disability rights agencies.
The Federally Funded Parent Training and Information Centers (PTIs) and Community Parent Resource Centers (CPRCs) are located in each state to provide training and information to parents of infants, toddlers, children, and youth with
disabilities and to professionals who work with children.
Michael O'Connor
Mike O'Connor is an attorney who represents children with disabilities and a member of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA)
Michael A. O'Connor, Esq. Mauk & O'Connor, LLP 1427 W. Howard Street Chicago, IL 60626-1426 Phone: 773 262 2199 Email: mikeoc@earthlink.net
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Harlem School Introduces Children to Swiss Chard
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: September 9, 2005
Ebony Richards, a confirmed hamburger and Tater Tots girl, knows the rules of the lunch line at her school, the Promise Academy in Harlem.
When confronted with whole-wheat penne covered with sautéed peppers and local squash, she does not blurt out "That's nasty." If she does, she goes to the end of the line.
Although seconds on main courses are not allowed - someone has to show children what a reasonable portion is - Ebony can fill her tray with a dozen helpings of vegetables or bowls of Romaine lettuce from the salad bar. Any time in the
school day, she can wander into the cafeteria for a New York apple.
Ebony, 12, had never seen Swiss chard until a month ago. She ate three helpings. "I was like, 'I don't want to eat that,' " she said of her first few months of meals at the Promise Academy. "But I had to, because there was nothing
else. Then it was like, 'This is good.' "
Now she demands that her father, Darryl Richards, pick up chard at the makeshift farmers' market held once a month in the school cafeteria. They may even take one of the school's cooking classes together.
As this school year begins, it is a rare administrator who is not reconsidering at least some aspect of lunch, as a way to confront increasing obesity and poor eating habits. Some steps are as simple as shutting off soda machines.
Others involve writing new, comprehensive nutrition policies.
But perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took
control of the students' diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home.
Experts see the program as a Petri dish in which the effects of good food and exercise on students' health and school performance can be measured and, perhaps, eventually replicated.
"The Promise Academy model is probably the most intensive anybody is working with," said Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who is working on a book about school food for the University of California Press.
Almost 90 percent of the students at the school come from families poor enough to qualify for free government lunches, and 44 percent are overweight. Most had never tasted a fresh raspberry or eaten a peach that wasn't canned in sugar
syrup before they picked up a cafeteria tray at the school.
"Our challenge is to create an environment where young people actually eat healthy and learn to do it for the rest of their lives," said Geoffrey Canada, the teacher and author from the South Bronx who developed the Promise Academy.
Mr. Canada created his school kitchen as part of the larger Harlem Children's Zone, an assault on poverty being watched by social service experts and policy makers across the country.
Promise was one of nine charter schools opened in the city last year. The Bloomberg administration has pledged to open 50 such schools, including 15 that are opening for this school year.
Mr. Canada, who has a master's in education from Harvard, drew a circle around a 60-block area in central Harlem to create the children's zone, a tight web of social, health and educational programs that start with a "baby college" for
new parents and will end, he hopes, with the well-fed college bound graduates of the Promise Academy.
The school has longer hours than most public schools and runs through most of the summer because the founders believe that its students need help catching up with those born into better circumstances.
School officials regularly measure the children's weight and fitness along with their academic progress. Mr. Canada and his staff hope that the Promise Academy will prove the importance of a serious school food program, much as data
from the national Head Start program was used to prove the effectiveness of early education and support for children.
That will take time. When the Promise Academy opened last year, kindergartners and sixth graders were the only students. This year they are moving up a grade, and another batch of kindergartners and sixth graders is starting. In five
years, when every grade level is filled, 1,300 students will be eating two meals and two snacks a day from the Promise Academy kitchen.
"We want the children to get to a point where they're looking forward to that apple, and the parents provide it for them," Mr. Canada said. "Now we say, 'Eat fruits and vegetables,' and we have kids who come back and say, 'My moms
ain't buying that.' "
The team at the school uses strict guidelines, education and a little psychology to change young palates. One key is to teach resistance to marketing come-ons from fast-food and candy manufacturers.
"They've got to hear they're being conned," Mr. Canada said, "or they're not going to be open to this."
Eating at the Promise Academy is about more than just the food. Children learn to respect where it comes from and who serves it, as well as whom they eat with. They must use tongs to pick up their morning bagels. They may not bang
their trays down on the cloth-covered cafeteria tables. No one is allowed to toss out whole peaches or to cut in line.
To make it all work, Mr. Canada relies on Andrew Benson, a young chef with a culinary degree from Johnson and Wales University. Mr. Benson, a veteran of three public school cafeterias in Harlem, said he was defeated by the city's
school food bureaucracy. (Actual cooking from scratch is done in less than half of the city's 1,356 schools.) The new kitchen at the academy rivals many in good New York restaurants. Mr. Benson does not use foods like processed cheese
and peanut butter from the commodities program, choosing to spend part of his budget on fresher food.
He feeds the children breakfast, lunch and an array of after-school and Saturday snacks at a daily cost of about $5.87 per student. The amount, almost twice what some public schools spend, comes from a mix of government reimbursements
and a school budget pumped up by grants and other private donations.
To get things rolling, Mr. Canada first turned to Ann Cooper, the chef who gained a national platform reworking the lunch program at the private Ross School in East Hampton. She helped stock the kitchen, find food purveyors and plan
menus. But the Promise Academy program is much less fancy than Ross's, in both food and financing.
The Promise menu and the per-pupil budget are the envy of Jorge Leon Collazo, who was hired last year as the first executive chef of the New York City public schools, in one of several efforts to improve the 860,000 meals that are
pumped out each day in the school system.
"I can't put turkey lasagna with fresh zucchini on the menu for all the schools in the city," Mr. Collazo said. "I'd get killed. No one would eat it. If I did something esoteric like that - esoteric for a public school - you'd also
have to have something like pizza."
Even at the Promise Academy, getting students to embrace healthy eating has been a struggle. At first, they went home complaining that they had not had enough to eat or that the food was terrible, so Mr. Benson brought parents in for a
meal.
The food impressed Jacqueline Warner, whose son, Chuck Cherry, 11, used to come home from school complaining that he was hungry. "It's just that he wasn't used to eating healthy portions," she said.
Ms. Warner, 40, has diabetes. She grew up in Harlem, eating what her mother could afford and knew how to cook. Often that meant fried foods, macaroni and cheese and lots of rice and potatoes. She loved it, but attributes her disease,
in part, to that diet.
"I'm just glad he has a chance now to know the difference between the food we grew up on," she said, "and the healthy kind of food they serve in this school."
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Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
By SAM DILLON
Published: September 7, 2005
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the
nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless
some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake
and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at
the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia,
Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard
and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help
states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000
headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student,
she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take
emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large
numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation. Ms. Spellings has
invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in
federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal
known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on
testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that
individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that
include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding
but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management
companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include
enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress
yesterday.
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Lawmaker and Educator Propose Incentive Pay for Teachers in Troubled Schools
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: September 7, 2005
Representative Charles B. Rangel and Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, urged the Bloomberg administration and the teachers' union yesterday to create pay incentives of $10,000 a year or more to
entice educators to work in some of city's lowest-performing schools.
On the first day back to work for the city's 83,000 teachers, Mr. Rangel and Mr. Levine proposed a 25 percent salary bonus for teachers who work an 11-month academic year in the most troubled schools.
They also proposed a 10 percent bonus for veteran educators designated master teachers.
For Mr. Rangel, the city's senior congressman, and Mr. Levine, the head of the city's most prestigious graduate school of education, the proposal marked an unusual and pointed intervention in municipal labor relations at a time when
the teachers' union and the Bloomberg administration seem eager to reach a contract deal.
"Everyone has to agree that in order to maintain qualified teachers we have got to kick up a notch what we pay our teachers," Mr. Rangel said at a news conference.
The proposal would raise starting pay for new teachers to $48,750, from $39,000 a year under the most recent contract, which expired in May 2003. For master teachers, it could raise pay at the highest end of the scale to about $90,000
a year, from about $82,000.
The proposed incentives could cost more than $1 billion a year, and Mr. Levine and Mr. Rangel said that it could be paid for by the state, which is under court order to provide an additional $5.6 billion to the city schools annually.
Mr. Levine characterized the proposal as "a plea on behalf of the children in our neighborhood and our city who are being left behind, largely low-income children of color," and he said the news conference was timed to coincide with
both contract talks and the mayoral campaign.
Many city teachers returned from summer break yesterday angry over the lack of a new contract. At one point this summer, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had predicted that a new contract would be sealed by the start of school, which begins
tomorrow.
But both administration and union officials said it was highly unlikely that a deal would be reached until later this month, after a panel of state-appointed arbitrators issues its report. The arbitrators' recommendations are not
binding.
The administration and the union, the United Federation of Teachers, had positive reactions to the plan.
"The chancellor has long supported and made clear that we need to use pay differentials to attract highly qualified teachers for our most challenging schools, where our best teachers are needed most," said Jerry Russo, the press
secretary for Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, said that she had put forward a similar plan for incentives to teachers who agreed to work in "enterprise zones" composed of about 200 of the city's worst-performing schools. "It's good
that others are raising their voices on this," she said.
Nearly two years ago, Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee, was accused of interfering with contract talks when she held hearings on the city's contracts with teachers, principals and
custodians.
Yesterday, Mr. Rangel rejected such a charge. "This is our business," he said. "Nobody has a right to go and have closed-door negotiations."
Ms. Moskowitz said she was thrilled by the congressman's remarks. "The contracts are public documents signed by public officials and there has got to be transparency," she said. "I am delighted that voices much more powerful than mine
are saying that."
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Articles for August 2005
Taking a Light Saber to Tired Old Teaching
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: August 31, 2005
SAN RAFAEL, Calif.
IN a spare bathroom next to the garage, George Lucas set up his darkroom. He had gotten a 35-millimeter camera about the same time he started high school, and had begun shooting everything from posed portraits of his niece and nephew
to trick photos of the family cat, lured into midair by a dangling piece of meat. Before long, he was making backyard war movies on an 8-millimeter handed down by his grandfather.
Anybody who lived near the Lucas place, 14 miles outside of Modesto in California's Central Valley, recognized these ventures as the latest expressions of a quiet boy's creativity. George had already written a weekly newspaper,
designed landscapes around his Lionel train set and built a dollhouse for a neighbor girl, scaled right down to a lamp made of a lipstick tube.
Little of this precocity, though, revealed itself in school. A bored, dreamy student, George had struggled with spelling and needed to repeat math the summer after eighth grade. His high school art teacher, looking over George's
drawings of space soldiers, admonished him, "Get serious." George's father refused to pay for him to study illustration in college, hoping instead he would take over the family's office-furniture store.
The filmgoing world knows how this particular story ends. George Lucas, the underachieving teenager, grew up to become George Lucas, the phenomenally successful director, auteur of the "Star Wars" series, "Indiana Jones" and "American
Graffiti." Maybe his experience tricking the cat into jumping was an early lesson in how to treat actors.
Except that the story has another prong, far less known, and tied to public policy rather than popular culture. Out of his own uninspiring education, the conviction that his abilities were ignored and throttled by conventional
schooling, Mr. Lucas, 61, has assiduously yet quietly built a foundation devoted to education reform over the past dozen years.
This is no exercise in designer charity. The George Lucas Educational Foundation has 30 full-time employees, a $4 million annual budget and a headquarters on the founder's Skywalker Ranch here in the Marin County hills. It publishes a
magazine, produces documentaries, supports projects in both public and private schools, distributes an e-mail newsletter and maintains an extensive Web site,EDUTOPIA.
All these enterprises espouse a consistent message firmly in the progressive camp, emphasizing the virtues of hands-on field work, practical experience and the use of film, video and digital materials in preference to the usual
textbooks and standardized tests.
To hear Mr. Lucas tell it, though, his preferred innovations are in many ways throwbacks. "Our platform is to say that there are time-tested ways of learning," he said in an interview earlier this summer. "Aristotle taught four or five
people; he didn't have huge classes. Or you have the mentoring system - the cobbler teaching his assistants. Whether it's Aristotle or learning how to make shoes, you had a reason to learn. Education didn't happen in isolation. Maybe
for the very elite, you can learn for the sake of learning. But for millions of students to learn, you need to know why you're learning."
To make those general precepts concrete, the Lucas foundation identifies and illustrates examples from the real world - a teacher in California who uses hip-hop lyrics as a route for his students to understand poets like Dylan Thomas;
a school in Washington that makes the field study of rare lizards a way of teaching such fundamental subjects as reading, writing and math.
The fierce passion the Lucas foundation brings to its program has much to do with geography. From his base in the Bay Area, Mr. Lucas had early and deep involvement with the innovators of the Silicon Valley. His staff at the foundation
includes veterans of Wired and Red Herring magazines, the public radio station KQED-FM and the Web zine Salon, all of which both chronicled and participated in the digital revolution, and these people's certitude echoes the high-tech
industry's mantra of evolve or die.
"We grew up or worked in an area where change is encouraged, where innovation is encouraged, where entrepreneurship is nurtured," said James Daly, the editor in chief of Edutopia, the Lucas foundation's magazine. "And that's not the
way it's been in education. If you feel like you're a hamster on the wheel all day, it's easy to stay that way. But when you get to the change agents, the rock does begin to roll uphill."
Largely female, married and middle-aged, not necessarily a recipe for the cutting edge, Edutopia's 85,000 subscribers actually use technology - e-mail, bulletin boards, listservs - more avidly than teenagers, according to a survey by
Grunwald Associates. They perceive themselves as influential on educational issues, even if only in their own classrooms or communities. And by an overwhelming margin, they assail the reliance on standardized tests mandated by the No
Child Left Behind law.
To its credit, the Lucas foundation stops short of being tendentious, the captive of its own doctrine. Its agenda reflects not only Mr. Lucas's frustrations with his own education (at least until he entered film school at the
University of Southern California) but a very deep family commitment to the field. His parents, both denied college by the Great Depression, presided over a household awash in National Geographics, World Almanac volumes, Landmark
histories and biographies, crossword puzzles, all those elements of recreational self-education.
MR. LUCAS's older sister, Kate Nyegaard, has served since 1992 on the school board in Modesto, which has a heavily Latino, bilingual student body. His younger sister, Wendy Lucas, has taught reading in various California schools, some
public and some Christian, for 22 years. They are reality checks for the foundation, Mrs. Nyegaard in a formal way as a member of its board.
While Edutopia publishes articles that can only send a chill through a devotee of the written word - "No Books, No Problem," read the headline of an article about a chemistry teacher who devises a curriculum without a text - it has
also trumpeted the advantages of a longer school year. One of its finest articles profiled a class in St. Johnsbury, Vt., whose teacher had been deployed to Iraq; another trenchantly explored the plight of biology instructors under
pressure to add "intelligent design" to their courses.
Even as an exponent of progressive education, Mr. Lucas himself has not escaped the long arm of standardized testing. There is a short essay about him written for fourth graders called "A Talented Young Man." It appears in a
Steck-Vaughn test-prep book.
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Articles for August 2005
Federal Judge Approves Record $6.7 Million Settlement in Special Ed Case
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District and the California Department of Education have agreed to pay more than $6.7 million to a child with a disability and his parents for their failure to appropriately educate the child for more
than five years.
Steven Wyner, a partner with the law firm Wyner & Tiffany which specializes in representing students with disabilities and negotiated the settlement, said “the settlement amount represents a record payment in a special education case."
"This lawsuit could have been avoided and millions of dollars could have been saved had the Manhattan Beach USD and the CDE simply complied with clearly established statutes and regulations.”
Ongoing Failure to Provide FAPE Damaged Child The Application for Court Approval of Minor’s Compromise, approved by U.S. District Court Judge Gary Allen Feess, states that the failure to provide services required by federal and state
law “resulted in permanent damage to [the student’s] academic, physical and social/emotional well-being, and has impaired his ability to function at the level at which he could have reasonably been expected to function…" Marcy J.K.
Tiffany , who also represented the Manhattan Beach family, said “this case should send a clear message to school districts that they cannot ignore the legal rights of special needs students with impunity. Sooner or later, the law will
hold them accountable.”
Most of the payments will go toward the future education and care of the student, now 17, who has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
The family requests that the press not identify their child by name. He continues to be educated in the Manhattan Beach USD. This is the culmination of one family’s six-year struggle to obtain services that are guaranteed by the law.
They are happy that this process has finally come to an end, but extremely sad that it has taken so long for them to secure their child’s legal rights, and that it has come at such a great loss to their child’s academic and social
well-being.
“No amount of money can compensate for the school district’s deliberate failure to provide an appropriate education at a crucial point in our son’s life,’’ said Deborah Porter. “This will provide for his future well-being and we also
hope this will force this school district, and all school districts, to do the right thing for other children.”
The settlement, which was approved by the Court on August 10th, followed a strongly-worded decision by Judge Feess filed on December 20, 2004 , granting partial summary judgment in favor of the student and his parents, Deborah and John
Porter. Judge Feess found Manhattan Beach USD and the California Department of Education (“ CDE ”) “equally culpable.”
The case began in January 1999, when the student’s parents requested a due process hearing claiming that Manhattan Beach USD had failed to provide their child with a “free appropriate public education.” Despite not being represented by
counsel, the family prevailed in the due process proceeding.
In June 1999, the California Special Education Hearing Office (“SEHO”) issued a decision finding that Manhattan Beach USD had failed to provide the student with appropriate reading and language instruction and socialization
interventions. The District was ordered to provide compensatory education to the student during the 1999-2000 school year, but never complied with the SEHO decision.
State Failed to Ensure that Hearing Officer's Decision is Implemented In August 2000, after waiting over a year for the District to provide the compensatory services, the Porters sued Manhattan Beach USD and the CDE in U.S. District
Court seeking to enforce the SEHO decision. The judge to whom the case was then assigned dismissed it on the ground that the Porters had to first exhaust administrative remedies by filing a compliance complaint with the CDE. In
December 2000, the Porters appealed the dismissal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and at the same time filed a compliance complaint with the CDE. The CDE issued a Compliance Report in March 2001 finding that Manhattan Beach USD
had not complied with the SEHO decision and ordering both compliance with that decision and additional compensatory education. However, Manhattan Beach USD also did not comply with the corrective actions set forth in CDE’s Compliance
Report.
Ninth Circuit Issues Decision, Offers Hope
In October 2002, the Ninth Circuit reversed the dismissal of the lawsuit and remanded the case to the District Court for further proceedings. Porter v. Board of Trustees of Manhattan Beach Unified School District et al., 307 F. 3d 1064
(9th Cir. 2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1194, 123 S. Ct. 1303, 154 L. Ed. 2nd 1029 (2003).
The Porters amended their complaint claiming that the CDE not only failed to take appropriate steps to force Manhattan Beach USD to comply with the SEHO decision, but also failed to take appropriate steps to ensure that Manhattan Beach
USD complied with the CDE ’s corrective actions. The case was subsequently transferred to Judge Feess.
School District Used Power to Retaliate Against Parents In his December 2004 decision, Judge Feess stated, “it seems that the District has endeavored to use the power it has over [the student’s] education as a means of retaliating
against the Porters for their criticisms of, and challenges to, the District.”
State Allowed District to Flout Authority
Judge Feess also took the CDE to task for its failure to exercise appropriate oversight over the District, stating “[a]lthough it is true that the District repeatedly flouted the State’s authority by failing to comply with two state
agency orders, it was only successful in doing so because of the CDE ’s inattention.” As interim relief, in a separate order entered on November 23, 2004, Judge Feess transferred control over the student’s education from the Manhattan
Beach USD and the CDE to a Special Master, Ivor Weiner, Ph.D.
Under the settlement agreement, Manhattan Beach USD and the California Department of Education have been ordered to set aside approximately $1.1 million in a trust to pay for the education of the student at the direction of the Special
Master.
Settlement Terms
According to the news release from Manhattan Beach Unified School District, the school district reported that The Alliance of Schools for Cooperative Insurance Programs and Schools Excess Liability Fund will pay $4.4 million of the
settlement.
Manhattan Beach will pay approximately $1.1 million. The California Department of Education will pay approximately $1.25 million. Of the remaining funds, $1.1 million will be spent on a court-appointed special master who will continue
to oversee the child's education through June 2007. Approximately $1.7 million will go to the Wyner & Tiffany law firm that represented the family over the past several years.
Pleadings, Documents, Articles
Settlement Agreement signed by the parties on August 5, 2005 (August 5, 2005) Note: This is a 7.7 mg PDF file, 27 pages.
News Release from Manhattan Beach Unified School District about Settlement in Porter (August 18, 2005)
News Release from Wyner & Tiffany: Federal Judge Approves Record $6.7 Million Settlement in Special Education Case (August 18, 2005)
Complaint in Porter v. Board of Trustees of Manhattan Beach Unified School District, Gerald F. Davis, individually and in his official capacity as Superintendent of Manhattan Beach Unified School District; Linda M. Jones, individually
and in her official capacity as Director of Pupil Personnel Services; Eloise Thompson, individually and in her official capacity as Assistant Superintendent, Pupil Personnel Services; California Department of Education; and Jack
O'Connell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California. Note: This is 6.7 mg PDF file, 21 pages.
In October, 2002, we reported on this case in 9th Circuit: Relief When District Refuses to Implement HO's Decision. "For some parents, winning relief at a due process hearing does not resolve their problems. What happens when the
school district refuses to implement a hearing officer's decision? What happens if the state department of education does not require the district to implement the hearing officer's decision? Last week, the U. S. Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that will help parents who are dealing with recalcitrant school officials." (The Special Ed Advocate, October 21, 2002)
Porter v. Bd of Trustees of Manhattan Beach USD (U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit). Parents of child for whom special education program was ordered by hearing officer under IDEA were not required to seek new hearing or to
comply with state’s complaint resolution procedure before suing for alleged failure to fully implement the program; also held that Eleventh Amendment immunity does not bar a federal court from granting prospective injunctive relief.
(20 pages in pdf)
Meet the Attorneys Wyner & Tiffany is a law firm that specializes in representing students with disabilities and their parents in special education and civil rights disputes with school districts and school district officials who fail
to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), and comparable provisions of state law.
The firm is dedicated to assisting individuals with disabilities and their parents in securing a “free appropriate public education,” as promised by the IDEA, so that these individuals obtain a meaningful education that will prepare
them to live independently as productive members of society.
The firm is comprised of lawyers, paralegals and advocates, all of whom are also parents of individuals with learning disabilities.
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Many Going to College Aren't Ready, Report Finds Test
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: August 17, 2005
Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces
one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.
The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading
comprehension, English, math and science.
"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news
conference yesterday.
ACT sets its college-readiness benchmarks - including the reading comprehension benchmark, which is new this year - by correlating earlier students' ACT scores with grades they actually received as college freshmen. Based on that data,
the benchmarks indicate the skill level at which a student has a 70 percent likelihood of earning a C or better, and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better.
Among those who took the 2005 test, only 51 percent achieved the benchmark in reading, 26 percent in science, and 41 percent in math; the figure for English was 68 percent. Results from the new optional ACT writing test, which was not
widely taken this year, were not included in the report.
About 40 percent of the nation's 2005 high school graduates took the ACT, and the average overall score, 20.9 of a possible 36, was unchanged from the year before. But Dr. Ferguson found it heartening that scores were holding even,
given that the pool of test takers had become so much larger and more diverse, in part because both Illinois and Colorado now use the ACT to test all students, even those who do not see themselves as college-bound.
Minority students now make up 27 percent of all ACT test takers, up from 24 percent in the class of 2001. The number of Hispanic test takers has grown 40 percent in that period, and the number of African-American test takers 23
percent. Caucasians taking the test have increased by only 2 percent.
"It's wonderful that more and more students who might not have considered college several years ago are now making plans for education beyond high school," Dr. Ferguson said.
But it is a source of concern, he said, that too many students are not taking the kind of rigorous high school courses that will prepare them for college. In fact, only 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT had completed
the recommended core curriculum for college-bound students: four years of English and three years each of social studies, science and math at the level of algebra or higher.
Those who do complete the core curriculum are far more likely to meet college readiness stand
ards, Dr. Ferguson said, but the percentage who complete that core has been falling. "The message doesn't seem to be getting though," he said.
The ACT report highlighted other worrisome trends as well, including a continuing decline in the percentage of students planning to major in engineering, computer science and education.
And at a time when more women than men go to college, Dr. Ferguson said, it is also a matter of concern that 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT were female, and only 44 percent male. As in previous years, men had
higher average math and science scores, and women higher averages scores in English and reading.
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Panel Votes to Hold Back 7th Graders Who Fail English Test
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: August 16, 2005
The Bloomberg administration won approval of a new seventh-grade promotion policy last night during a contentious meeting at the Department of Education's Lower Manhattan headquarters, where the Panel for Educational Policy voted in
favor of holding back seventh graders who fail citywide English tests starting next year.
Although three members of the panel were absent and two abstained, a resolution to adopt new promotion standards for seventh graders received eight votes - one more than needed to win approval. But before the vote, several protesters
in the audience stood and, with scarves tied around their mouths, turned their backs to the panel.
During the approximately 15 minutes allowed for public comment, several other people criticized education officials for tying students' promotion to success on standardized tests. Others said that the new policy placed undue blame on
students for what is, ultimately, the system's failure to educate.
But none of those objections compared to the avalanche of complaints that followed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's first announcement of tougher promotion rules for third graders in early 2004. Back then, the Panel for Educational Policy
threatened to veto the plan. Mr. Bloomberg won approval only after he fired two of his appointees to the panel and the Staten Island borough president dismissed a third.
During a presentation about the promotions standards for seventh-graders last night, the city's deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, Carmen Fariña, told a roomful of parents and teachers that the administration's promotion
rules introduced during the past two years for third and fifth graders had produced "a tremendous amount of achievement."
In fact, the administration's policies to end so-called social promotion in the lower grades have meant that fewer children have been held back, not more, mainly because of intense and expensive remedial efforts.
"It's time to do the same thing for middle school students so they can be successful in high school," Ms. Fariña said. She added that the initiative was not about punishment but about "being prepared."
Mr. Bloomberg first vowed in May to take on the issue of poor performance in junior high school after fewer students passed the state's eighth-grade reading test than in last year. Fewer than a third of the city's eighth graders were
reading at or above grade level, according to the most recent scores.
The administration has pledged $40 million toward intervention efforts for the middle grades, including, Ms. Fariña said last night, Saturday classes, organizational and study skills workshops for students, counseling for parents of
adolescents, and more teacher training.
"If we do not do this, we are dooming students to fail in high school," she said.
Once new state math requirements take effect during the school year 2006-7, promotions for seventh graders will be tied to scores on both of the city's standardized reading and math tests.
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Students With Disabilities Making Great Strides, New Study Finds
Data reflect successful experiences and achievements of special education students moving into early adulthood
FOR RELEASE: July 28, 2005
Students with disabilities have made significant progress in their transition to adulthood during the past 25 years with lower dropout rates, an increase in postsecondary enrollment and a higher rate of gainful employment after leaving
high school, according to a new report released today by the U.S. Department of Education. The report is available at U.S. Deparment of Education
The National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2) documents the experiences of a national sample of students over several years as they moved from secondary school into adult roles. The NLTS2 report shows that the incidence of
students with disabilities completing high school rather than dropping out increased by 17 percentage points between 1987 and 2003.
During the same period, their postsecondary education participation more than doubled to 32 percent. In 2003, 70 percent of students with disabilities who had been out of school for up to two years had paying jobs, compared to only 55
percent in 1987.
"These accomplishments show the benefits of accountability and high academic standards among all students, including those with disabilities," said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. "As we focus increasingly on high
school students, these findings square nicely with the goals of No Child Left Behind, such as closing the achievement gap and insisting that all students be given the quality education they so deserve."
NLTS2 began in 2001, and is a follow-up to the first National Longitudinal Transition Study conducted from 1985 through 1993, in which the experiences of the first "cohort" of students were analyzed. NLTS2 reports on a second cohort of
young people, 12,000 students nationwide who were ages 13-16 at the start of the study. Information will be collected over 10 years from parents, students and schools, and will provide a national picture of the experiences and
achievements of young people as they transition into early adulthood.
•Core Academics Improved—Cohort2 high school students with disabilities were much more likely than their cohort1 counterparts to take core academic courses, including mathematics, science, social studies and a foreign language.
•Grades Were Higher—Regarding academic performance, more than half of cohort2 students with disabilities received above-average grades, representing a shift from students receiving mostly Cs to more students receiving mostly As or Bs,
as reported by teachers.
•Age and Grade-Level Match Improved—The proportion of students who were at the typical age for their grade level increased from one-third to more than one-half between 1987 and 2001. As being older than the typical age for a grade
level has been shown to be a powerful predictor of disabled students dropping out of school, this indicator signals positive outcomes for youths with disabilities in their efforts to finish high school. •More Support—By 2001, half of
15- to 17-year-old students with disabilities were receiving related or support services from or through their schools, compared with less than one-third of students in 1987.
The study was funded by the Department's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and focuses on a wide range of important topics for students with disabilities, such as high school coursework, extracurricular
activities, academic performance, postsecondary education and training, employment, independent living and community participation.
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Articles for July 2005
Governors Endorse a Standard Formula for Graduation Rates
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: July 18, 2005
DES MOINES, July 17 - Governors from 45 states agreed Sunday to adopt a common formula to calculate high school graduation rates, an initiative intended to help policy makers more accurately measure student success and identify
academic programs that need improving.
The agreement is nonbinding, but as a series of recommendations, it would lead to a uniform accounting system to replace the patchwork of approaches currently used that the governors say often produces inaccurate or misleading
information. It would also help states comply with the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which uses graduation rates as a measure of whether schools are meeting annual progress requirements.
The governors said the agreement would also lead to a common formula for dropout rates and eventually to a reassessment of high school courses to make them more rigorous. Results of a federal study released last week showed that
average reading and math scores for 17-year-olds were unchanged from the 1970's.
"This is just the first step," said Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and chairman of the National Governors Association, which announced the agreement at its annual summer meeting here. "Right now, different states have
different definitions. So how can we make valid comparisons? And if you can't compare, how do we validate who has the best practices?"
Education reform, specifically "redesigning high school," has been a major policy focus of the meetings here this weekend, as well as Mr. Warner's chief priority during his one-year term as chairman. The push for harmonizing how
graduation rates are determined was a central component of his efforts, viewed as a critical need to help states track student progress and divert resources to those falling behind.
Raymond Simon, deputy secretary of education, said the federal study released last week "reaffirmed the urgency of redesigning the American high school."
For now, the nation's most populous states, California, Texas and Florida, as well as Maryland and Wyoming, have not agreed to adopt the new formula. Mr. Warner said "a couple more states" were likely to join the agreement, but he
stopped short of predicting that all 50 would.
Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican who will succeed Mr. Warner on Monday as chairman of the association, said current state-by-state comparisons of graduation rates were largely meaningless, adding that it would be like
ranking one basketball team shooting at an 8-foot-high basket against another shooting at a 10-foot-high basket.
"We should all be shooting at a 10-foot basket," Mr. Huckabee said. "This will give us the ability to honestly know how well we are doing compared to other states." Alluding to what many governors said needs to come next, a universal
definition for dropout rates, Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said state calculations were so incomplete that they often led to "vast disparities," even within a state.
The governors said it was particularly difficult to track the progress - or even the whereabouts - of students who are counted among incoming ninth graders but have disappeared by graduation. The simple math of comparing aggregate
numbers, they said, does not account for students who may have transferred to another school or taken time off before deciding to return later.
Further, they said, schools often produce dropout rates using outdated information or false assumptions, not really knowing whether a missing student has graduated, transferred or become missing for other reasons.
It is unclear, however, when the governors would be ready to sign an agreement on a dropout rate. Officials with the association said the task force that developed the formula for graduation rates would meet again within a few months
to set a timetable for moving forward.
The formula for graduation rates divides the number of a state's graduates in a particular year by the number of students entering the ninth grade for the first time four years before, plus the difference between the number of students
who transfer in and out over the same four years.
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Students Say High Schools Let Them Down
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: July 16, 2005
DES MOINES, July 15 - A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online
nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.
The survey, being released on Saturday by the association, also found that fewer than two-thirds believe that their school had done a good job challenging them academically or preparing them for college. About the same number of
students said their senior year would be more meaningful if they could take courses related to the jobs they wanted or if some of their courses could be counted toward college credit.
Taken together, the electronic responses of 10,378 teenagers painted a somber picture of how students rate the effectiveness of their schools in preparing them for the future.
The survey also appears to reinforce findings of federal test results released on Thursday that showed that high school seniors made almost no progress in reading and math in the first years of the decade. During that time, elementary
school students made significant gains.
"I might have expected kids to say, 'Don't give us more work; high school is tough enough,' " said Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and chairman of the governors association, which opens a three-day summer meeting here on
Saturday.
"Instead," Mr. Warner said, "what we got are high school students actually willing to be stretched more. I didn't think we'd get much of that."
The governors' survey was conducted as part of the association's effort to examine public high schools and devise strategies for improving them. Mr. Warner has made high school reform his priority as chairman of the association. His
term ends on Monday, when Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican, is scheduled to succeed him.
While a vast majority of respondents in the survey, 89 percent, said they intended to graduate, fewer than two-thirds of those said they felt their schools did an "excellent" or "good" job teaching them how to think critically and
analyze problems.
Even among the remaining 11 percent, a group of 1,122 that includes teenagers who say they dropped out of high school or are considering dropping out, only about one in nine cited "school work too hard" as a reason for not remaining
through graduation. The greatest percentage of those who are leaving, 36 percent, said they were "not learning anything," while 24 percent said, "I hate my school."
Experts in education policy said the survey results were consistent with other studies that have shown gaps between what students learn in high school and what they need for the years beyond.
"A lot of business people and politicians have been saying that the high schools are not meeting the needs of kids," said Barbara Kapinus, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association. "It's interesting that kids are
saying it, too."
Marc Tucker, president of the National Council on Economic Education, an organization that helps states and school districts create programs that are more tailored to contemporary student needs, said he did not believe that American
high schools could adequately prepare students without a fundamental change in how they operated.
Mr. Tucker said American schools had been too slow to adapt high school curriculums to the real-life demands of college and the workplace. Except for that small fraction of highly motivated students with an eye toward prestigious
private colleges and state universities, many more students, he said, are under the impression that just having a diploma qualifies them for the rigors of college and the workplace.
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Study Great Ideas, but Teach to the Test
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: July 13, 2005
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.
BECKY KARNES, a high school English teacher, recently completed a graduate-level writing course that she loved at Grand Valley State University.
"The course taught us better ways to teach writing to kids," said Ms. Karnes, a 16-year veteran who is finishing up her master's degree. "It showed you ways to stretch kids' minds. I learned so much, I had my eyes opened about how to
teach writing."
Ms. Karnes learned all sorts of exercises to get children excited about writing, get them writing daily about what they care about and then show them how they can take one of those short, personal pieces and use it as the nucleus for a
sophisticated, researched essay.
"We learned how to develop good writing from the inside, starting with calling the child's voice out," said Ms. Karnes, who got an A in the university course. "One of the major points was, good writing is good thinking. That's why
writing formulas don't work. Formulas don't let kids think; they kill a lot of creativity in writing."
And so, when Ms. Karnes returns to Allendale High School to teach English this fall, she will use the new writing techniques she learned and abandon the standard five-paragraph essay formula. Right?
"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to
teach to the state test" (the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, known as MEAP).
"MEAP is not what writing is about, but it's what testing is about," Ms. Karnes said. "And we know if we teach them the five-paragraph essay formula, they'll pass that test. There's a lot of pressure to do well on MEAP. It makes the
district seem good, helps real estate values."
In Michigan, there is added pressure. If students pass the state tests, they receive $2,500 college scholarships, and in Ms. Karnes's middle-class district, families need that money. "I can't see myself fighting against MEAP," she
said. "It would hurt my students too much. It's a dilemma. It may not be the best writing, but it gets them the money."
In this fashion, the five-paragraph essay has become the law of the land: introductory paragraph; three supporting paragraphs, each with its own topic sentence as well as three supporting ideas; and summary paragraph.
Students lose points for writing a one-sentence paragraph.
Many English teachers have developed a standard five-paragraph form with blanks to fill in.
Topic sentence:__________.
Literary example:_________.
Historical example:_________.
Current event:__________.
Concluding sentence:_________.
The National Council of Teachers of English has warned that standardized state tests mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law, as well as the College Board's new SAT writing sample, are actually hurting the teaching of writing
in this country. For their part, the makers of these tests emphasize that they don't mandate a writing formula, and they, too, say it would be a mistake if schools taught only by the formula.
But Nancy Patterson, the Grand Valley professor who offers the popular course for teachers here, says in the face of those tests, teachers cling to the formula and it spreads like kudzu. "A lot, particularly the younger ones, have been
raised on the five-paragraph formula, and are insecure about their own writing," she said. "They drink up what we do here, but then go back to teach to the test. It shuts them down. It narrows the curriculum."
"If you give kids the formula to write an essay, you're taking away the very thinking that a writer engages in," she said. "Kids are less apt to develop a writer's thinking skills." And it is spreading downward. In preparation for the
fourth-grade state writing test, she said, she sees third-grade teachers pressed to use the five-paragraph formula. A teacher in Dr. Patterson's class described her frustration over a practice essay test in her district asking third
graders to "defend or refute from a patriotic standpoint" whether a friend should go to a Memorial Day parade. "For 9-year-olds?" said Dr. Patterson. "Defend or refute?"
Dr. Patterson has her teachers write in every class - something she did with her students during 29 years in the public schools. They draw maps of their neighborhoods, then write a story of something that happened there. They envision
a character they'd like to create, make a paper doll of it, then pair up with another student and together write a story with the two characters interacting.
"You're teaching them narrative - how to tell stories that are dear to them," she said. She has them read good essays that start a hundred different ways - with a quote; a question; a simple declaration of a problem; a run-on sentence;
a word or two. There are lessons on how a writer blows up an important moment and how to turn a personal piece of writing into a researched essay.
RECENTLY, Kristen Covelle, 24, has been going on interviews for English teaching jobs. She mentions exciting things she's learned from Dr. Patterson. "The interview will be going great," Ms. Covelle said, "and then MEAP will come up.
They want to know will I teach to the test, that's what they're looking for. They asked how I feel about using "I" in writing. Would there ever be a case when "I" is appropriate in an essay. I knew the answer they want - you're not
supposed to use it. But I couldn't say that. I said there could be times, you just can't close the door. They didn't say anything but it was definitely the low point of the interview."
Ms. Karnes isn't totally against the formula. "For kids struggling, if you can give them a formula and they fill in the blanks, some will pass the MEAP test who wouldn't otherwise," she said. "But it turns into a prison. It stops you
from finding a kid's potential."
She loves the last month of school, when state tests are over, she said. Last spring she did lessons on poetry and writing short stories. "I found interests and talents in those kids I didn't know were there," she said. "It would have
been nice to have a whole year to build on those things."
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For Parents Seeking a Choice, Charter Schools Prove More Popular Than Vouchers
By SAM DILLON
Published July 13, 2005
CLEVELAND - When Ohio enacted a pilot program of school vouchers here a decade ago, David Brennan, an Ohio businessman, quickly founded two schools for voucher students.
Three years later, with voucher programs under attack, Mr. Brennan closed the schools and reopened them as charter schools, another educational experiment gaining momentum at the time.
That decision reflected the fortunes of the two parallel school choice movements that once shared the cutting edge of the nation's school reform efforts. Charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately administered, have
proliferated across the nation, with 3,300 such schools now educating nearly one million students in 40 states. In contrast, voucher programs, which use taxpayer funds to pay tuition at private schools, serve only about 36,000 students
in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
"Vouchers are moving slowly," said Paul T. Hill, a professor who studies school choice as director of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education. "The American people don't want a complete free market in
education. They want some government oversight of taxpayer-funded schools."
Last month voucher advocates achieved a rare victory when the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature created 14,000 new publicly financed "scholarships" or vouchers to allow students in failing public schools to attend private schools.
That will make Ohio's voucher program, which began in 1996 with the Cleveland pilot program, the largest in the country. Earlier this spring the Utah Legislature also created a small voucher program that will allow disabled students to
study at private schools at public expense.
But those twin victories were the meager results from the most ambitious legislative campaign yet by voucher advocates. Republicans introduced proposals in more than 30 legislatures for voucher or tuition tax credits, an arrangement
under which parents receive a subsidy for children's private schooling through the tax code rather than as a direct grant. Vouchers were defeated in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Indiana and Missouri.
Still, in the view of voucher proponents, the legislative sessions brought significant advances, and they are celebrating, especially because this is the 50th anniversary of the 1955 essay in which University of Chicago economist
Milton Friedman suggested the use of vouchers.
In an interview, Dr. Friedman, now 93, said he believed that vouchers would eventually become more widespread than charter schools. But he acknowledged disappointment with vouchers' modest growth. "My personal belief is that the rapid
expansion of charter schools will be a short-lived phenomenon, because they are only a halfway solution."Dr. Friedman said.
Many voucher students attend parochial schools like St. Agatha-St. Aloysius, housed in a crumbling brick hulk of a building on Cleveland's East Side. The neighborhood has changed much, from mostly Irish-American to mostly black, but
the school, where Sister Sandra Soho has been a teacher or principal for 35 years, has not. Boys wear white shirts and ties, shelves in the basement library are stocked with trophies won by teams a half-century ago, discipline is
strict and daily homework is a given.
Charter schools here and elsewhere encompass a range of curriculums and styles. The several Hope Academies in Cleveland, managed by Mr. Brennan's company, follow a back-to-basics approach. Some charter schools, like the City Day
Community School in Dayton, are intimate academies. Others are technology-rich, where students take notes in class on computers.
Legislative debates over voucher programs and charter schools have tended to become fierce political brawls. "The entire educational establishment - the unions, the administrators, the school boards - is opposed to vouchers," said Kent
Grusendorf, a Republican Texas state representative who chairs the House Education Committee.
Several Republican lawmakers voted with Democrats to defeat a voucher proposal in Texas last month. "This is one area where management and unions work in perfect unison," Mr. Grusendorf said.
For Parents Seeking a Choice, Charter Schools Prove More Popular Than Vouchers
By Sam Dillion Published July 13, 2005
The nation's first voucher program and its first charter schools began at about the same time. In 1990, Wisconsin enacted the first voucher program, in Milwaukee. A year later, Minnesota voted the nation's first charter school law.
Many legislatures approved charter schools because they seemed less radical and aroused less opposition than vouchers, said Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group.
"Charters are glasnost and vouchers are perestroika," Mr. Bolick said, referring to Mikhail Gorbachev's twin reform policies in the Soviet Union, the former a halfway measure of openness, the latter a more radical restructuring. "The
educational establishment has been willing to allow charters in some states just to forestall vouchers."
As an example, he cited Arizona, where in 1995 lawmakers came within a few votes of enacting a broad voucher program. Instead, the Legislature passed a law that has made it easier to create charter schools there than anywhere else in
the nation. Arizona now has 500 charter schools, but no voucher program. This year, the Legislature enacted a tuition tax credit, but Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, vetoed it.
Voters got a chance to give their opinions on voucher programs in 2000, when proponents succeeded in getting initiatives on the ballot in California and Michigan. That year vouchers programs got much positive publicity when George W.
Bush spoke in favor of them during his presidential campaign. But voters overwhelmingly rejected the two state proposals that November.
Ohio launched its pilot voucher program in Cleveland in 1996, offering taxpayer-financed "scholarships" to about 2,000 students. By this past school year, the program had grown to about 5,600 students attending 44 private schools.
Also over the past decade, more than 200 charter schools have been started in Ohio. Mr. Brennan, the businessman who opened and then closed the two voucher schools in Cleveland, today runs 34 profit-making charter schools across Ohio.
The Cleveland voucher program has become quite popular, especially with black parents like Andrea Holland. Black children make up about half of the city's voucher school students.
Ms. Holland, who runs an electrical contracting business with her husband, enrolled their son Jonathan, 13, at St. Agatha-St. Aloysius parochial school two years ago, transferring him from a public elementary school where he had faced
bullying, she said.
"I'm not otherwise able, like rich folks, to take my kid out and put him into a private school," Ms. Holland said. "But with this program I can afford to."
Kim Metcalf, an education researcher who conducted a nine-year study of the Cleveland voucher program, concluded that average achievement levels of Cleveland's voucher students were in some instances significantly higher, and were
never lower, than those of students in the Cleveland public schools. In contrast, achievement levels at most of Cleveland's charter schools were somewhat lower than in Cleveland's traditional public schools with similar student
populations, according to a 2003 study by Ohio's Legislative Office of Education Oversight, a nonpartisan agency.
Because voucher programs divert tax dollars from public to private schools that are not subject to the same government accountability measures - standardized tests, for example - both national teachers' unions, the American Federation
of Teachers and the National Education Association, oppose them. Officially, at least, the unions support charter schools, as long as they are governed by nonprofit groups, are held accountable for student achievement and meet other
criteria. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers is working to start its own charter schools.
In states like Ohio that permit private companies to govern whole chains of charter schools, the unions have fought them bitterly.
"Charters and vouchers are equal on our agenda," said Tom Mooney, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "We consider charters more insidious right now, because they've grown larger, but vouchers could grow, too."
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FOCUS ON TWO UPDATED IDEA 2004 REGULATIONS
Participation in State and District Assessments
The No Child Left Behind Act requires that schools teach all children, including children with disabilities, to proficiency in reading, math and science by 2014. All students in grades 3 through 8 will participate in the annual
proficiency testing of reading and math. Annual science assessments are required by 2007.
In IDEA 2004, the language about who will participate in assessments was changed to
“All children with disabilities are included in all general State and districtwide assessment programs . . . with appropriate accommodations and alternate assessments, where necessary and as indicated in their respective individualized
education programs.” (Section 1412(c)(16)(A))
For the child with a disability who has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), the IEP shall include:
"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 . . . [and]
if the IEP Team determines that the child shall take an alternate assessment on a particular State or districtwide assessment of student achievement, a statement of why . . . the child cannot participate in the regular assessment;
[and] . . . [why] the particular alternate assessment selected is appropriate for the child . . ." (Section 1414(d)(1)(A)(i)(VI))
IDEA 2004 includes new requirements for accommodation guidelines and alternate assessments. (Section 1412(a)(16))
Children Who Attend Private Schools
The law includes new requirements about equitable participation of children who attend private schools and consultation between public and private school officials. The consultation process includes written affirmation, compliance, and
complaints by private schools to the state.
Children who attend private schools are entitled to equitable services. Special education and related services may be provided on the premises of private religious schools. (Section 1412(a)(10))
Under “Child Find,” it appears that school districts are responsible for locating and identifying children with disabilities who attend private schools in the district, even if the child’s parents do not live in the district. However,
current caselaw may lead to rulings that do not require school districts to accept responsibility for special education services to out-of-district children who attend private schools in the district. The child’s parents and original
school district may be responsible.
Tuition Reimbursement for Private Placements
The law about reimbursement for parental placements in private schools is unchanged.
If the parent removes the child from a public school program and places the child into a private program, the parent may be reimbursed for the costs of the private program if a hearing officer or court determines that the public school
did not offer a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) “in a timely manner.” (Section 1412(a)(10)(C))
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Goodbye, Class. See You in the Fall.
By ALAN FINDER
Published: July 11, 2005
ARDSLEY, N.Y. - Even though it was his last day of kindergarten, Zachary Gold, a bright, enthusiastic 6-year-old, said he wasn't scared about moving up to the rigors of first grade. Unlike most kindergartners at the Concord Road
Elementary School in this Westchester County village, he already knew who his first-grade teacher would be.
In September, Zachary will come right back to room P8, his 18 classmates from kindergarten and his teacher, Leslie Cohen.
"I feel, like, not scared, because it's going to be the same," Zachary said. "Well, different work, but the same teacher. She's a nice teacher. I love Ms. Cohen."
Having a teacher stay with a class for more than a year - or looping, as it is known - is on the rise, according to many experts. As educational innovations go, it is remarkably simple. So are its benefits, proponents say. Teachers get
to know their students, and the students' parents, extremely well. They know each child's strengths and weaknesses, and the children know the teachers' expectations and methods. This familiarity can save a lot of time at the beginning
of the school year.
There is little hard data on the frequency or effectiveness of looping, but classes in hundreds, if not thousands of schools across the United States have adopted it.
"As schools try to improve their standardized test scores, this appears to be catching on," Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said.
It is most common in elementary schools, though some middle schools do it, too. Schools in Colorado Springs have tried looping, as have those in Attleboro, Mass., and Antioch, Ill. In New York City, hundreds of classes stay together
for more than a year, most of them in the lower grades.
"In New York, it's a lot more prevalent than we think," said Carmen Fariña, the city's deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. "It's becoming more popular."
The decision on whether a teacher will loop with a class is left to principals, teachers and parents, said Ms. Fariña, who herself stayed with a class through third and fourth grades four times in her teaching career. "In the city,
there are hundreds of classes doing it," she said. "In a lot of schools there are four or five classes looping."
The big payoff from looping appears to be in the fall, when teachers typically take time to assess each child, trying to figure out their skill levels and how each student learns. But when Ms. Cohen and her class return in September,
she said, "we can basically pick up where we left off."
"I've always felt the first six to eight weeks of the school year are extremely chaotic for kids," Ms. Cohen said, "and not a whole lot of learning takes place."
Spending two years together as a class also reassures young children, she said. "Both at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety in kids," she said. "And I think the anxiety makes
it more difficult for them to learn."
The potential disadvantages of looping are also clear-cut. If parents think a teacher is inadequate, they would surely oppose having their child spend an additional year in his or her class.
Advocates of looping say options need to be built into any program, so that parents and teachers can decide to place a child in a different class if remaining with a teacher would be detrimental.
Research into looping suggests that it can pay substantial dividends. The school district in East Cleveland, Ohio, experimented with looping from 1993 to 1997. A class in each of four elementary schools stayed with their teachers for
three years, generally from kindergarten through second grade. The teachers worked extensively with parents to reinforce lessons in school, and the classes also met for five weeks each summer.
After three years, students in the looped classes scored an average of 25 percentage points higher on standardized tests in reading, language arts and math than other students in the school district, said Frederick M. Hampton, an
associate professor of education at Cleveland State University who oversaw the research project.
"Everything about the children's lives is pretty much in constant motion," said Professor Hampton, who described East Cleveland as poor and predominantly African-American.
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Requests Win More Leeway Under NCLB Ed. Dept. Gives 16 States Approval on Changes
By Lynn Olson
Federal officials by late last week had sent decision letters to 16 states approving at least some of their requested changes to accountability plans under the No Child Left Behind Act, which should make it easier for schools and
districts to show progress. Another 31 states are awaiting such letters, although many have received oral approvals or denials.
The slew of requests—including proposals that federal officials have rejected in the past—was spurred, in part, by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ April 7 pledge to take a more “common sense” approach to carrying out
the law.
The large number of proposed revisions has left the Department of Education scrambling to provide a response in time for states to identify before the start of the new school year the schools and districts in need of improvement. The
logjam has displeased some state officials who were already upset about implementation of the 3½-year-old federal law.
“The U.S. Department of Education has taken more than five months to act on requested amendments to Virginia’s accountability plan that, for the most part, have already been granted to other states,” Thomas M. Jackson Jr., the
president of the Virginia board of education, complained in a statement last month. “This continued disrespect toward a state that has faithfully implemented the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is bewildering.”
“From where we sit, the process is slow,” said Patricia I. Wright, the deputy superintendent of education in Virginia, which submitted its initial request in January. “But the issues are complicated, so to give credit to the U.S.
Department of Education, they have taken quite a bit of time to consider each state’s individual request.”
The failure to make states’ proposed changes public also has bothered advocacy organizations, which are concerned that states are trying to water down their accountability plans without public scrutiny.
“If this process is going to be perceived as having any real credibility, then it needs to be conducted more in the open,” said Dianne M. Piché, the executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington-based
watchdog group. She noted that states’ proposed amendments to their accountability plans are not posted on the federal Department of Education’s Web site until after the department has acted, and that the decision letters often are not
posted right away. The department does not post rejected proposals.
“Decisions are being made below the radar screen,” contended Michael A. Resnick, the associate executive director of the National School Boards Association. “It’s very difficult for real people at the local level to get a sense of what
the larger picture is.”
The federal law requires states to test students in reading and mathematics in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Those results are used to help determine whether schools and districts are making adequate progress, so that all
students score proficient on state tests by 2013-14, with a series of cascading interventions for schools and districts that miss their annual targets. Each state must submit an accountability plan for approval by the federal
government that describes in detail how it is carrying out the law’s accountability provisions. States can request changes to their accountability plans at any time.
In January, federal officials notified states that they had until April 1 to submit proposed amendments to their accountability plans that would affect how they calculate progress based on data from the 2004-05 school year. In April,
that deadline was extended to June 1 so that states could take advantage of additional leeway offered by the federal government.
Most notably, Ms. Spellings sent a letter to state schools chiefs May 10 outlining new options for determining the progress of students with disabilities. Forty-two states have asked for that flexibility, including a number of states
that had to revise their original requests.
Tinkering and Tweaking
Many of the changes approved so far reflect flexibility already granted to other states. For example, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Virginia all received permission to increase the minimum number of students who must be in a
subgroup before a school is held accountable for that subgroup’s performance.
That action has raised concern among civil rights organizations, said Ms. Piché, because as the minimum subgroup size rises, many schools will no longer have to demonstrate progress for some populations of students, such as those who
receive special education services.
“With any of these decisions, I think the ultimate test should be how many children are being counted, and how many children are not being counted,” she said.
A number of states also have asked to use a statistical technique known as a “confidence interval” to help determine with greater reliability whether schools have met their achievement targets. States also have received permission to
identify districts for improvement only when all three grade spans—elementary, middle, and high school—do not make adequate progress in the same subject for two years in a row.
Florida and Missouri got the go-ahead to revise their annual achievement targets for schools, replacing a large jump in those targets in 2004-05 with smaller, annual increments. And several states received permission to include in
their high school graduation rates special education students and English-language learners who take more than four years to earn a diploma.
“This seems to be the game that we’re into,” said Mr. Resnick of the NSBA, based in Alexandria, Va. “Limited modifications are being made, perhaps to enable some schools to make adequate yearly progress that hadn’t before. But you run
out of room to do that.”
Pushing the Envelope
Other states are trying to push the Education Department farther, although so far they have not succeeded. Connecticut, Virginia, and Washington want to limit public school choice and tutoring to students in subgroups that did not make
adequate progress, rather than to all students in a school identified for improvement. So far, the department has rejected that request.
Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington state also want to identify a school or district for improvement only if the same subgroup misses its achievement targets in the same subject for two years in a row, another proposal that federal
officials have turned down. And Minnesota and Virginia hope to reverse the order of the remedies, so that students would be offered tutoring before public school choice, a proposal that is pending.
States such as Washington also have repeated earlier requests to exempt students who are new to the United States from taking tests in English for three years or until they have reached a minimum level of English proficiency, whichever
comes first.
Although federal officials have rejected such requests in the past, as Mary Alice Hueschel, a deputy superintendent of education in Washington state acknowledged, “honestly, our approach was to keep our issues up front, knowing that
we’ve been told no more than once.”
But in a June 22 statement, Connecticut Commissioner of Education Betty J. Sternberg complained, “the increased flexibility which the federal agency has promised simply is not happening for Connecticut.”
She noted that the department had agreed to only two minor amendments to her state’s accountability plan. Two others were identified as “acceptable … with modifications,” while the rest were essentially denied.
“An answer to Connecticut’s central request—to use frequent, classroom-based ‘formative’ tests in grades 3, 5, and 7, rather than add statewide standardized accountability tests in those grades—was put on hold,” she said.
Federal officials also rejected a request to test some students with special needs at their instructional levels, not their grade levels. As a result, Ms. Sternberg said, Connecticut will have to devise a separate set of tests for
special education students in grades 3-8, “adding tremendous additional costs to the estimated $8 million shortfall in federal funding for NCLB test development.”
Connecticut’s attorney general has said he plans to sue the federal government over the law.
2 Percent Option
One of the biggest questions is which states will be able to use new flexibility in measuring the progress of special education students.
In May, Secretary Spellings said the department would soon issue a notice of proposed rulemaking that would permit states to draft “modified” achievement standards, and tests based on those standards, to determine whether a limited
group of students with “academic disabilities” was making progress. According to the department, such students make up about 2 percent of the school-age population.
Until the final regulation is in place, states that show they are meeting a set of core conditions can choose an interim option that allows them to adjust the percent of proficient students with disabilities upward. Only states that
intend to write “modified” achievement standards and tests are eligible for the short-term flexibility.
Forty-two states applied for such leeway. So far, 29 have received at least oral approval; six more have been rejected. Those states may resubmit a different proposal for review, according to department officials.
Though many states are hoping to use the 2 percent option for the accountability decisions they make this summer, Ellen Forte-Fast, an education consultant who has analyzed state accountability plans for the Washington-based Council of
Chief State School Officers, asserted that “nobody is going to be helped.”
“This is the appearance of flexibility,” she said. “It’s not flexibility. It doesn’t have any impact.”
After running a simulation model, for instance, West Virginia officials discovered that the so-called 2 percent rule did not help more than one or two schools, said Liza Cordeiro, a spokeswoman for the state education department. In
Delaware, based on preliminary information, only about 16 schools did not make adequate progress solely because of their special education subgroups, and the new flexibility helped only a handful of those schools.
“It did help a couple, so anything that would help a couple is certainly worth it,” said Robin R. Taylor, Delaware’s associate secretary of education for assessment and accountability.
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Education Official Suggests Expansion of Testing
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: July 9, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, suggested on Friday that the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires that public school children be tested in reading and math, could be expanded to include
other subjects.
"I am a strong believer in this, 'what gets measured gets done' kind of notion," Ms. Spellings told members of the American Federation of Teachers at their summer meeting here.
While she was referring to testing for science, which begins in two years, she added, "It helps the system figure out what we need to do, where and when."
She added, "And so, we need to round out the system a little more."
Expanding the federal testing requirements to include subjects beyond reading, math and science, however, would appear to require Congress to amend the law.
Ms. Spellings's comments came in a rare unscripted event for a senior member of the Bush administration. She shared a stage with the union president, Edward J. McElroy, who posed questions based on written queries submitted in advance
by teachers at the meeting.
Describing himself as a union president eager to forge a friendly working relationship with Ms. Spellings and her staff, Mr. McElroy was largely solicitous of his guest, asking her only general questions and not pressing her for too
many details.
His deferential manner came a day after his speech to the union in which he said teachers were expressing "incredible frustration" with the No Child Left Behind law "because of the way it's been implemented." Three-quarters of teachers
responding to a union survey expressed unhappiness with the law, he said.
For the coming school year, states are required to test all children in Grades 3 through 8 and those in the 10th, 11th or 12th in reading and math. By the 2007-8 school year, states must be ready to begin testing children in science.
The possibility that testing might expand arose as Mr. McElroy asked Ms. Spellings to respond to criticism from teachers that an emphasis on math and reading was undermining the quality of education in other subjects, like civics and
languages.
"I've heard that before about the testing issue," she replied, adding, "In many ways we're in the infancy of accountability and education in our country."
Speaking to reporters later, Ms. Spellings said the ability to expand testing depended upon refining the process of how children are measured.
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Vermont hopeful on new education waivers.
By HOWARD WEISS-TISMAN
Reformer Staff Article Published: Wednesday, July 06, 2005
BRATTLEBORO -- The state is looking for a little flexibility in how it complies with the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Last month, Richard Cate, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Education, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, asking that most disabled students in the public schools be exempt from having to take tests in their
grade levels.
Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings softened the requirements for the federal education law, and allowed states to apply for waivers that would increase the number of students who could test out of grade
level.
Prior to Spellings' announcement, only 1 percent of children in special education could take tests out of their grade level. A 10th-grader with a learning disability could take his or her annual test and be counted in the fourth-grade
scores, for example.
In May, Spellings announced that states could apply for th
e new waiver that would allow up to 3 percent of the children to test out of grade level. "This would affect students with severe cognitive disabilities," Cate said. "We don't
want to frustrate students and force them to take tests that are beyond their abilities. We want to give them some chance to do well on the tests."
If the federal office approves Vermont's request, about 1,600 students would be affected.
The U.S. Department of Education is basing its decisions on which states could increase their number of disabled students taking alternate assessments by looking at test participation rates, how states publish their data, and if states
are making progress in raising test scores.
In the past month, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland were given the new flexibility, while requests from Connecticut and California were denied.
"We're in pretty good shape," Cate said. "I expect our request to be granted."
Cate said he expected to hear from the U.S. Department of Education in September.
"This is a good thing," said Deborah Merchant, director of family and instructional services for the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union. "If you have a child who is reading out of grade level, you don't want them taking that test."
At the local level, Merchant said the decision as to whether a child should test out of grade level is made by the child's special education support team. If the team, made up of teachers, school counselors and district officials,
think that the student would benefit by taking alternate tests, they apply to the state.
The ultimate decision is made in Montpelier
At the local level, Merchant said the decision as to whether a child should test out of grade level is made by the child's special education support team. If the team, made up of teachers, school counselors and district officials,
think that the student would benefit by taking alternate tests, they apply to the state.
The ultimate decision is made in Montpelier.
At the May state board of education meeting, Cate said that the department receives about 1,500 requests annually and approves about 20 percent of the requests, according to meeting notes.
He said the new 3 percent limit would likely increase the number of requests but he said the department has a process in place for determining and approving eligibility.
Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to test every student in math and reading in grades 3-8, and in high school.
The scores are reviewed annually, and schools are expected to make adequate yearly progress.
Test scores are also looked at separately for low-income students, racial minorities and special education students. Scores are expected to rise in every category. If even one category does not show yearly improvements, the school is
labeled as not showing annual progress.
The way the law is now written, test scores for a special education student count at that grade level, and often bring down the overall results for the school.
If Vermont receives the federal flexibility, test scores for severely learning disabled students would count in the lower grades at which they perform.
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Federal Spending Increases, but More Schools Will Get Less Money for Low-Income Students
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: July 4, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 3 - A new analysis of federal money that public schools receive for low-income students shows that a record number of the nation's school districts will receive less in the coming academic year than they did for the
one just ended.
For the 2005-2006 school year, spending under the Department of Education's Title I program, which helps low-achieving children in high-poverty areas, is increasing by 3.2 percent, to $12.6 billion.
But because of population shifts, growing numbers of poor children, newer census data and complex formulas that determine how the money is divided, more than two-thirds of the districts, or 8,843, will not receive as much financing as
before.
The analysis, based on data from the department, was made by the Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group for public schools. A similar study by the group last year showed that 55 percent of the schools would receive less money
than they did in the previous year.
"It's an alarming number," said Tom Fagan, a former department official who conducted the analysis. "It's clear that the amount of overall increase is not keeping pace with the number of poor kids."
Susan Aspey, a department spokeswoman, defended the spending levels for Title I, saying, "President Bush and Congress have invested record amounts of funding to help the nation's neediest students."
But Mr. Fagan said the increasing number of districts that are losing money is making it harder for the schools to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's signature education program, which
measures progress through annual tests in math, reading and science. That is giving critics of the program more ammunition to accuse the administration of underfinancing the program while demanding greater results.
Title I provides the largest component of financing for No Child Left Behind. "The federal government is concentrating more money in fewer districts," said John F. Jennings, the president and chief executive of the Center on Education
Policy. "It means there is lots of anger and lots of tension. They're asking us to do more and more with less and less."
The law that created No Child Left Behind requires that money allocated for Title I above a 2001 baseline of $8.76 billion come from two grants that contain specific qualification requirements. One requirement is that a school district
is eligible for an increase only if more than 5 percent of its children are from low-income families. Comparisons are based on 2002 census figures, which are the latest available.
The report states that "districts close to this minimum often move in and out of eligibility for these grants, losing and gaining relative large sums from one year to the next." Many of the nation's largest metropolitan areas have no
trouble in exceeding the standard, and as a result are getting significant increases for the coming year. Los Angeles leads the list, with an increase of $53.4 million, followed by Philadelphia ($29.3 million), Chicago ($20.5 million)
and New York City ($18.1 million).
The increases are attributable in part to another characteristic of the grants: they use weighted formulas to determine allocations so that per-student spending is higher in high-poverty districts than it is in lower-poverty districts.
But Title I money for school districts in many smaller communities is more vulnerable to short-term shifts in population, including an influx of immigrants, middle-income families seeking more affordable housing and high-income
families weary of big-city living.
That helps to explain why the Conejo Valley Unified School District, which includes bedroom communities about an hour's drive west of Los Angeles, will lose 37.6 percent of its Title I money from a year ago, the largest percentage drop
of any school district in the country, according to the study.
Conejo Valley's decrease, $475,000, reflects an unintended consequence of spending formulas. The number of Title I students for the coming year will increase, to 3,050 from 3,000 last fall, Superintendent Robert Fraisse said. But
because of an overall population increase in the area, the percentage of Title I students in district schools will fall to a projected 4.83 percent.
"We were shocked," Mr. Fraisse said. "Even though we will have more individual students eligible, the area has become less poverty-intense, so it doesn't matter the number of kids we have."
As a result, the district is eliminating some of the programs intended to help achieve the goals of No Child Left Behind, including remedial reading classes, summer school, the purchase of new software and family resource counselors,
who serve in outreach programs to parents of children who do not speak English.
"We have a lot of enthusiasm toward educational reforms," Mr. Fraisse said. "But this has taken the wind out of our sails. Principals are worried. Teachers are worried. I am worried."
A similar fate awaits children in the San Diego school district, which led the list of districts that are losing Title I support in actual dollars, $4.1 million. Scott Patterson, the chief financial officer, said the district is losing
up to 1.5 percent of its students a year because of population shifts.
Mr. Patterson said the district was likely to cut back many of the same programs that Conejo Valley is dropping, as well as an after-school program to help children in reading and math.
All Title I money is paid to the states, based on their number of poor children as measured against the national average, 6.04 percent for the coming year. The states distribute the money to their individual school districts. The
analysis found that 41 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, would receive increases, led by Texas ($65.6 million), Pennsylvania ($45.1 million) and Florida ($33.1 million).
Leading the nine states that are losing money are New York ($15.2 million), Ohio ($13.3 million) and Oregon ($7.1 million). New York and Oregon are gaining poor children, but their totals are less than the national average. Ohio has
fewer poor children than it did a year ago.
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Report of Ritalin Risks Prompts a Federal Study
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: July 1, 2005
ROCKVILLE, Md., June 30 - Federal health officials said Thursday that they were looking into a suggestion by a small Texas study that Ritalin and other stimulant drugs given to children might increase their risk of cancer later in
life.
A team of experts from the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency went to Texas on May 23 to examine the methods used by the researchers, who found damage to the
chromosomes of 12 children who took Ritalin for three months.
Ritalin, which entered the market in 1955, has been used for decades to treat children for attention or hyperactivity problems.
Dr. David Jacobson-Kram of the Office of New Drugs at the food and drug agency said that the study, by researchers at the University of Texas and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, had flaws in its methodology but that its results could
not be dismissed. Drugs that are known to cause cancer cause similar chromosomal changes, Dr. Jacobson-Kram said.
But other scientists cautioned that the study was far too small and its finding far too preliminary to cause alarm. The study did not include a comparison group of children who had not taken Ritalin. And federal officials said there
was no reason for children currently taking Ritalin or other stimulants to stop taking them.
Dr. Lawrence Greenhill of Columbia University, an expert on Ritalin and other stimulant drugs used for children, questioned why the government was devoting so many resources to following up on the study's findings. Dr. Greenhill, like
many other academic researchers, serves as a consultant for companies that make the drugs.
Several research teams are trying to reproduce the study on a larger scale, using better controls. And federal officials are examining millions of health records to determine if children who took Ritalin decades ago now have higher
rates of cancer. The drug agency has also asked the makers of Ritalin-like stimulants to provide it with any information about their drugs' effects on chromosomes.
"I would say that if these data are reproducible, then that would be very concerning," Dr. Jacobson-Kram said.
He added that it would be at least a year before the results of those studies were known.
It is unclear, Dr. Jacobson-Kram said, how Ritalin might damage chromosomes.
"There's no obvious mechanism by which these drugs should be doing this," he said. "And there is nothing about them by which they clue us that they are DNA damaging."
About 29 million prescriptions were written last year in the United States for Ritalin and similar drugs to treat attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, 23 million of them for children. The drugs are among the most widely
prescribed medicines in the world.
Controversy has long surrounded their use, however, with critics saying that the medications are greatly overprescribed.
Dr. Jacobson-Kram made his presentation before an F.D.A. advisory committee called to examine the most recent reports of adverse events among children taking Concerta, a long-acting form of Ritalin. The committee found nothing new or
unusual about the reports, which included cases of children who had become psychotic and others who had developed heart problems.
The drug agency said no committee members had conflicts of interest that would prevent them from evaluating the drug's safety in an independent manner.
F.D.A. officials told the committee that the agency planned to change Concerta's label to make the risks of such side effects clearer. Among the mental side effects reported among children taking Concerta were hallucinations, thoughts
of suicide, psychotic behaviors and aggression.
"It's not that this is something new or that this is something that's happening at a higher incidence than before," Dr. Paul Andreason, a psychiatrist who is part of the agency's division of neuropharmacologic drug products, told the
committee.
But, Dr. Andreason said, descriptions of these problems in the labels of Concerta, Ritalin and similar stimulants are often written in technical language. So the F.D.A. has decided that descriptions of the drugs' potential side effects
must be stated more clearly, he said.
Still, agency officials and several committee members said they were not convinced that Concerta caused mental problems like hallucinations and psychosis. Rather, the children taking the drug may also suffer from other mental
disorders.
"The agency believes that it is not yet possible to determine whether these events, especially the more serious ones, are causally associated with these treatments," said Dr. Dianne Murphy, director of the Office of Pediatric
Therapeutics at the drug agency.
The most common side effects of Ritalin, Concerta and similar drugs are appetite suppression, headaches, abdominal pain and sleep disturbances. Children who take these drugs chronically often weigh less and are shorter in stature as a
result.
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Articles for June 2005
Taught at Home, but Seeking to Join Activities at Public Schools
By JAMES DAO
Published: June 22, 2005
STRASBURG, Pa., June 16 - Mary Mellinger began home-schooling her eldest sons, Andrew and Abram, on the family's 80-acre dairy farm five years ago, wanting them to spend more time with their father and receive an education infused with
Christian principles. Home schooling could not, however, provide one thing the boys desperately wanted - athletic competition.
But the school district here, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia, does not allow home-schooled children to play on its teams. So Mrs. Mellinger reluctantly gave in and allowed the boys to enroll in public high school, where Andrew,
17, runs track and Abram, 15, plays football and both perform with the marching and concert bands.
"We grieved about losing the time we had with the boys," Mrs. Mellinger, 41, said outside the 150-year-old red brick house where Mellingers have lived for seven generations. "It seems so unfair. We're taxpayers, too."
Mrs. Mellinger's plaint has become the rallying cry for an increasing number of parents across the country who are pushing more public schools to open their sports teams, clubs, music groups and other extracurricular organizations to
the nation's more than 1 million home-educated students.
This year, bills were introduced in at least 14 state legislatures, including Pennsylvania's, to require school districts to open extracurricular activities, and sometimes classes, to home-schooled children, say groups that track the
issue. Fourteen states already require such access, while most others leave the decision to local school boards.
But many districts strongly resist the idea, citing inadequate resources, liability issues, questions about whether students would be displaced from teams and clubs, and concerns about whether home-schooled children could be held to
the same academic and attendance standards. In some states, districts also lose state aid when children leave to be home schooled, although that is not the case in Pennsylvania.
The push for access is in many ways a new chapter for the home-schooling movement, which for years viewed public education as a hostile, overly regulated system that should be avoided at all costs.
But as the movement has gained more acceptance and grown in size and diversity, more parents want their children to be involved in school activities like chess, basketball or Advanced Placement courses, say home-schooling advocates and
educators. Even people who do not want the services argue that other families should not be denied them, seeing access as a civil rights issue for people who pay school taxes.
"We found enough activities within the home-school community to satisfy our needs," said Maryalice Newborn, who runs a support network for home-school families outside Pittsburgh. "But if somebody else wants to participate, shouldn't
they have that right?"
Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a nonprofit group based in Virginia, said polls showed that a majority of home-school parents remained wary of letting their children participate in
public school activities. But as earlier battles over the right to home schooling fade from memory, that attitude is likely to change, he said.
"The further we get from those early days, when there was real persecution, the more people will forget," Mr. Klicka said. "And they will want equal access more."
In Oregon, Colorado and other states that distribute aid based on enrollment, some districts have begun encouraging home-schooled students to take courses, typically in advanced subjects like calculus or foreign languages, said Mike
Griffith, a policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit group.
But most states do not provide per-pupil aid for extracurricular activities, so there is less incentive to allow home-schooled students to participate, Mr. Griffith said.
In Pennsylvania, where the number of home-schooled students has risen steadily in recent years to more than 24,400 children, more districts each year are allowing those students to participate in extracurricular activities, and
sometimes classes.
But nearly half of the state's 501 school districts prohibit such access, including many here in rural Lancaster County, a conservative area with one of the largest populations of home-schooled students in the state. Stephany Baughman
of Strasburg led the fight to change that policy in one of the districts last year.
Mrs. Baughman has always home-schooled her four children, calling it a way "to speak into their lives." But two years ago, her eldest child, Derek, wanted to join the high school soccer team. The Lampeter-Strasburg district said no. So
she petitioned the school board last year to change its policy, turning the drive into a civics lesson for her children.
The board refused to change its policy. So she sent Derek, 15, to a private Christian academy, where he has played on the varsity soccer and basketball teams. Mrs. Baughman hopes the state legislation requiring access will pass so that
her 12-year-old son, Brandon, can join the high school lacrosse team while continuing to be educated at home.
"Some families don't want to mix in," said Mrs. Baughman, who gave up a career as a commercial photographer to teach her children. "We're not like that."
Brian Barnhart, assistant superintendent of the 3,250-student Lampeter-Strasburg School District, said the school board remained unconvinced that home-schooled children could be held to the same standards as public school students.
Mr. Barnhart said many parents also worried that home-schooled students would take coveted positions from public school students. "We see extracurricular activities as a reward for students who are complying and who are working through
school," he said.
Tim Allwein, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said many boards believed that allowing home-schooled students into sports and clubs would be an administrative nightmare that raised questions
about costs, transportation and liability. For that reason, the association opposes the state bill, saying the decision should be left to the individual districts.
"The single main ingredient to making this work is to have a school board that is open to the idea," Mr. Allwein said. "Not all of them have been."
Such arguments infuriate home-schooling advocates, who say hundreds of districts in many states have resolved those issues.
"It's institutional prejudice," said Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican whose wife is home-schooling the couple's four school-age children. "It's offensive."
The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state teachers' union, has joined the school board association in opposing the legislation, which was sponsored by State Senator Bob Regola, a Republican from near Pittsburgh, and would
require districts to allow home-schooled students to participate in extracurricular activities.
Nevertheless, the bill was approved by the Senate Education Committee, and opponents and supporters give it a strong chance of clearing both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature this fall. It is not clear, however, whether
Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, would sign it.
"He will review the bill when it reaches his desk, but he believes that this is a local decision," said Kate Philips, the governor's spokeswoman.
Both Abram and Andrew Mellinger said that if the bill became law, they would probably return home for their education but continue playing sports and music at the high school.
"I'd love to have them back," said Mrs. Mellinger, who is also home-schooling three of her four other children. "But I can't provide all the opportunities they need. We can practice music. But we can't put together an orchestra."
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U.S. Audit Faults Speech Therapy in City Schools
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: June 23, 2005
The New York City schools misspent $870 million in Medicaid payments by channeling tens of thousands of poor special-education students into speech therapy performed by unqualified practitioners, often without proper referrals,
according to a scathing federal audit released yesterday.
The school system's record-keeping was so chaotic and the speech services so badly documented that school officials often could not prove that students needed the speech therapy, or ever received it at all, said the audit, which
covered the period between 1993 and 2001.
The city schools, chronically in need of money, are portrayed in the audit as having vigorously tapped into an antipoverty program, while doing a haphazard job at best of adhering to federal regulations.
Medicaid typically pays for health care for the poor, but since the late 1980's, it has also paid school systems nationwide for speech, hearing and other health-care services for poor children. Schools in New York State, especially the
city's, have taken advantage of the program far more than those in other states, according to federal statistics.
The audit represents a new stain for the city's special education system, which has long been troubled and has been roiled in the last two years by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to overhaul the schools.
In fact, even as the audit identified improper spending, many parents have often complained that there have been lengthy delays in obtaining special education services. In this case, because of what the auditors contended was a routine
lack of proper documentation for speech services, it is impossible to say whether the therapy, if it was received at all, took the place of other special-education needs.
The auditors did say that while the violations might seem technical, they "could have a direct impact on the quality of services rendered." They also said school officials disregarded the state's advice that speech referrals should
come from a physician or a licensed practitioner.
State and city officials vehemently disputed the audit, which took three years to complete and was issued by the inspector general in the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The officials insisted that the findings be
withdrawn.
Washington and the states share the cost of Medicaid. The auditors recommended that New York State be forced to return $435 million to the federal government, which is the federal portion of the questionable payments. The city school
system itself is not being held financially liable, but if the state has to return the money, it could in turn punish the district.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, would not discuss whether it plans to penalize the state.
If it does, the amounts at stake are so high that the issue is likely to be catapulted into Congress. Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat, has in recent years lobbied the Bush administration to rein in federal regulators
and investigators over the issue of Medicaid speech services.
The findings in the audit were among the most critical appraisals of a state Medicaid program anywhere in the nation in recent years. The auditors estimated that 86 percent of 2.5 million Medicaid claims for speech services by the New
York City schools from 1993 to 2001, totaling $870 million, violated federal regulations. The services were for 110,000 students.
After scrutinizing a sample of 100 claims, the auditors found that in 42 cases, they were unable to verify that the services had been provided, based on documentation offered by the school system. Most of the 100 claims either lacked
correct referrals from a medical professional, or were not provided by or overseen by a properly certified speech therapist.
The audit represents an escalation of federal scrutiny into New York's overall Medicaid program, which at $45 billion is far larger than that of any other state. A 2004 audit by the inspector general found similar deficiencies in $340
million in Medicaid spending on speech services in schools in New York outside New York City.
The New York State Health Department, which oversees Medicaid, accused the inspector general of essentially picking on the state, saying that it had applied far stricter standards in this audit than it had in audits of speech services
in other states.
The department said the federal government had over the years issued conflicting and confusing rules for Medicaid speech services, and as a result, it was unfair for the state to be penalized for not following them. It also said the
auditors were applying rules intended for a medical setting to an educational one.
"There is no question that the New York City Department of Education billed for services it felt were provided to poor children with disabilities," Kathryn Kuhmerker, a deputy state health commissioner, wrote in response to the audit.
Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education, noted in a statement that Mayor Bloomberg took office and gained control of the school system after the period covered by the audit. She questioned why the
inspector general waited until 2002 to begin looking at claims going as far back as 1993.
"We disagree with this audit and will work with the state to have the recommendations reversed or changed," she said.
Jill Chaifetz, executive director of Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group that monitors special-education programs in the schools, said she was not surprised by the audit. "There has been a longstanding problem of lack of
accountability in the system," she said.
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Students With and At Risk for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: Meeting Their Social and Academic Needs
Abstract
Lane, Kathryn Lynne; Wehby, Joseph; Barton-Arwood, Sally M.
Preventing School Failure v. 49 no. 2 (Winter 2005) p. 6-9
Given the negative outcomes experienced by students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), it is imperative that these students receive empirically validated interventions to meet their educational needs. This issue is
dedicated to providing educators with both the research base and the practical tools for meeting these challenges. Specifically, this issue will offer feasible, effective procedures for conducting social skills interventions that
address some of the core limitations in the social skills literature. Furthermore, this issue will address the academic needs of students with EBD by (a) documenting teachers' self-reported professional needs development and use of
instructional modifications and (b) providing guidelines for supporting secondary students with EBD as they meet the call for high-stakes testing and transition from school to life.
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Why Children with ADHD Do Not Have Low IQs
Abstract
Journal of Learning Disabilities v. 38 no. 3 (May/June 2005) p. 262-80
The major cognitive deficit of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is impaired executive function (EF), a cognitive component that some theorists believe to be the primary substrate for the general
intelligence (g) factor. We review the constructs of g and EF and the relevant research findings on ADHD. We then analyze the results of a battery of diverse tests, including measures of EF, administered to 123 boys with ADHD. The
correlations among the EF measures, two well-accepted measures of IQ, and the g factor extracted from the entire battery are trivial at best. These results are discussed in the context of collateral evidence supporting the independence
of g and EF and its clinical and theoretical implications.
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Florida Supreme Court Takes Up Vouchers
By JOE FOLLICK
Published: June 8, 2005
New York Times Regional Newspapers
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., June 7 - Six years after Florida lawmakers approved the nation's first statewide voucher program, the legality of the plan was debated on Tuesday before the state's Supreme Court.
Two lower state courts have ruled that the voucher plan known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program violates a section of the State Constitution barring the use of public money "directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or
religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."
But on Tuesday the justices focused almost exclusively on another section of the State Constitution requiring that the state pay for only "the support and maintenance of free public schools."
In 2000, a state appeals court ruled that the state's voucher system did not violate that portion of the Constitution.
"Where I am having difficulty," said Justice Charles T. Wells, is that "this is money that is coming dollar for dollar out of the money that would otherwise be for the uniform system of public schools."
Barry Richard, a lawyer hired by the state to defend the vouchers, said the Constitution allowed the Legislature to spend money for vouchers if it maintained a quality public education system.
Some justices raised the specter of a new voucher school system that would be separate from the traditional public school system.
"That is the problem here," Justice Peggy A. Quince said. "Where does the Legislature get the authority to have other forms of education?"
John M. West was the only lawyer to speak on behalf of the antivoucher group, which includes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Education Association, the
state's largest teachers union.
He turned the discussion back to the topic of religion after Justice Raoul G. Cantero suggested that a voucher system was simply a "fee for services" arrangement.
"What the state is paying for," Mr. West said, "is religious indoctrination of young children."
More than 700 children receive vouchers through the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Almost all of them are African-American or Hispanic students who attended public schools that failed the state's grading system twice in a four-year
period. Nearly 60 percent of the students use the vouchers to attend religion-based schools.
The state has other, much larger voucher programs that are not the subject of the lawsuit debated Tuesday. The McKay Scholarship provides tuition for more than 14,000 children with special needs or disabilities to choose a school with
specific programs.
The Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program gives tax breaks to businesses that donate money to private scholarship groups. Currently, about 10,000 children are involved in the program.
Voucher proponents have raised concerns that an adverse ruling could eliminate those programs, as well as a prekindergarten program that is to start in August. That plan gives $2,500 in state money to mostly religion-based schools for
each 4-year-old attending.
Tuesday's hearing will be the only public debate among justices. Generally, the Florida Supreme Court issues a formal ruling within a few months after oral arguments.
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Study on Special Education Finds Low Graduation Rate
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: June 3, 2005
Most students who are enrolled in special education classes in New York City are failing to earn regular high school diplomas, according to a study released yesterday by a nonprofit group that monitors the school system. About 111,000
students who received special education services left the system from 1996 to 2004, and of those students, 13,672 - or 12.3 percent - graduated with Regents or local diplomas, according to Advocates for Children, the nonprofit group
that issued the report, "Leaving Empty-Handed." In addition, 12 percent received an alternative certificate, an Individualized Education Program diploma.
"The graduation rates are grim and mean that most of the city's students receiving special education services are leaving school with no options for college, employment or independence," said Jill Chaifetz, the executive director of
the group.
Ms. Chaifetz and Elisa Hyman, the group's deputy director, said the findings underscored what they saw every day: longstanding failures to serve vulnerable children.
"This is a huge number of kids," Ms. Chaifetz said. "They can have a future. But what we are providing is the opportunity to fail."
The report also found that the city's special education graduation rate "lags dismally" behind that of other parts of the state and across the nation. In the 2002-3 school year, for instance, the percentage of special education
students receiving regular diplomas was 12.8 percent in New York City, 26 percent in New York State and 31 percent nationally.
The Department of Education vigorously disagreed with the group's conclusions, contending that its efforts to overhaul the special education system were beginning to produce measurable results.
For example, it cited test scores released on Wednesday for the third, fifth, sixth and seventh grades showing that the number of special education students scoring at Level 1, or "not proficient," dropped in mathematics from 61.4
percent last year to 53.1 this year. In English, this year 43.2 percent of students were not proficient, compared with 58.1 percent last year.
"No one has more aggressively tackled the long-neglected area of special education services for our children," a spokeswoman for Chancellor Joel I. Klein, Michele McManus Higgins, said in a statement. "And yesterday's news about the
remarkable gains in achievement by our special education students, in both math and English, strongly suggests that we are on our way to improved graduation rates for these students."
In fact, the study notes, the percentage of special education students graduating with Regents or local diplomas has increased over the last four years, to 15.96 percent from a low of 9.14 percent in 2000.
In addition, Ms. Higgins said, this year the department selected dozens of troubled schools to receive grants for improving their special education services. She also said that 58 high schools will begin accepting groups of special
education students for the first time in September, and that they have received grants to develop services for these students and have arranged summertime professional development for staff members.
Special education students' disabilities vary from depression, anxiety and mild impediments in speech and hearing to more severe learning disabilities and retardation.
Last June, the state set a goal of having 80 percent of special education students graduating with a local, Regents or high school equivalency diploma by 2010.
Slightly more than 12 percent of special education students who left school in the last eight years received an alternative certificate, an Individualized Education Program diploma. But that diploma is not equal to a Regents or a local
diploma, and is not accepted in many cases by colleges, the armed forces or vocational training programs.
The report also found significant disproportions in graduation rates by race and sex. White and Asian special education students were, on average, twice as likely to graduate as black and Hispanic students. And girls were more likely
than boys to finish school.
"In a broader context, 12 percent is certainly shockingly low," said Christopher Swanson, a senior researcher for the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy research organization based in Washington. Mr. Swanson has researched
special education graduation rates nationally.
"It's important not to jump to conclusions that just because a student has an I.E.P. that they are unable to take a normal course of study with modifications or to graduate," said Mr. Swanson, referring to the specialized curriculum
for such students. "Just because these are special education students, we shouldn't write them off as not being able to graduate."
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Articles for May 2005
Teaching Students With Learning Disabilities: Constructivism Or Behaviorism?
Marcee M. Steele
University of North Carolina Wilmington
Abstract
There is much controversy concerning the use of constructivist and behaviorist principles for teaching children with learning disabilities. Although many educators support the use of one paradigm exclusively, the author recommends
combining ideas from both perspectives for the most effective instruction. This article includes a brief discussion of learning disabilities, a summary of key constructivist and behaviorist principles and their impact on students with
learning disabilities, and a list of recommendations for practice in the classroom.
Read this article here:Teaching Students With Learning Disabilities: Constructivism Or Behaviorism?
How to use the Parental Attitudes to Inclusion scale as a teacher tool to improve parent-teacher communication.
Fiona Bryer, Peter Grimbeek, Wendi Beamish and Anthony Stanley
Griffith University
This study considers one way to make more productive use of information in a recognised survey instrument, the Parental Attitudes to Inclusion (PATI) scale and, thus, to enhance inclusive classroom practice for students with special
needs. The instrument, designed to elicit views about inclusion, was initially administered to a large sample of Californian parents of inclusion-eligible children with severe cognitive disabilities. The present study gathered
responses from a convenience sample of 10 Queensland parents of children diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder and enrolled in regular Queensland classrooms. This study demonstrates that it is possible to identify specific parental
attitudes that differ significantly from those of the group, and that this information can be used to target points for discussion between teacher and parent. This methodology raises general issues about the context in which an
attitude is expressed. For example, attitudes may refer to the inclusion of a specific child (parent view) or a group of children (teacher view). This study raises the issue of the moral weight of a group-based view of inclusion. This
study also discusses the need to take into account the effect of context on the formulation of views about inclusion, and proposes refinements to the PATI scale that would allow it to be used to identify the locus of such contextual
differences.
Read this article here:How to use the Parental Attitudes to Inclusion scale as a teacher tool to improve parent-teacher communication.
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Building Intelligent Learning Management Systems to mimic the Teacher Student relationship
Nathan Ashlock
Alion Science and Technology
Wanda Majors
U.S. Army Armor Center, Ft. Knox
David Nilsen
Alion Science and Technology
George Paschetto
Alion Science and Technology
The University of Texas
Abstract
This paper investigates strategies for building intelligent learning management systems, which can mimic the teacher student relationship and proposes extensions to the SCORM version 1.3.1 to enable these strategies. The analysis is
partly based on a number of research papers published on the analysis of learning in a classroom environment against individual tutoring. The proposed extensions would enable support for Learning Management Systems (LMS) initiating
conversation with the learner. This proposal involves the addition of a number of data elements to the SCORM data model. Introduction The Department of Defence(DoD) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
launched the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative in November 1997 [1]. The mission of the ADL is to provide access to the highest quality education and training, tailored to individual needs, delivered cost effectively
anytime anywhere. Since then, the ADL have developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) to build very descriptive learning objects. The major vendors of Learning Management Systems (LMS), all support SCORM learning
objects, which implies that SCORM compliant content is fully deliverable without modification on many LMS’s. The SCORM model is broken up into three different sections: Content Aggregation Model (CAM) [3], Sequencing and Navigation
(SN) model [2] and the SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) [4].
Extending the Manifest
A number of studies were carried out on teaching environments and the effects on the participating students [5] and have shown in that in a typical classroom environment on average every student asks about 0.1 questions every hour. The
speed with which different students can progress through instruction varies by factors of three to seven [6]. With individual tutoring, students may ask or answer on average 120 questions per hour [6]. The achievement of individually
tutored students may exceed that of classroom students by as much as two standard deviations – an improvement which is equivalent to raising the performance of 50th percentile students to that of 98th percentile students [7].
Clearly, individual tutoring is the way forward for education, however, it would not be feasible to have the same number of teachers as students. Building learning objects is the first step in accomplishing automated one-to-one
tutoring environment. An analogy can be drawn from the state of the art as a visually and hearing impaired teacher (LMS) with limited ability to turn a page, watch the time and remember data. To change our teacher into an intelligent
successful teacher the current version of SCORM and the current API available has to be changed. With the current state of SCORM, there is no interaction initiated by the LMS, which takes advantage of the vast metadata that is
available from the learning object. Extending the manifest to include a personal element with various attributes, such as, name, age, address, ability, learning preference and associated metadata would enable the LMS to initiate
conversation with the client on a ‘personal’ level.
Read this article here: Building Intelligent Learning Management Systems to mimic the Teacher Student relationship
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The Stroop Test and its Relationship to Academic Performance and General Behaviour of Young Students
ANTHONY IMBROSCIANO & RICHARD G. BERLACH
University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, Australia
The test developed by Stroop some 70 years ago is used, among other purposes, as an indicator of attention disorder and general mood fluctuations. The present research attempted to determine whether a correlation existed between the
Stroop Test, student ability as defined by a standardised IQ test, and general classroom behaviour. This study involved 87 year three students, across four schools in Perth, Western Australia. Independent variables included
socio-economic level, gender, and school type (government or private). Results indicated a strong positive correlation of IQ and Stroop Test Ranking with socio-economic status. No significant differences were found between IQ and
Stroop by type of school, nor were any significant differences found with regard to gender. Results suggest that the Stroop Test may be a powerful predictive instrument with regard to students’ academic performance and general
behaviour rankings.
Read this article in Teacher Development
ISSN 1366-4530
Volume 9 Number 1 2005
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The College Dropout Boom
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 24, 2005
CHILHOWIE, Va. - One of the biggest decisions Andy Blevins has ever made, and one of the few he now regrets, never seemed like much of a decision at all. It just felt like the natural thing to do.
In the summer of 1995, he was moving boxes of soup cans, paper towels and dog food across the floor of a supermarket warehouse, one of the biggest buildings here in southwest Virginia. The heat was brutal. The job had sounded
impossible when he arrived fresh off his first year of college, looking to make some summer money, still a skinny teenager with sandy blond hair and a narrow, freckled face.
But hard work done well was something he understood, even if he was the first college boy in his family. Soon he was making bonuses on top of his $6.75 an hour, more money than either of his parents made. His girlfriend was around, and
so were his hometown buddies. Andy acted more outgoing with them, more relaxed. People in Chilhowie noticed that.
It was just about the perfect summer. So the thought crossed his mind: maybe it did not have to end. Maybe he would take a break from college and keep working. He had been getting C's and D's, and college never felt like home, anyway.
"I enjoyed working hard, getting the job done, getting a paycheck," Mr. Blevins recalled. "I just knew I didn't want to quit."
So he quit college instead, and with that, Andy Blevins joined one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America. He became a college dropout, though nongraduate may be the more precise term.
Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20's now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960's, when the Census Bureau began keeping
such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.
The phenomenon has been largely overlooked in the glare of positive news about the country's gains in education. Going to college has become the norm throughout most of the United States, even in many places where college was once
considered an exotic destination - places like Chilhowie (pronounced chill-HOW-ee), an Appalachian hamlet with a simple brick downtown. At elite universities, classrooms are filled with women, blacks, Jews and Latinos, groups largely
excluded two generations ago. The American system of higher learning seems to have become a great equalizer.
In fact, though, colleges have come to reinforce many of the advantages of birth. On campuses that enroll poorer students, graduation rates are often low. And at institutions where nearly everyone graduates - small colleges like
Colgate, major state institutions like the University of Colorado and elite private universities like Stanford - more students today come from the top of the nation's income ladder than they did two decades ago.
Only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college managed to graduate within five years, the Department of Education found in a study last year, but 66 percent of high-income students did. That gap had grown over
recent years. "We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard,
said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. "And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem."
There is certainly much to celebrate about higher education today. Many more students from all classes are getting four-year degrees and reaping their benefits. But those broad gains mask the fact that poor and working-class students
have nevertheless been falling behind; for them, not having a degree remains the norm.
That loss of ground is all the more significant because a college education matters much more now than it once did. A bachelor's degree, not a year or two of courses, tends to determine a person's place in today's globalized,
computerized economy. College graduates have received steady pay increases over the past two decades, while the pay of everyone else has risen little more than the rate of inflation.
As a result, despite one of the great education explosions in modern history, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over the course of a lifetime - has stopped rising, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest
that it has declined over the last generation.
Put another way, children seem to be following the paths of their parents more than they once did. Grades and test scores, rather than privilege, determine success today, but that success is largely being passed down from one
generation to the next. A nation that believes that everyone should have a fair shake finds itself with a kind of inherited meritocracy.
In this system, the students at the best colleges may be diverse - male and female and of various colors, religions and hometowns - but they tend to share an upper-middle-class upbringing. An old joke that Harvard's idea of diversity
is putting a rich kid from California in the same room as a rich kid from New York is truer today than ever; Harvard has more students from California than it did in years past and just as big a share of upper-income students.
Students like these remain in college because they can hardly imagine doing otherwise. Their parents, understanding the importance of a bachelor's degree, spent hours reading to them, researching school districts and making it clear to
them that they simply must graduate from college.
Andy Blevins says that he too knows the importance of a degree, but that he did not while growing up, and not even in his year at Radford University, 66 miles up the Interstate from Chilhowie. Ten years after trading college for the
warehouse, Mr. Blevins, 29, spends his days at the same supermarket company. He has worked his way up to produce buyer, earning $35,000 a year with health benefits and a 401(k) plan. He is on a path typical for someone who attended
college without getting a four-year degree. Men in their early 40's in this category made an average of $42,000 in 2000. Those with a four-year degree made $65,000.
Still boyish-looking but no longer rail thin, Mr. Blevins says he has many reasons to be happy. He lives with his wife, Karla, and their year-old son, Lucas, in a small blue-and-yellow house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of
a stunningly picturesque Appalachian valley. He plays golf with some of the same friends who made him want to stay around Chilhowie.
But he does think about what might have been, about what he could be doing if he had the degree. As it is, he always feels as if he is on thin ice. Were he to lose his job, he says, everything could slip away with it. What kind of job
could a guy without a college degree get? One night, while talking to his wife about his life, he used the word "trapped."
"Looking back, I wish I had gotten that degree," Mr. Blevins said in his soft-spoken lilt. "Four years seemed like a thousand years then. But I wish I would have just put in my four years."
The Barriers
Why so many low-income students fall from the college ranks is a question without a simple answer. Many high schools do a poor job of preparing teenagers for college. Many of the colleges where lower-income students tend to enroll have
limited resources and offer a narrow range of majors, leaving some students disenchanted and unwilling to continue.
Then there is the cost. Tuition bills scare some students from even applying and leave others with years of debt. To Mr. Blevins, like many other students of limited means, every week of going to classes seemed like another week of
losing money - money that might have been made at a job.
"The system makes a false promise to students," said John T. Casteen III, the president of the University of Virginia, himself the son of a Virginia shipyard worker.
Colleges, Mr. Casteen said, present themselves as meritocracies in which academic ability and hard work are always rewarded. In fact, he said, many working-class students face obstacles they cannot overcome on their own.
For much of his 15 years as Virginia's president, Mr. Casteen has focused on raising money and expanding the university, the most prestigious in the state. In the meantime, students with backgrounds like his have become ever scarcer on
campus. The university's genteel nickname, the Cavaliers, and its aristocratic sword-crossed coat of arms seem appropriate today. No flagship state university has a smaller proportion of low-income students than Virginia. Just 8
percent of undergraduates last year came from families in the bottom half of the income distribution, down from 11 percent a decade ago.
That change sneaked up on him, Mr. Casteen said, and he has spent a good part of the last year trying to prevent it from becoming part of his legacy. Starting with next fall's freshman class, the university will charge no tuition and
require no loans for students whose parents make less than twice the poverty level, or about $37,700 a year for a family of four. The university has also increased financial aid to middle-income students.
To Mr. Casteen, these are steps to remove what he describes as "artificial barriers" to a college education placed in the way of otherwise deserving students. Doing so "is a fundamental obligation of a free culture," he said.
But the deterrents to a degree can also be homegrown. Many low-income teenagers know few people who have made it through college. A majority of the nongraduates are young men, and some come from towns where the factory work ethic, to
get working as soon as possible, remains strong, even if the factories themselves are vanishing. Whatever the reasons, college just does not feel normal.
"You get there and you start to struggle," said Leanna Blevins, Andy's older sister, who did get a bachelor's degree and then went on to earn a Ph.D at Virginia studying the college experiences of poor students. "And at home your
parents are trying to be supportive and say, 'Well, if you're not happy, if it's not right for you, come back home. It's O.K.' And they think they're doing the right thing. But they don't know that maybe what the student needs is to
hear them say, 'Stick it out just one semester. You can do it. Just stay there. Come home on the weekend, but stick it out.' "
Today, Ms. Blevins, petite and high-energy, is helping to start a new college a few hours' drive from Chilhowie for low-income students. Her brother said he had daydreamed about attending it and had talked to her about how he might
return to college.
For her part, Ms. Blevins says, she has daydreamed about having a life that would seem as natural as her brother's, a life in which she would not feel like an outsider in her hometown. Once, when a high-school teacher asked students to
list their goals for the next decade, Ms. Blevins wrote, "having a college degree" and "not being married."
"I think my family probably thinks I'm liberal," Ms. Blevins, who is now married, said with a laugh, "that I've just been educated too much and I'm gettin' above my raisin'."
Her brother said that he just wanted more control over his life, not a new one. At a time when many people complain of scattered lives, Mr. Blevins can stand in one spot - his church parking lot, next to a graveyard - and take in much
of his world. "That's my parents' house," he said one day, pointing to a sliver of roof visible over a hill. "That's my uncle's trailer. My grandfather is buried here. I'll probably be buried here."
Taking Class Into Account
Opening up colleges to new kinds of students has generally meant one thing over the last generation: affirmative action. Intended to right the wrongs of years of exclusion, the programs have swelled the number of women, blacks and
Latinos on campuses. But affirmative action was never supposed to address broad economic inequities, just the ones that stem from specific kinds of discrimination.
That is now beginning to change. Like Virginia, a handful of other colleges are not only increasing financial aid but also promising to give weight to economic class in granting admissions. They say they want to make an effort to admit
more low-income students, just as they now do for minorities and children of alumni.
"The great colleges and universities were designed to provide for mobility, to seek out talent," said Anthony W. Marx, president of Amherst College. "If we are blind to the educational disadvantages associated with need, we will simply
replicate these disadvantages while appearing to make decisions based on merit."
With several populous states having already banned race-based preferences and the United States Supreme Court suggesting that it may outlaw such programs in a couple of decades, the future of affirmative action may well revolve around
economics. Polls consistently show that programs based on class backgrounds have wider support than those based on race.
The explosion in the number of nongraduates has also begun to get the attention of policy makers. This year, New York became one of a small group of states to tie college financing more closely to graduation rates, rewarding colleges
more for moving students along than for simply admitting them. Nowhere is the stratification of education more vivid than here in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson once tried, and failed, to set up the nation's first public high
schools. At a modest high school in the Tidewater city of Portsmouth, not far from Mr. Casteen's boyhood home, a guidance office wall filled with college pennants does not include one from rarefied Virginia. The colleges whose pennants
are up - Old Dominion University and others that seem in the realm of the possible - have far lower graduation rates.
Across the country, the upper middle class so dominates elite universities that high-income students, on average, actually get slightly more financial aid from colleges than low-income students do. These elite colleges are so expensive
that even many high-income students receive large grants. In the early 1990's, by contrast, poorer students got 50 percent more aid on average than the wealthier ones, according to the College Board, the organization that runs the SAT
entrance exams.
At the other end of the spectrum are community colleges, the two-year institutions that are intended to be feeders for four-year colleges. In nearly every one are tales of academic success against tremendous odds: a battered wife or a
combat veteran or a laid-off worker on the way to a better
life. But over all, community colleges tend to be places where dreams are put on hold. Most people who enroll say they plan to get a four-year degree eventually; few actually do. Full-time jobs, commutes and children or parents who
need care often get in the way. One recent national survey found that about 75 percent of students enrolling in community colleges said they hoped to transfer to a four-year institution. But only 17 percent of those who had entered in
the mid-1990's made the switch within five years, according to a separate study. The rest were out working or still studying toward the two-year degree.
"We here in Virginia do a good job of getting them in," said Glenn Dubois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System and himself a community college graduate. "We have to get better in getting them out."
'I Wear a Tie Every Day'
College degree or not, Mr. Blevins has the kind of life that many Americans say they aspire to. He fills it with family, friends, church and a five-handicap golf game. He does not sit in traffic commuting to an office park. He does not
talk wistfully of a relocated brother or best friend he sees only twice a year. He does not worry about who will care for his son while he works and his wife attends community college to become a physical therapist. His grandparents
down the street watch Lucas, just as they took care of Andy and his two sisters when they were children. When Mr. Blevins comes home from work, it is his turn to play with Lucas, tossing him into the air and rolling around on the floor
with him and a stuffed elephant.
Mr. Blevins also sings in a quartet called the Gospel Gentlemen. One member is his brother-in-law; another lives on Mr. Blevins's street. In the long white van the group owns, they wend their way along mountain roads on their way to
singing dates at local church functions, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes ribbing one another or talking about where to buy golf equipment.
Inside the churches, the other singers often talk to the audience between songs, about God or a grandmother or what a song means to them. Mr. Blevins rarely does, but his shyness fades once he is back in the van with his friends.
At the warehouse, he is usually the first to arrive, around 6:30 in the morning. The grandson of a coal miner, he takes pride, he says, in having moved up to become a supermarket buyer. He decides which bananas, grapes, onions and
potatoes the company will sell and makes sure that there are always enough. Most people with his job have graduated from college.
"I'm pretty fortunate to not have a degree but have a job where I wear a tie every day," he said.
He worries about how long it will last, though, mindful of what happened to his father, Dwight, a decade ago. A high school graduate, Dwight Blevins was laid off from his own warehouse job and ended up with another one that paid less
and offered a smaller pension.
"A lot of places, they're not looking that you're trained in something," Andy Blevins said one evening, sitting on his back porch. "They just want you to have a degree."
Figuring out how to get one is the core quandary facing the nation's college nongraduates. Many seem to want one. In a New York Times poll, 43 percent of them called it essential to success, while 42 percent of college graduates and 32
percent of high-school dropouts did. This in itself is a change from the days when "college boy" was an insult in many working-class neighborhoods. But once students take a break - the phrase that many use instead of drop out - the
ideal can quickly give way to reality. Family and
work can make a return to school seem even harder than finishing it in the first place. After dropping out of Radford, Andy Blevins enrolled part-time in a community college, trying to juggle work and studies. He lasted a year. From
time to time in the decade since, he has thought about giving it another try. But then he has wondered if that would be crazy. He works every third Saturday, and his phone rings on Sundays when there is a problem with the supply of
potatoes or apples. "It never ends," he said. "There's a never a lull."
To spend more time with Lucas, Mr. Blevins has already cut back on his singing. If he took night classes, he said, when would he ever see his little boy? Anyway, he said, it would take years to get a degree part-time. To him, it is a
tug of war between living in the present and sacrificing for the future. Few Breaks for the Needy
The college admissions system often seems ruthlessly meritocratic. Yes, children of alumni still have an advantage. But many other pillars of the old system - the polite rejections of women or blacks, the spots reserved for graduates
of Choate and Exeter - have crumbled.
This was the meritocracy Mr. Casteen described when he greeted the parents of freshman in a University of Virginia lecture hall late last summer. Hailing from all 50 states and 52 foreign countries, the students were more intelligent
and better prepared than he and his classmates had been, he told the parents in his quiet, deep voice. The class included 17 students with a perfect SAT score.
If anything, children of privilege think that the system has moved so far from its old-boy history that they are now at a disadvantage when they apply, because colleges are trying to diversify their student rolls. To get into a good
college, the sons and daughters of the upper middle class often talk of needing a higher SAT score than, say, an applicant who grew up on a farm, in a ghetto or in a factory town. Some state legislators from Northern Virginia's
affluent suburbs have argued that this is a form of geographic discrimination and have quixotically proposed bills to outlaw it.
But the conventional wisdom is not quite right. The elite colleges have not been giving much of a break to the low-income students who apply. When William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton, looked at admissions records
recently, he found that if test scores were equal a low-income student had no better chance than a high-income one of getting into a group of 19 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams and Virginia. Athletes, legacy
applicants and minority students all got in with lower scores on average. Poorer students did not.
The findings befuddled many administrators, who insist that admissions officers have tried to give poorer applicants a leg up. To emphasize the point, Virginia announced this spring that it was changing its admissions policy from "need
blind" - a term long used to assure applicants that they would not be punished for seeking financial aid - to "need conscious." Administrators at Amherst and Harvard have also recently said that they would redouble their efforts to
take into account the obstacles students have overcome.
"The same score reflects more ability when you come from a less fortunate background," Mr. Summers, the president of Harvard, said. "You haven't had a chance to take the test-prep course. You went to a school that didn't do as good a
job coaching you for the test. You came from a home without the same opportunities for learning."
But it is probably not a coincidence that elite colleges have not yet turned this sentiment into action. Admitting large numbers of low-income students could bring clear complications. Too many in a freshman class would probably lower
the college's average SAT score, thereby damaging its ranking by U.S. News & World Report, a leading arbiter of academic prestige. Some colleges, like Emory University in Atlanta, have climbed fast in the rankings over precisely the
same period in which their percentage of low-income students has tumbled. The math is simple: when a college goes looking for applicants with high SAT scores, it is far more likely to find them among well-off teenagers.
More spots for low-income applicants might also mean fewer for the children of alumni, who make up the fund-raising base for universities. More generous financial aid policies will probably lead to higher tuition for those students who
can afford the list price. Higher tuition, lower ranking, tougher admission requirements: they do not make for an easy marketing pitch to alumni clubs around the country. But Mr. Casteen and his colleagues are going ahead, saying the
pendulum has swung too far in one direction.
That was the mission of John Blackburn, Virginia's easy-going admissions dean, when he rented a car and took to the road recently. Mr. Blackburn thought of the trip as a reprise of the drives Mr. Casteen took 25 years earlier, when he
was the admissions dean, traveling to churches and community centers to persuade black parents that the university was finally interested in their children.
One Monday night, Mr. Blackburn came to Big Stone Gap, in a mostly poor corner of the state not far from Andy Blevins's town. A community college there was holding a college fair, and Mr. Blackburn set up a table in a hallway, draping
it with the University of Virginia's blue and orange flag.
As students came by, Mr. Blackburn would explain Virginia's new admissions and financial aid policies. But he soon realized that the Virginia name might have been scaring off the very people his pitch was intended for. Most of the
students who did approach the table showed little interest in the financial aid and expressed little need for it. One man walked up to Mr. Blackburn and introduced his son as an aspiring doctor. The father was an ophthalmologist. Other
doctors came by, too. So did some lawyers.
"You can't just raise the UVa flag," Mr. Blackburn said, packing up his materials at the end of the night, "and expect a lot of low-income kids to come out."
When the applications started arriving in his office this spring, there seemed to be no increase in those from low-income students. So Mr. Blackburn extended the deadline two weeks for everybody, and his colleagues also helped some
applicants with the maze of financial aid forms. Of 3,100 incoming freshmen, it now seems that about 180 will qualify for the new financial aid program, up from 130 who would have done so last year. It is not a huge number, but
Virginia administrators call it a start.
A Big Decision
On a still-dark February morning, with the winter's heaviest snowfall on the ground, Andy Blevins scraped off his Jeep and began his daily drive to the supermarket warehouse. As he passed the home of Mike Nash, his neighbor and fellow
gospel singer, he noticed that the car was still in the driveway. For Mr. Nash, a school counselor and the only college graduate in the singing group, this was a snow day.
Mr. Blevins later sat down with his calendar and counted to 280: the number of days he had worked last year. Two hundred and eighty days - six days a week most of the time - without ever really knowing what the future would hold.
"I just realized I'm going to have to do something about this," he said, "because it's never going to end."
In the weeks afterward, his daydreaming about college and his conversations about it with his sister Leanna turned into serious research. He requested his transcripts from Radford and from Virginia Highlands Community College and
figured out that he had about a year's worth of credits. He also talked to Leanna about how he could become an elementary school teacher. He always felt that he could relate to children, he said. The job would take up 180 days, not
280. Teachers do not usually get laid off or lose their pensions or have to take a big pay cut to find new work.
So the decision was made. On May 31, Andy Blevins says, he will return to Virginia Highlands, taking classes at night; the Gospel Gentlemen are no longer booking performances. After a year, he plans to take classes by video and on the
Web that are offered at the community college but run by Old Dominion, a Norfolk, Va., university with a big group of working-class students.
"I don't like classes, but I've gotten so motivated to go back to school," Mr. Blevins said. "I don't want to, but, then again, I do."
He thinks he can get his bachelor's degree in three years. If he gets it at all, he will have defied the odds.
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In a Grim Corner of Baltimore, a High School Offers a Haven
By GARY GATELY
Published: May 22, 2005
BALTIMORE, May 21 - Behind the four-story brick school, the gray gothic watchtower of the state penitentiary looms large. On the streets outside the classrooms, drug dealers work the corners against the depressingly familiar backdrop
of boarded-up houses and vacant lots. Inside the school chapel, an old bullet hole mars a back window.
But order prevails inside St. Frances Academy, a Catholic co-ed high school founded 177 years ago by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black nuns.
The nuns - and, nowadays, priests and lay teachers - pride themselves on helping children from some of Baltimore's toughest neighborhoods replace despair with hope, failure with success, doubt with faith.
The school is just north of block after block of prison and jail cells holding as many as 7,000 inmates at a time. Most of the students know people in prison and many of them have mourned family members or friends who were murdered or
died of AIDS. .
Some have moved away from drug-addicted parents to live with grandparents or other relatives. Others arrived at St. Frances Academy after either failing or being thrown out of public schools or after getting into trouble with the law.
St. Frances defies the odds.
When students enter the academy, often from overcrowded and unruly public schools, on average they read at a sixth-grade level. But within three years, most progress to a 12th-grade reading level.
They study college-level texts for some courses in the rigorous curriculum, and required courses include algebra, geometry, a foreign language, African-American studies and either chemistry or forensics (where students learn science
through, for example, ballistics testing.) Almost every student graduates, and 90 percent go on to college - for three out of four students, the first in their families to do so.
"We have to believe that God is at work within them," said Sister John Francis Schilling, the principal. "So many of them come here down on themselves. I think that the hope that we give them is, first of all, hope in themselves. I see
this as my ministry."
The ministry is done not only in classrooms but also in group and individual therapy sessions - the school has nine social workers and counselors - and required "Rites of Passage" classes that focus on an often grim reality.
At one class for girls, called Sisters, a student mentioned having been molested. The teacher asked if other students had been molested, and a handful of them said they had. In another class, a teacher asked how many students knew
somebody who had been shot, and 12 of 19 teenagers raised their hands.
Nobody skirts the touchy subjects here: homicide, absentee parents, addiction, sex, teenage pregnancy, racism, poverty. A "Grief and Loss" group meets regularly.
Chanaye Jackson, a 15-year-old sophomore, said she had found compassion and comfort in the group. Chanaye's father was fatally shot in 1992, and her mother died the next year. She saw her godfather shot to death outside her home, she
said.
Chanaye, who now lives with her grandmother, said she had also lost one of her closest friends, a 15-year-old boy, when he was stabbed to death in 2003 in a fight.
"He was doing a project in school," she said, "and he said if he had one wish, it would be that all the violence, the shootings and the killing would stop."
Chanaye, a soft-spoken girl who is an honors English student, clings to her faith and relies on the support of those around her at the school.
"I know that everything God does is for a reason and that he would never give me more than I could handle," she said. "And every person was put in my life for a reason, and if it was their time to go, then it was their time to go."
Karrell Jones, a freshman who plays for the academy's junior-varsity basketball team, had all but given up on school before coming to St. Frances. Before arriving here, he had been suspended from three public middle schools, and by age
12, he had a clear vision of his future.
"I just wanted to be selling drugs," Karrell said. "I thought that's where it was at. I didn't have anybody to tell me, to be on my case about doing the right things. I mean, if you aren't in school, you're just out there, and all the
younger kids see is the money."
He said his best friend was in jail, and a lot of people he knew had been killed, including a cousin. "It scared me," he said, "because that could easily have been me killed."
For a surrogate father figure, Karrell need to look no further than David Owens, a teacher. Moving non-stop, Mr. Owens works his religion classroom like a singer on a stage, and seamlessly weaves into a lecture King David, John the
Baptist, the beatitudes and modern-day parables of AIDS and people with mental illness.
"We know the number of black males in jail outnumber any other group," he tells students in his booming voice. "But I refuse to let you fail. I refuse to let you become a statistic. You have no idea of the power that you hold."
The Oblate Sisters have taken on challenges from the very beginning, when Mother Mary Lange founded the school in 1828 to teach children of slaves to read the Bible, a practice that was then illegal in Maryland.
Today, the school, named after St. Frances of Rome, a 15th-century mystic, sits in one of the poorest neighborhoods of a city where half of those who start public high schools never finish, where the homicide rate last year was five
times greater than that of New York City, and where officials estimate that as many as one in 10 people are drug addicts.
More than 72 percent of the students live below the poverty line. Like its students, St. Frances struggles financially. The annual tuition is $4,700 - though it actually costs $6,300 to educate each child - but 60 percent of the
students pay only partial tuition, or none. The school relies on contributions to cover the gap.
Last month, St. Frances got a big boost - a $2 million gift, its largest ever. It came from a former student of an Oblate school in Washington, Camille Cosby, the film producer and wife of the entertainer Bill Cosby. (An anonymous
donor has since contributed $1 million more.)
"I know what these nuns do," Mrs. Cosby said in an interview. "I know how much time they put into educating their students. They're not buying into the repetitive messages about hopelessness. They're not buying into the message that
you can't do it. There's so much failure in the education system now, we have to embrace solutions that work."
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IDEA Regulations on Fast Track, Expected in June
On May 18, 2005, Troy Justesen, Acting Director of the Office of Special Education Programs, was interviewed by Rachel Kosoy of the Disability Law Resource Project. During this interview, Dr. Justesen said he expects the proposed
regulations for Part B of IDEA to be published during the first or second week of June.
During the interview, Dr. Justesen fielded questions about IDEA 2004, the proposed IDEA regulations, and how the public can make comments to request changes in the regulations. Dr. Justesen expects the proposed regulations for Part B
of IDEA to be published in the first or second week of June. (Part B governs special education for children with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 21). Other proposed regulations will be issued at separate intervals. For example,
the Part C regulations about services to infants and toddlers will be published after the Part B regulations.
After the proposed regulations are published, the public will have 75 days to comment on the regulations. If you want a regulation changed or think a regulation is not clear, you need to advise the Department of Education about the
specific changes you want made to that regulation and why. (see the discussion of how to comment in this interview)
After the Department of Education reviews all public comments (they expect to receive between 10,000 and 50,000 comments), they will revise the regulations and publish the Final Regulations in the Federal Register. According to Dr.
Justesen, they expect to publish the Final Regulations six or seven months after IDEA 2004 goes into effect on July 1, 2005 (December 2005- January 2006)
In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Justesen answered questions a variety of topics, including:
Impact of NCLB: Full Inclusion of Children with Disabilities & Accountability for Children with Disabilities in the Regular Education Setting
How Regulations Are Written, Published, Revised, Published
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and Final Rule: Proposed Regulations & Final Regulations Will Be Published in the Federal Register
New: Regulations Will Include Language of the IDEA Statute
Proposed Regulations for Part B Expected in Early June
Public Comment Period: Not Less Than 75 Days
Department of Education is Using Database to Track Comments & Concerns
New: Preamble to Regulations
New: Index of Regulations
New: Regulations Reorganized to Track IDEA Statute
Public Meetings: Summer 2005
How to Comment: Be Specific and Give Your Reasons>br>
Form Emails and Form Letters "Not Useful"
Regulations Mirror the Statute
Effective Date of IDEA 2004 is July 1, 2005 - "The law is the law"
Current IDEA Regulations Helpful in Providing Guidance & Answering Questions
House Conference Report Answers Questions
Aligning IDEA & No Child Left Behind
Dr. Justesen indicated that the Department of Education has already received 6,500 comments, even though the proposed regulations have not been published. Most of these comments and concerns focused on the following issues and
concerns:
Due Process: Legal Assistance Unavailable to Parents; Will Parents Have to Pay School's Attorney Fees?
Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Assessments
Requirements for Alternate Assessments
Accessible Textbooks
Early Intervening Services
Research Based Instruction & Essential Components of Reading Instruction
Practices for Homeless Children
Services to Students in Private Schools
Requirements for Highly Qualified Special Education Teachers
Discipline: "Still a major area of concern"
Evaluation for Specific Learning Disabilities - "Moving Away from the Discrepancy Model"
IQ Tests: Not Intended to Be Used to Determine if Child Has a Learning Disability
Maintenance of Effort
3-Year IEP Option
New Appendix A
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Research Finds a High Rate of Expulsions in Preschool
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: May 17, 2005
So what if typical 3-year-olds are just out of diapers, still take a daily nap and can't tie their shoes? They are plenty old enough to be expelled, the first national study of expulsion rates in pre-kindergarten programs has found.
In fact, preschool children are three times as likely to be expelled as children in kindergarten through 12th grade, according to the new study, by researchers from the Yale Child Study Center.
"No one wants to hear about 3- and 4-year-olds' being expelled from preschool, but it happens rather frequently," said the study's chief author, Walter S. Gilliam.
Although preschool expulsion rates varied widely by state and type of setting, the study found that on average, boys were expelled at 4.5 times the rate of girls, African-Americans at twice the rate of Latinos and Caucasians, and
4-year-olds at 1.5 times the rate of 3-year-olds. Expulsion rates were lowest in preschool classrooms in public schools and Head Start, and highest in faith-affiliated centers, for-profit child care and other community-based child-care
settings.
"What the data tells us, as does the show 'Supernanny,' is that there are a lot of out-of-control kids out there," said Karen Hill-Scott, a California expert on children's development and their readiness for school.
Dr. Hill-Scott said it was not surprising that expulsion rates in preschool were higher than those in later grades, since schools are legally obligated to educate children in kindergarten through 12th grade, while pre-kindergarten
programs are not required to retain disruptive children.
Expulsions were about twice as common in classrooms where the teachers had no access to a child psychologist or psychiatrist as in those where they did.
"My take-away from this report is that teachers need more support," said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, which advocates for universal voluntary preschool.
Because the study is the first of its kind, it is impossible to say whether expulsion rates are increasing.
"I've certainly heard people say the problem is getting worse," said Dr. Gilliam, the author. "But maybe the reality is that we're serving more children these days. Maybe we're serving more at-risk children than we served in the past,
and that's a good thing."
Some longtime preschool directors say they have seen a sharp rise since the 1970's in the number of children with behavioral problems.
"In the past, in a school of 150 kids, you might have one or two kids with behavior problems, but now it may be up to 10 percent of the kids," said Susan Glaser, an educational psychologist and preschool director in Cleveland.
"In the past, many of these children weren't sent to school," she said, "because their parents sensed that they weren't ready. But now there's much more day care. Children start younger and stay longer hours."
The study, based on a telephone survey of 4,815 state-financed pre-kindergarten classrooms, found that the preschool expulsion rate was 6.7 per 1,000 children enrolled, compared with 2.1 expulsions per 1,000 students in kindergarten
through 12th grade. Given the number of enrollments nationally, it is estimated that more than 5,000 preschool children are expelled each year.
The study did not gather information on why the children were expelled. But Dr. Gilliam said a wide range of behavior could lead to expulsion: aggression toward the teacher or other children; actions that violate a zero-tolerance
policy, like taking a toy gun to school; or anything that might cause a teacher to worry about injury and liability, like running out of the classroom to the parking lot.
"We don't know how the behavioral problems break down, how much is egregious versus zero tolerance," he said. "We weren't measuring behavioral problems, we were measuring the decisions teachers make."
Though the study provided no data on what becomes of children after expulsion, Dr. Gilliam offered a common outcome based on his experience in the field.
"What I've seen myself," he said, "is children expelled from one preschool, and the parent is embarrassed and needs child care and needs to find another place. But they're embarrassed to tell the new place anything, and a few days
later the child is expelled again."
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Those Who Outgrow Foster Care Still Struggle, Study Finds
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: May 19, 2005
CHICAGO, May 18 - As the definition of adulthood has shifted in this country and young people are living with their parents even into their 20's, one group has been mostly left behind in this phenomenon: thousands of people who grow up
in foster care.
Nationally each year, some 20,000 youths who were once removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect leave their second home - the child welfare system - because they get too old for it. In some states, they are allowed to stay
on until they turn 21, but in many more places, they "age out" when they turn 18.
And that, the authors of a new study to be released on Thursday by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago say, can have devastating consequences. The study, which is believed to be the broadest of its kind in
20 years, looked at a rarely examined group - more than 600 young people, mostly 19 years old and in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, who recently left foster care or will soon do so.
As a group, the youths from foster care wrestled with tougher problems than a wide national sample of 19-year-old Americans, the study said. More than a third of those coming from foster care had no high school diploma or general
equivalency diploma, compared with about 10 percent of people their age. Those from foster care were also far more likely to be pregnant, unemployed, unable to pay the rent, or getting counseling.
Perhaps more striking about the group from foster care, though, those allowed to stay in the child welfare system - living in foster homes or youth facilities beyond their 18th birthdays - seemed to fare better than those who headed
out at 18. Those who left at 18 were half as likely to be enrolled in school or a training program than those still in care, the study found. Those who had left care were 50 percent more likely to be unemployed and out of school than
those who stayed in. About 14 percent of those who left, in fact, reported finding themselves homeless at some point. Of those who left care, 11.5 percent reported sometimes or often not having enough to eat, compared with less than 4
percent of those who stayed in care.
"Most states do not allow them to stay in much beyond 18, and that's the legacy of what we thought, historically, was the point of becoming an adult," said Mark E. Courtney, the study's lead author and the director of Chapin Hall
Center here. "But it doesn't make sense anymore. What parent kicks their child out at 18? Why are we treating these kids radically differently than parents are treating every other kid?"
Dr. Courtney said he was unsure precisely how many states allow youths to stay in care until they are 21, but said that Illinois is one in that small group, while youths in Iowa and Wisconsin - and most other states - generally leave
the foster care system when they turn 18 or 19.
It is uncertain, though, how much it might cost states to extend such benefits to 21, and in tight budget times, money may be one reason states have been reluctant.
"The reluctance could be a fiscal issue or it could be the whole issue, too, of older wards - you're not cute and cuddly anymore," said Robert F. Harris, the public guardian who represents wards in Cook County, Ill. "But by and large,
young people need the benefit of societal support past 18 - and even past 21."
Shalonda Williamson, one of those surveyed in Dr. Courtney's study, said in an interview that she has been in the system since she was 9. Now 20, she is studying computers at college in Chicago, but remains in the formal care of the
child welfare system here. To her, that is a relief. She has somewhere to live.
"If I had gotten out at 18, I think I'd be totally different than I am now," she said. "When you're 18, you're not really an adult anyway. I think it's around 20 when you start getting your life together."
Even now, Ms. Williamson acknowledged, she does not have every adult question answered: She has no bank account or summer job.
But Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria, Va., said the "dismal" findings described in Dr. Courtney's study and others emerging from the foster system across the
country should not necessarily leave child welfare experts clamoring to hold youths in the system longer.
"When we talk about people aging out, we get away from the central point," he said. "What these results should tell us is that we've got to stop throwing so many children into foster care in the first place. What you can see is,
regardless of what the problems were going in, foster care surely didn't fix them."
The Chapin Hall study cost $1.6 million and was financed by the three states and the William T. Grant Foundation.
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U.S. Provides Rules to States for Testing Special Pupils
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: May 11, 2005
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced guidelines yesterday for states that plan to take advantage of new, short-term flexibility in the way special-education students are tested under the federal education law, No Child
Left Behind.
To gain the extra flexibility, Ms. Spellings said, states must show that they are in compliance with other facets of the law and that their efforts to raise the achievement of students with disabilities are working.
Some state education officials and advocates for special-education students quickly criticized the requirements as too stringent.
Until now, the Bush administration has allowed only 1 percent of all students, those most severely handicapped, to be given special tests to assess whether they are comprehending material at grade level. All other disabled students
have been required to take the same tests as the general student body.
Last month, Ms. Spellings said the Department of Education would give some states increased flexibility, allowing them to administer alternative tests to an additional 2 percent of students, those who have extreme difficulties with
standard instruction and assessment.
Officials confirmed the offer yesterday, but only on a short-term basis, which was left unspecified. They also set a deadline of June 1 for states to apply for the concessions and said they would take effect next school year. In
addition, Ms. Spellings restated the department's commitment to allocate $14 million in technical assistance and other help to eligible states.
"I believe this is a smarter, better way to educate special-education children," Ms. Spellings said at a news conference at her Washington office. Later, she added: "In the past, we simply ignored special-education kids as 'over
there.' That's not the case now."
Some policy analysts and state education administrators said they were pleased that the administration was offering more flexibility but said they doubted that many states could fulfill the eligibility requirements to take advantage of
the change.
"The flexibility that they put out there is something that every state needs - it's not like those students are concentrated in one state or another," said Patty Sullivan, the director of the Center on Education Policy, a research
group based in Washington. "I'm concerned that not many states are going to be able to meet the guidelines. It says 'eligible states,' and the guidelines set a pretty high bar."
Betty J. Sternberg, the education commissioner in Connecticut, said, similarly: "The percentages are fine. They help us. The problem may be in the details of what they are requiring us to do to have access to the flexibility."
Connecticut officials announced plans last month to sue the federal government for forcing the state to conduct more testing without providing the money to pay for it. The department has repeatedly said it is unwilling to waive or
weaken that part of the law.
When asked how children would benefit from the changes, one official at the news conference, Reid Lyon, branch chief for child development and behavior at the National Institute for Child Health Development, said it would be in the
area of instruction.
By using alternative testing for the most challenged children, Mr. Lyon said, teachers will be better equipped to deal with the specific needs of each child. "There is a much clearer focus on how the children are progressing as a
function of instruction," he said. "That attention has not been there in the past. That attention has been on whether someone met a bar."
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Getting Smaller to Improve the Big Picture
By ELISSA GOOTMAN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: May 3, 2005
The Central Park East Secondary School, one of New York City's first small public high schools, was once a beacon of educational innovation. But in the two decades since it opened, the graduation and attendance rates have plummeted to
below citywide averages.
Even the founding principal has not visited in years, saying she finds the school's fate heartbreaking.
In Chelsea, the New York City Museum School, another pioneering small school, is thriving, even as it struggles with financial difficulties. Students there make regular pilgrimages to museums throughout the city, though they spend less
time on such trips than they did a few years ago.
One of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's chief strategies for transforming the city's school system is the creation of 200 small schools, including 53 secondary schools that opened in September. But the idea is not new - there was an
explosion of such schools in the early 1990's - and a look at this older generation of small schools shows that size itself has not been a silver bullet.
There has been no long-term comprehensive study of the outcomes of New York City's early small schools. But interviews with teachers, current and former principals and parents indicate a wide range of results and suggest that even the
hallmarks of small schools - better attendance and graduation rates - are not guaranteed.
"If I look at the small schools that existed at that time, about half are mediocre or worse than mediocre, and half are better than mediocre," said Deborah Meier, the founding principal of Central Park East, who is now an author,
lecturer and consultant.
Some of the small schools fell victim to their own success, like Beacon High School on the West Side, which, with more than 1,000 students, is no longer so small. Some reaped praise for years, only to struggle when their founders were
replaced by administrators who did not quite get the school's mission.
In some cases, partnerships with community organizations fell apart. In others, the private money that helped get special programs off the ground dried up, forcing cutbacks.
These varying outcomes - including the experiences of some small schools that had to be closed - offer cautionary lessons that some of the most vocal champions of small schools say have not been heeded by officials leading the current
initiative.
"Every school reform comes as if it has no history," Ms. Meier said. "We just recycle a previous reform package, we give it a slightly different name, sometimes not even a different name, and we don't go back to look at what happened
the last time we did this."
Still, officials working on the current initiative say that a vast majority of old small schools, if not ideal, are better than the large failing ones now being replaced. At the big schools being transformed into small school campuses,
four-year graduation rates for the class of 2002 ranged from 23 percent at Bushwick High School, in Brooklyn. to 46 percent at South Bronx High School. Citywide, the average was 51 percent.
In endorsing small schools, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have cited a wide body of research and local statistics showing that smaller schools yield higher attendance, promotion and graduation rates. But the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has financed hundreds of small schools across the country in recent years, has found some of the academic results disappointing.
Michele Cahill, a chief architect of Mr. Bloomberg's small schools plan, said that she and other city education officials had taken steps to ensure that the new schools would fare better - by improving principal training, requiring
rigorous curriculums, demanding high-quality teaching, building stronger community partnerships and imposing strict accountability measures.
"We're doing it differently," Ms. Cahill said.
Robert L. Hughes, the president of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit education reform group that has been at the forefront of New York City's small-schools effort for more than 15 years, said that the early small schools
suffered from inconsistent support. Among past chancellors, Joseph A. Fernandez and Ramon C. Cortines were cautious supporters, while Rudy Crew was a vocal skeptic.
This time, the city has created a special Office of New Schools, headed by a chief executive, Kristen Kane, who reports directly to the chancellor.
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Articles for April 2005
Boy Paid to Disappear/ School District Pays $180,000 to Be Free of Blind, Autistic, Developmentally Disabled Student it Considers Dangerous
The Seattle Times
April 8, 2001
LSC-funded Northwest Justice Project (NJP), in Washington State, representing a boy diagnosed as blind, autistic and developmentally disabled, has reached a settlement with the Seattle School District regarding its failure to
accommodate his disabilities. The settlement requires the district to pay the boy's mother $180,000, and in exchange the mother has agreed to keep her son out of the district and not to press discrimination charges against the
District. Last year, an administrative law judge -- in a due process hearing filed by the mother after the school refused to allow the boy on campus pursuant to a series of outbursts by the boy -- had found that the District was
violating federal law by failing to adequately care for the boy. The settlement was reached while an appeal by the District was pending in federal court. Explaining how the school District did not make an adequate effort to educate the
boy, NJP attorney Carol Vaughn says, "When [the boy] attends school, he's not engaged in tasks or activities." She adds, "[He] is 'learning' to associate school with unstructured nap and play time." Ray Rivera, Boy Paid to Disappear;
School District Pays $180,000 to Be Free of Blind, Autistic, Developmentally Disabled Student it Considers Dangerous, The Seattle Times, Apr. 8, 2001, at A01.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amid Affluence, a Struggle Over Special Education
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Published: April 24, 2005
WESTPORT, Conn., April 20 - "Legal Issues in School Health Services," all 662 pages of it, is a popular read among school administrators in this wealthy town on the Long Island Sound. Parents, however, are more likely to be poring over
Gary Mayerson's "How to Compromise With Your School District Without Compromising Your Child," or "Wrightslaw: Special Education Law," by Peter W. D. Wright and Pamela Darr Wright.
Special education is a hot topic here, with school board meetings exploding into shouting matches over what services children are entitled to under federal law and parents spending thousands of dollars on appeals to force the school
district to provide those services for their children. The parents say they have no choice: the district, one of the state's most affluent, is fighting just as hard to hold the line on skyrocketing special education costs.
"The sign outside Westport should say: 'Don't Move Here. We Don't Take Care of Special Ed,' " said Stanley Alintoff, a parent who said he has spent more than $100,000 challenging Westport's decision to revoke special accommodations his
daughter was receiving because of a digestive disorder.
With an estimated 5.7 million children in the United States qualifying for special education, similar struggles are playing out around the country. Federal laws aimed at protecting the disabled entitle those who qualify to a free and
"appropriate" education tailored to their needs. But the definition of "appropriate" differs from town to town, leaving much to quarrel about. The battle is particularly intense in the suburbs, where wealthy, educated parents no longer
see special education as a stigma or trap. They are pressing hard for services and accommodations to address their children's learning needs, from extra time on tests to tuition for private schools. But many suburban school districts
are aggressively challenging some of the requests as indulgent interpretations of the law.
In Hamilton County, Tenn., for instance, school officials spent $2.2 million on lawyers and expert witnesses to avoid having to reimburse Maureen and Philip Deal the $60,000 annual cost of providing their autistic son, Zachary, with
one-on-one behavioral training. Administrators warned that giving in could have made the district responsible for $10 million a year in services for other children. In December, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
sided largely with the parents. The district is reviewing its options.
In Calaveras County, Calif., the Bret Harte Union High School District fought so hard to block the claims of a student that Judge Oliver W. Wanger of United States District Court took 83 pages to berate the district's "hard-line
position" and its law firm for "willfully and vexatiously" dragging out the case so long that the former student is now 24.
Similar battles are under way in Westport, a town of gracious homes and six- and seven-figure incomes, where both Mandarin Chinese and Latin will be taught next fall at the high school, remodeled recently at a cost of $76 million.
Westport's school district has spent more than $2 million on legal fees and settlement costs in the last six years to fight parents' complaints that special education students get short shrift.
As of last week, the district reported, 564 children, or 11 percent of Westport's student body, qualified for special education. Some are getting as little as a few hours of weekly speech therapy. Others get tuition for private school
or home tutoring.
Dr. Elliott Landon, the superintendent of Westport's schools, and Cynthia Gilchrest, the director of pupil services, acknowledged that tensions were high. But they insisted that their decisions were not based on cost. "In the years
I've been here in special ed, it's what is best for kids," said Dr. Landon, who ran three other school districts before taking the Westport job six years ago.
His administration has denied many special education requests - horseback riding and personal trainers, for instance - that it deemed extravagant. "This is a tough community, where everyone has to be perfect, and when you don't fit
that world, some people react differently than others," Dr. Landon said. "They want what they want, which oftentimes is not appropriate."
But Ron Blittstein, a father who is fighting to get his 11th grader extra time to complete tests, disputed the notion that parents like him were seeking an unfair edge. "No one wants to be in the club," he said.
Coming from Warren, N.J., where, he said, accommodations were granted without fuss, Mr. Blittstein said that Westport's harder line could cost children their shot at an education. "They have seemingly endless resources to just wear you
down, and my kid will be out of the school system in a year," he said. While the federal government created the special education entitlement, and some states outside New York, New Jersey and Connecticut enacted stricter laws of their
own, Congress and state legislatures have failed to provide all the funding.
According to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, local districts shouldered 61.5 percent of the burden for special education in the 2003-4 school year. Shortfalls in state and federal funding also meant special education
consumed 8 percent of local government outlays in Connecticut, up from 6.6 percent in the late 1990s, according to the conference.
The strain on the bottom line can be intense, even in Westport, where in the 2002-3 school year the $10.9 million spent on special education consumed 15.9 percent of the district's education spending. Still, that was below the 19.7
percent state average and the 17.5 percent average for comparable towns, according to the State Department of Education.
Dr. Landon and Nancy Harris, the business manager for Westport's school system, said they have kept special education expenses in line through cost control, not by narrowing eligibility or skimping on services. One example they cited
was the hiring of in-house occupational and physical therapists, saving the district $400,000 a year by reducing fees to outsiders. Dr. Landon said expanded "academic support" in lower grades has reduced the number of children who need
special education referrals later.
But some longtime residents of Westport said that the town's attitude toward children with special needs has shifted from the days when it opened Stepping Stones, a preschool program conceived with the disabled in mind.
"The focus of the administration changed," said Richard C. Elliott, an adjunct professor of education at Argosy University in Sarasota, Fla., who spent 30 years as a teacher and administrator in the Westport system. "It changed from
asking the question, 'What's best for the child?' to asking, 'What is our minimal requirement under the law?' "
Last year, 23 requests, most of them from parents, were filed with the state from Westport for "due process" - an administrative procedure that generally precedes a lawsuit. That was the highest number in Connecticut, according to the
state. Next highest were West Hartford, with 16 requests, and Greenwich, with 15, both with larger districts than Westport. Parents have also gone to court, and some have left the public schools or moved a few miles out of town to
another district.
At school board meetings and in interviews, many parents faulted Dr. Landon, and the town's competitive culture. "Elliott Landon does not get kudos for how many special ed kids he teaches multiplication tables to," said Valerie
Spellman, the mother of two autistic children, who moved her family out of the district last year. "He gets kudos for how many kids he gets into Ivy League schools."
Marsha Moses, a lawyer who advises the district, said parents were always free to supplement what taxpayers provide. "The question really comes," Ms. Moses said, "if there are public dollars being asked to fund things that may be not
necessary to provide a free and appropriate education." Well-to-do families, however, have shown a willingness to push back. Richard Ellenbogen and Dr. Debra Weissman paid $50,000 in legal fees for more than 11 days of due process
hearings last year to force Westport to pay for private school for their teenage son, who has a bipolar disorder and other problems that interfere with his ability to learn.
Westport's solution was to recommend placing him in a public school in Trumbull, which teaches special education children from the region for a fee. The hearing officer sided with the district. But the couple said that they believed
the curriculum was not sufficiently challenging and that they might appeal, or move.
"The process does take over your life," said Dr. Weissman, a dermatologist, sipping tea in her kitchen. Poring over the bills, her husband, a legal consultant, said he can only wonder how different things might be if the district
"spent the money on education instead of litigation."
Declining to address specific cases, Ms. Gilchrest, Westport's director of pupil services, said that during the 2003-4 school year, "if we had said yes to every request that went to due process, it would have cost an additional $1
million." Settling those cases cost the district $309,000, she said. Thus, even with $153,000 in legal fees, she said, taxpayers saved more than $500,000. Parents and some members of Westport's Board of Finance point out that Ms.
Gilchrest's analysis places no value on lost staff time or on the cost to society of failing those children. Critics also have trouble grasping why the district fights tooth and nail in situations where giving in would cost little.
Some of the fiercest fights, they said, involve requests for extra time on tests or early dismissal so children can attend enrichment programs at parents' expense.
Ms. Gilchrest said: "We want to make sure we don't put a label of handicapped on a child that's not handicapped. That's a serious label." Some of the parents, however, wonder whether the hard stance is also meant to warn them that life
might be easier elsewhere. For his part, Mr. Alintoff, whose case is now in court, insists he will stand his ground. "I didn't move to Westport to send my kid to private school," he said.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT LINDA STURM, :: Plaintiff, : CASE NO. 3:03CV666 (AWT)v. ::ROCKY HILL BOARD OF EDUCATION, :: Defendant. :
RULING ON MOTION TO DISMISS
The plaintiff, Linda Sturm, was employed by the defendant as a special education teacher at Griswold Middle School in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. She alleges that her efforts on behalf of certain students led to both the defendant’s
failure to renew her contract and her resignation. The defendant has filed a motion to dismiss all five counts of the complaint pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6). For the reasons set forth below, the motion to dismiss is being
granted in part and denied in part.
I. Background
The court accepts as true the following allegations taken from the Complaint. In September of 1998, the plaintiff was hired as a special education resource teacher at Griswold Middle School. The school offered a structured program
called BRACES (Behavior, Rewards, Achievement, Consequences, Encouragement and Support). BRACES was designed to improve student behavior and cooperativeness while decreasing disrespectfulness, inappropriate language and failures to
complete class assignments. (Compl. ¶ 10.) 2
Throughout her tenure, the plaintiff recommended that several of her students be placed in the BRACES program and attempted to have some of her students "mainstreamed" into regular classrooms. (Compl. ¶ 12.) She believed such actions
were consistent with the purposes of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (the "IDEA"). (Compl. ¶ 13.) Specifically, the plaintiff alleges she recommended eight students for placement into the BRACES
program (Compl. ¶¶ 14-21), advocated for the mainstreaming of one student (Compl. ¶ 22), refused to agree to a "trade" that would have substituted one student for another into the BRACES program (Compl. ¶ 24), and asked for the
separation of four "troublesome" female students (Compl. ¶ 25).
In March of 2003, the plaintiff was told her contract would not be renewed and was allowed to resign rather than appear on a list of "non-renewals". (Compl. ¶ 29.) At the end of the 2001- 2002 school year, the plaintiff’s resignation
became effective. She subsequently applied for a position as a part-time special education teacher in the Glastonbury School District, but was not hired. She alleges two of the defendant’s employees, Carey Miller and Ruth Young,
intentionally and maliciously told an official of the Glastonbury School District that the defendant would not rehire the plaintiff. (Compl. ¶¶ 48-50.)3
II. Legal Standard When deciding a motion to dismiss under Fed R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), the court must accept as true all factual allegations in the complaint and must draw inferences in a light most favorable to the plaintiff. See Scheuer
v. Rhodes, 416 U.S. 232, 236 (1974). A complaint "should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to
relief." Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45-46 (1957); see also Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467 U.S. 69, 73 (1984). "The function of a motion to dismiss is ‘merely to assess the legal feasibility of the complaint, not to assay the weight
of the evidence which might be offered in support thereof.’" Mytych v. May Dep’t Stores Co., 34 F. Supp. 2d 130, 131 (D. Conn. 1999) (quoting Ryder Energy Distribution v. Merrill Lynch Commodities, Inc., 748 F.2d 774, 779 (2d
Cir.1984)). "The issue on a motion to dismiss is not whether the plaintiff will prevail, but whether the plaintiff is entitled to offer evidence to support his claims." United States v. Yale New Haven Hosp., 727 F. Supp. 784, 786 (D.
Conn. 1990) (citing Scheuer, 416 U.S. at 232).4
III. Discussion A. 42 U.S.C. § 1983 The plaintiff alleges the defendant violated her First Amendment rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 by refusing to renew her contract because of her recommendations regarding student placement. The
defendant seeks to dismiss this count of the Complaint on the grounds that the plaintiff’s speech did not involve a matter of public concern. See Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138, 146 (1983).
Whether speech addresses a matter of public concern in the employment context is determined by the content, form and context of the statements in question, "as revealed by the whole record." See id. at 147-48. Speech by an employee
regarding a matter of pure personal interest is generally not protected under First Amendment retaliation law. See Bernheim v. Litt, 79 F.3d 318, 324 (2d Cir. 1996)(quoting Connick, 461 U.S. at 147). However, a statement does not lose
First Amendment protection "simply because the speech is communicated privately to the employer rather than to the public." Gihvan v. W. Line Consol. Sch. Dist., 439 U.S. 410, 415-16 (1979).
Here, the plaintiff communicated exclusively with other school officials about specific issues in specific cases. She alleges her efforts were a form of "advocacy" on behalf of her pupils. As such, her statements served to advance the
federally 5 legislated goal of integration of disabled students into regular classrooms. (Compl. ¶ 13.) Based on the "whole record," established at this point in the proceedings exclusively by the complaint, the plaintiff potentially
could demonstrate that the form, context and content of her statements sufficiently concerned a matter of public interest. Such a showing is sufficient to defeat a motion to dismiss.
The defendant also seeks to dismiss the plaintiff’s § 1983 claim due to her failure to allege either a specific policy or practice, or that the challenged action was directed by an official with final policymaking authority. See
Mandell v. County of Suffolk, 316 F.3d 368, 385 (2d Cir. 2003). The plaintiff challenges the retaliatory employment decisions made by the board through the district superintendent. Such an allegation could provide a sufficient basis
for holding the defendant liable in this case. See Pembaur v. City of Cincinnati, 475 U.S. 469, 483-84 (1986); Mandell, 316 F.3d at 385.
Accordingly, the motion to dismiss is being denied with respect to the first count of the complaint. B. Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-51q
The plaintiff also brings a retaliation claim under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-51q, invoking the protection of the First Amendment of the Constitution and article first, section four of 6 the Connecticut constitution. The defendant seeks to
dismiss this count, again arguing that the speech involved is not a matter of public concern. Connecticut courts have applied federal First Amendment analysis to federal and state retaliation claims made under Conn. Gen. Stat. §
31-51q. See Daley v. Aetna Life & Cas. Co., 249 Conn. 766 (1999)(using federal "public concern" analysis to evaluate § 31-51q claim that invoked First Amendment and Conn. Const. art. I, § 4). For the same reasons as the first count of
the complaint, the motion to dismiss is being denied as to the plaintiff’s state law retaliation claim.
C. Rehabilitation Act The plaintiff claims the alleged retaliation also violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794. That statute protects a qualified individual with a disability from discrimination "solely by
reason of her or his disability." 29 U.S.C.A. § 794(a) (West 1999 & Supp. 2004). The defendant argues the plaintiff has alleged no disability under the Rehabilitation Act, and therefore cannot avail herself of the Act’s protection
against retaliation. Construing the complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, she claims she was coerced to resign because of her efforts on behalf of her students, who are "qualified individuals" under the Act. Under her
theory, the Act prohibited the defendant from retaliating against her for attempting to protect the rights of her disabled students.
7 Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act expressly incorporates the anti-retaliation provision of Section 503 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12203. See 29 U.S.C.A. § 794(d). That provision prohibits retaliation
against "any individual" because he or she opposes any act or practice made unlawful by the act. 42 U.S.C.A. § 12203 (West 1995 & Supp. 2004) (emphasis added). Courts have extended protection against retaliation under the
Rehabilitation Act to those who advocate on behalf of the disabled. See, e.g., Weixel v. Bd. of Educ. of N.Y., 287 F.3d 138, 149 (2d Cir. 2002) (threat to report disabled child’s mother to authorities due to her efforts to obtain home
schooling for child was example of retaliatory conduct); Weber ex rel. Samuel M. v. Cranston Sch. Comm., 212 F.3d 41, 49 (1st Cir. 2000) (Congress failed to limit the retaliation provision of the Rehabilitation Act "in apparent
recognition of the fact that disabled individuals may need assistance in vindicating their rights from individuals who may have their own claim to relief under the Act"); Lillbask ex rel. Mauclaire v. Sergi, 193 F.Supp.2d 503, 515 (D.
Conn. 2002) (Rehabilitation Act "has been construed on behalf of disabled people to include those on whom they depend to vindicate their rights") (citation omitted). Because the plaintiff has standing to claim retaliation based on her
efforts on behalf of her students, the motion to dismiss is being denied with respect to the third count of the complaint. 1Where defamation and false light claims arise from a single set of statements, "plaintiff can proceed upon
either theory, or both, although he may have but one recovery for a single instance of publicity.” Restatement (Second), Torts § 652E (1976); see also Goodrich v. Waterbury Republican-American, Inc., 188 Conn. 107, 131 (1982)
(incorporating false light claim of the Restatement into Connecticut law).
2"Except as otherwise provided by law, a political subdivision of the state shall not be liable for damages to persons or property caused by: (A) Acts or omissions of any employee which constitute criminal conduct, fraud, actual malice
or willful misconduct . . . ." Conn. Gen. Stat § 52-557n (a)(2)(A)(2). The plaintiff has cited no other statutory grounds for waiver of immunity. 8
D. Defamation/False Light In the fourth count of the complaint, the plaintiff alleges the statements of Ms. Miller and Ms. Young concerning the defendant’s unwillingness to rehire Ms. Sturm were either defamatory or invaded her privacy
by placing her in a false light.1 The plaintiff specifically and exclusively alleges that the statements were intentional and malicious. The defendant correctly argues that as a municipal entity, it is immune from liability for the
intentional torts of its employees under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-557n(a)(2).2 See Miner v. Town of Cheshire, 126 F. Supp. 2d 184, 199 (D. Conn. 2000). Accordingly, the motion to dismiss is being granted as to the fourth count of the
complaint. E. Wrongful Discharge The plaintiff argues that the defendant is also liable for wrongful discharge under Connecticut law. In order to state a claim for wrongful discharge under Connecticut law, a plaintiff 9 must identify
an “important and clearly articulated public policy.” See Thibodeau v. Design Group One Architects, LLC, 260 Conn. 691, 701 (2002). The statutory remedy under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-51q, invoked by the plaintiff here in the second count
of the complaint, precludes her from bringing a common-law wrongful discharge action based on the policy articulated by that statute. See Burnham v. Karl and Gelb, P.C., 252 Conn 153, 161- 62 (2000).
The plaintiff also cites the IDEA as a potential source of public policy, but does not allege that she is protected by the statute. The Connecticut Supreme Court has held that a plaintiff who is not entitled to protection under a
statute “cannot use the public policy embodied therein to support her claim of wrongful discharge based upon a violation of public policy.” Burnham, 252 Conn. at 182-83; see also Thibodeau, 260 Conn. at 706-07 (holding that plaintiff
could not invoke public policy against sex discrimination in wrongful discharge action where defendants were specifically exempted from Fair Employment Practices Act). The plaintiff cites no authority to support her assertion that
there is a “judicially conceived notion of public policy” capable of supporting a wrongful termination claim in this case. Id. at 699. The public policy exception to the general rule allowing unrestricted termination of an at-will
employment relationship is “a narrow one.” Parsons v. United Techs. Corp., 10 243 Conn. 66, 79 (1997). Connecticut courts have been reluctant to expand the scope of the exception absent a specific pleading of public policy. See
Thibodeau, 260 Conn. at 701 (listing cases where court rejected wrongful discharge claims for failure to meet public policy requirement). Because the plaintiff has failed to make a showing that there is a clearly articulated public
policy, the motion is being granted with respect to the fifth count of the complaint.
IV. Conclusion
For the reasons stated above, Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss [Doc. # 15] is hereby DENIED with respect counts one, two and three of the Complaint and hereby GRANTED with respect to counts four and five of the Complaint.
So ordered.
Dated this 29th day of March 2005, at Hartford, Connecticut.
/s/ Alvin W. Thompson
United States District Judge
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Districts and Teachers' Union Sue Over Bush Law
By SAM DILLON
Published: April 21, 2005
Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President Bush's signature education law, the nation's largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont sued the Department of Education yesterday,
accusing it of violating a passage in the law that says states cannot be forced to spend their own money to meet federal requirements.
Some legal scholars said that the union, the National Education Association, had assembled a compelling cause of action. Still, they added, since the case has few close precedents, it was difficult to judge the suit's prospects.
But it was clearly another headache for Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, who is trying to resolve a federal-state conflict over the law, known as No Child Left Behind, that has taken on new forms in recent days. A day
before the suit was filed, Utah's Republican-dominated Legislature approved the most far-reaching legislative challenge to the law.
Both the Utah measure, which requires educators there to spend as little state money as possible in carrying out the federal law's requirements, and the union lawsuit rely heavily on the same section of the federal law, which prohibits
federal officials from requiring states to allocate their own money to fulfill the law's mandates.
This month, Connecticut's attorney general also announced the intention to sue the department on the same grounds, saying that the testing the law requires costs far more than the money the state is given to pay for it. "If the facts
about educational spending are as the plaintiffs allege, then this lawsuit has good prospects of winning," said David B. Cruz, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California. "It is a strong case because the
statutory language is clear. The law says nothing in the act shall be interpreted to impose requirements that aren't being funded."
Since Ms. Spellings took office in January, she has pledged to improve relations with the nation's educators, which had frayed partly because of the law's demands for sweeping changes in local education practices. The law requires that
every racial and demographic group in every school must score higher on standardized tests every year. Falling short can bring sanctions, including the closing of schools.
Ms. Spellings has promised more flexibility, but those assurances have failed to blunt resistance to the law, even in strongly Republican states like Texas, which is defying a federal ruling on the testing of disabled children. "If I
were sitting in the White House, I would be concerned about the backlash against the law," said Patricia Sullivan, who tracks education politics closely as director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group. "It's growing,
and it's breaking out in many states."
In Utah yesterday, Tim Bridgewater, an aide to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, said that the governor would sign the bill that was approved on Tuesday. During the debate, several lawmakers protested the growth of federal influence
on Utah's schools, asserting that while Washington paid 8 cents of every education dollar in the state, the law had given it virtually total control.
In a statement yesterday, Secretary Spellings said that though most school decisions should be made locally, "the federal government plays an important role" by keeping educators' attention on minority students who lag behind. "States
across the nation who have embraced No Child Left Behind have shown progress," she said. "The same could be true in Utah, whose achievement gap between Hispanics and their peers is the third largest in the nation and has not improved
significantly in over a decade."
"Returning to the pre-N.C.L.B. days of fuzzy accountability and hiding children in averages will do nothing" to help Utah students, she added. Ms. Spellings did not comment on the lawsuit filed and financed by the National Education
Association, but her spokesman, Susan Aspey, called it "regrettable."
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At the Front of the Fight Over No Child Left Behind
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN Published: April 18, 2005
DANBURY, Conn., April 15 - In 2003, as Betty J. Sternberg was about to be named the first woman to run Connecticut's Department of Education, one local newspaper sized her up as an accomplished insider whose one drawback was her
"limited experience in the political arena."
The last few months have provided an unexpected crash course on politics, as Dr. Sternberg has emerged as a national leader in the fight against provisions of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law pushed by President Bush that requires
students to take annual proficiency tests.
Connecticut is challenging the frequency of those tests and the limited exemptions the law provides for more than 5,000 of the state's special education students and 28,000 who are learning English.
Seeking to persuade policymakers to be flexible in carrying out the law, Dr. Sternberg has taken her campaign to Washington - and anywhere else she can. In an address to students at Danbury High School on Friday, the topic was violence
in schools, but she managed to insert a few digs about the law into her remarks and discussed how it felt to be called un-American for taking on the Bush administration.
On Monday, she will make her case before the official who used the "un-American" description for opponents of the law - Margaret Spellings, the secretary of the United States Department of Education. Dr. Sternberg had tried for months
to get an appointment with Ms. Spellings, which was scheduled only after Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, appealed to the White House. Dr. Sternberg, 55, who was not well known outside Hartford until recently, will also meet with four
of the seven members of Connecticut's Congressional delegation.
Dr. Sternberg, a registered Democrat who grew up in Lower Manhattan as the only child of two teachers, said there is still much of the New Yorker in her, as her opponents are learning. "There's a feisty side to me," she said. She
graduated from Brandeis University in 1971 and earned a master's degree in math education from Teachers College at Columbia University the year after. After moving to Connecticut in 1975, she raised a son and a daughter, who are now in
their 20's, and completed the doctorate in education she had started at Stanford University. She taught for a few years, then moved up the ranks of the state's Education Department.
She does not hesitate to turn her experiences - her battle with weight, an attack by a gang member - into lessons for her commentaries and speeches. She talks freely about her 1987 divorce from Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor
at Yale, and the pressures that imposed on her career. She turned down conferences and speaking engagements that she now relishes.
Her recent marriage to Howard Stromberg, a businessman with three grown daughters, including one who qualified for special education services, gave her a peek into some of the system's shortcomings and insights into problems with the
No Child Left Behind law, such as its insistence that all but the most severely disabled students be given annual grade-level exams. Earlier this month, Ms. Spellings said she would consider allowing alternate tests for more special
education students.
"The federal government is going to have to understand that they're going to see more states raising the kind of questions Betty is raising now," said Gerald N. Tirozzi , who was Connecticut's education commissioner and then an
assistant secretary in the United States Department of Education during the Clinton administration.
Topping her grievances is the requirement that schools begin testing proficiency annually from the third through eighth grades, twice as often as Connecticut does now. Ms. Spellings has argued that schools cannot manage what they do
not measure, and that the yearly tests are a core principle of the new law. In a recent television appearance in which Connecticut's problems with the law were discussed, Ms. Spellings said it was un-American and demonstrated the "soft
bigotry of low expectations" to oppose tests that might help close the gap in performance between rich and poor, and white and nonwhite students. Dr. Sternberg took offense at the comments and demanded an apology. Ms. Spellings's
office said it received the demand on Wednesday and was preparing a response.
Dr. Sternberg says she has nothing against standardized testing, and notes that as the state Education Department's director of curriculum in 1990, she was part of an agency The Wall Street Journal singled out for praise for pushing
standardized testing to make schools more accountable. But she said that the state would glean little from additional testing and that the money it would cost - some $8 million - could be better spent in the classroom.
Not one to show up on Monday unprepared, Dr. Sternberg has already figured out that she may have something in common with Ms. Spellings, a longtime associate of President Bush whose biography notes that she is the first Education
Department secretary with school-age children. "Someone has told me that for a while, she was also a single parent," said Dr. Sternberg, whose information turned out to be correct. "So we have a little bit of common ground.”
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Study Finds Shortcoming in New Law on Education
By GREG WINTER
Published: April 13, 2005
The academic growth that students experience in a given school year has apparently slowed since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the education law that was intended to achieve just the opposite, a new study has found. In both
reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No
Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.
That finding casts doubt on whether schools can meet the law's mandate that all students be academically proficient by 2014. In fact, to realize the goal of universal proficiency, the study said, students will have to make as much as
three times the progress they are currently making.
The study was conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association, which develops tests for about 1,500 school districts in 43 states. To complete it, the group drew upon its test data for more than 320,000 students in 23 states, a
sample that it calls "broad but not nationally representative," in part because the biggest cities, not being Northwest clients, were not included. One of the more ominous findings, the researchers said, is that the achievement gap
between white and nonwhite students could soon widen. Closing the gap is one of the driving principles of the law, and so far states say they have made strides toward shrinking it.
But minority students with the same test scores as their white counterparts at the beginning of the school year ended up falling behind by the end of it, the study found. Both groups made academic progress, but the minority students
did not make as much, it concluded, an outcome suggesting that the gaps in achievement will worsen.
"Right now it's kind of a hidden effect that we would expect to see expressed in the next couple of years," said Gage Kingsbury, Northwest's director of research. "At that point, I think people will be disappointed with what N.C.L.B.
has done."
The findings diverge from those of other recent studies, including a survey last month by the Center on Education Policy, a research group. It found that a significant majority of state education officials reported widespread academic
progress and a narrowing of the achievement gap. "This new study should give everybody pause before they run off and say, 'We're marching to victory,' " said Jack Jennings, the center's president. "Maybe we're not."
Kerri Briggs, a senior policy analyst at the Education Department, said the Northwest study had both encouraging and worrisome aspects, but added that she would have to examine it more closely before passing judgment. Some critics
speculated that because the study lacked data from big cities, which have large populations of minority students and have posted significant gains on test scores in recent years, it might have overstated or mischaracterized what was
happening with the achievement gap.
"It's hard to know how much you can extrapolate from this study," said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Education Trust, which released its own report in January showing mixed results on student performance and achievement gaps. "I
don't think you want to make generalizations about what's going on nationwide."
Still, the Northwest study tracked student performance at a level that others did not, a factor that may help explain why some of its findings appear unorthodox. Rather than relying on test scores at just one point in the year, the
Northwest study looked at how students fared in the fall and then again in the spring, in an effort to see how much they had learned during the year. With this approach, Northwest found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up
from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a
time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.
But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel
compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle.
The practice may leave teachers with less time to focus on students who are either far below or far above the proficiency mark, the researchers said, making it less likely for the whole class to move forward as rapidly as before No
Child Left Behind set the agenda.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Experiment Begun in New York Is Transformed in Miami Schools
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: April 13, 2005
MIAMI
PARTLY wary and partly intrigued, Kennetha Jones stepped into Lakeview Elementary School here for the first time last December. She eyed the mismatched chairs and wobbly desks. She heard the shouts of arguing and fighting echoing down
the halls. And with the practiced perspective of a veteran teacher, she could tell that nearly all the children were working at the lowest reading level for their grades, and she knew they all couldn't be that slow by nature.
Mrs. Jones was not naïve about urban education. She wasn't exactly teaching in a country club at Hialeah Gardens Elementary, then her current school. It ran well above capacity, dealt with an immigrant population, and had
three-quarters of its students on free or reduced lunch. But it was a place of possibilities, with a butterfly garden and a new playground in bright crayon colors, with an active PTA to endow academic medals and an A on the Florida
state report card.
Yet, after five satisfying years at Hialeah Gardens, it suddenly seemed as if everybody was trying to convince Mrs. Jones, 40, to transfer to Lakeview, that sinkhole. The principals of both schools wanted her to do it. Mrs. Jones's
brother and daughter, both educators, wanted her to do it. Above all, the new superintendent of schools in Miami and Dade County, Rudy Crew, wanted her, or at least people like her, to do it.
Under a new program devised with the teachers' union, Dr. Crew was offering 20 percent more pay for 20 percent more hours for all teachers willing to work in the 39 most-troubled schools in the county, the ones he had designated as the
"School Improvement Zone." He liked to describe the plan as "an internal Peace Corps."
So Mrs. Jones listened to him and the others and transferred into Lakeview, one of 10 incoming teachers on a faculty of 33, replacing 10 others who had retired, shifted schools, or been fired. All of that turnover had been accomplished
by Jeffrey Hernandez, a principal installed by Dr. Crew after he demoted the previous principal, along with eight other principals of failing schools.
There Mrs. Jones sat, then, on a recent afternoon, leading a session of guided reading for eight first graders who were already, in her estimation, two years behind in their reading skills. As she patiently steered them through a story
about a red fox, paying special attention to phonics, she helped them sound out words as simple as "hers," "getting," and "fed."
She had been up since 4:45 in the morning, and already had done a math review session for 40 pupils who volunteered to come to school by 7 a.m., 90 minutes before the official class day began. Over the course of the week, she also
would serve as the mentor to a less-experienced colleague, observing and critiquing a reading lesson before delivering a model version of it herself. She generally headed back home at 8:30 p.m.
"When you come to a school like this, you have to come with your heart," Mrs. Jones said during a brief break. "For so many of these children, you're the only stability they have. As soon as you can show them you care about them, about
their learning, they come to you like sponges. For me, it's about more than the money."
The roots of the Miami experiment go back to New York City, where Dr. Crew served as schools chancellor in the middle to late 1990's. There, he identified and took direct control over chronically low-performing schools, putting them
into a "chancellor's district" that is a direct precursor to Miami's "School Improvement Zone." He incorporated diagnostic testing and a traditional, phonics-based reading curriculum, as he has in Miami. The schools, as later studies
showed, improved markedly.
But Dr. Crew was a prophet without honor in his adopted land. The mayor at that time, Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose education policy basically consisted of putting public dollars into tuition vouchers for private schools, drove the
chancellor out of town with a campaign of public criticism. .
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Principal Fired for Failing to Report Sex Assault Case
By JAMES DAO
Published: April 13, 2005
A high school principal in Columbus, Ohio, has been fired and three assistant principals suspended without pay because they failed to notify the police last month about accusations that a 16-year-old special-education student had been
sexually assaulted in the school auditorium by a group of boys, one of whom videotaped the incident, school officials said yesterday.
The principal and her assistants not only failed to report the incident but also urged the girl's father to avoid calling the police out of concerns that reporters would become aware of the assault, according to statements given to
school investigators.
The police are investigating four teenagers in connection with the incident, a spokeswoman for the Columbus police, Sherry Mercurio, said yesterday, but no charges have been filed.
"It's an alleged assault that we're looking into," Ms. Mercurio said. A spokesman for the school district declined to say whether the boys, whose names were not released, had been suspended. The boys, all younger than 18, were not at
school yesterday, he said.
One of the three assistant principals, Richard Watson, said he had found the videotape and then viewed it with other administrators. Their conclusion, they told investigators, was that there had been no coercion.
The district released statements this week from an inquiry that described a chaotic, vacillating response to the girl's complaint and an overarching concern about the tape by the top administrators at the 835-student building, Mifflin
High School, on the northeastern side of the city. The district's investigation into the incident, which occurred on the afternoon of March 9, was first reported by The Columbus Dispatch.
One witness's statement said a boy pulled the girl onto the auditorium stage, ordered her to be quiet, pushed her to her knees and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
"If you scream, I'll have all my boys punch you," the boy told her and then hit her in the face, causing her mouth to bleed, a student told the investigators.
The girl told a special-education teacher minutes after the incident that she had been forced to have oral sex with two boys behind a curtain on the stage while at least two others watched. She said the boys stopped only after someone
arrived in the auditorium and scared them off.
The girl, who has a speech defect, "just kept saying she was scared," the special-education teacher told the investigators.
Another special-education teacher, Lisa Upshaw, told the investigators that administrators did not call the girl's father immediately after learning about the attack.
When Mrs. Upshaw took it upon herself to call the father, Mr. Watson urged him not to come pick up his daughter until after the end of the school day "to avoid a confrontation with the suspects," Mrs. Upshaw told the investigators.
When the father arrived, he asked whether the school administration was going to call the police, Mrs. Upshaw said in her statement. "Mr. Watson said, 'No, we don't want to do that. We don't want the police,' " she told the
investigators.
The father then stepped into the hallway and called the police on his cell phone.
Mr. Watson and other administrators told investigators that the principal, Regina B. Crenshaw, had also advised the father to avoid calling the police, the investigation report says. Mrs. Crenshaw recommended that the father return the
next morning and report the incident to a police officer who was usually stationed at the school but who was not there on March 9, the report added.
"Do not call the police; let our officer handle it tomorrow, and you will be happy with the results," Mr. Watson said Mrs. Crenshaw told the father, the investigation report says.
Mrs. Crenshaw then saw the father out of the school and left for the day, several administrators said in their statements. That evening, the father returned with the police, who inspected the auditorium. After Mrs. Crenshaw learned
that the police had begun an investigation, she notified her superiors about the incident, according to the investigation report. Mrs. Crenshaw, who had worked for the district since 1980 and had been the principal at Mifflin for a
year, did not return calls to her home. Mr. Watson declined to comment.
In his statement to investigators, Mr. Watson said he had told the father not to call 911 out of concerns that the police dispatcher's radio calls would be picked up by television news reporters, which might cause the girl "further
mental trauma." But he said he did not try to dissuade the father from calling the police on a non-emergency line.
Mr. Watson and two other assistant principals, Suzie Retterer-Helfrich and Vincent D. Clarno, were suspended without pay. They will be reassigned when they return to work on Tuesday, a spokesman for the school system, Andrew Marcelain,
said.
"You failed to demonstrate the leadership required of a Columbus Public Schools building administrator by your evident disregard for the victim's safety and lack of sensitivity to both the victim and parent," Superintendent Gene T.
Harris wrote in letter to the assistant principals notifying them of their suspensions.
Ms. Retterer-Helfrich said in an interview yesterday that she was not involved in the deliberations over how to handle the girl's complaint because she had been administering a test at the time.
Mr. Clarno could not be reached.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Do IQ Scores Belong In IEPs?
Our daughter has speech language processing problems. This year, the IEP team
included the results of an old WISC (more than two years old) in her IEP. This is
the first time IQ scores have been included in her IEP. We disagreed but the IEP
team insisted.
The results of the old IQ test are very different than prior evaluations. Her Verbal,
Performance and Full Scale IQ scores were significantly lower on this evaluation.
Two months ago, we had an independent evaluation done. The results of this
evaluation are in line with earlier testing. When the IEP team insisted that IQ test
scores must be included in the IEP, we asked that the recent test results be
included.
The IEP team refused to include the new evaluation results. They agreed to
include a few statements from the private evaluator’s report because these
statements are "interesting."
We are concerned that if the old IQ test scores are included in her IEP (Verbal,
Performance & Full Scale IQ scores, no subtest scores), those working with our
daughter will have lower expectations for her and she will be treated as a 'slow
learner'.
Answer
IDEA does not include any requirement about including a child's IQ scores in the
IEP.
Section 300.347(a)(1) requires that the IEP for each child with a disability include -
(1) A statement of the child’s present levels of educational performance, including-
(i) How the child’s disability affects the child’s involvement and progress in the
general curriculum (i.e., the same curriculum as for non-disabled children) . . .
IQ Scores, Low Expectations & Letter Writing
Did you know that IQ tests often measure the adverse impact of the disability on
the child’s achievement, not true intelligence?
Did you know that Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQ scores are composites
of several subtests that measure different areas? Subtest scores often provide
important information because they can pinpoint specific problems that need
further examination.
You are correct to be concerned about low expectations. When IDEA was
reauthorized in 1997, Congress wrote:
"Implementation of this Act has been impeded by low expectations, and an
insufficient focus on applying replicable research on proven methods of teaching
and learning . . ." (See Section 1400: Findings & Purposes)
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Connecticut to Sue U.S. Over Cost of Testing Law
By Sam Dillion
Published: April 6, 2005
The State of Connecticut will sue the federal government over President Bush's
signature education law, arguing that it forces Connecticut to spend millions on
new tests without providing sufficient additional aid, the state's attorney general
announced yesterday.
Although a handful of local school districts, in Illinois, Texas and other states,
have filed legal challenges to the law, known as No Child Left Behind, Connecticut
would be the first state to do so. Its suit would open a new chapter in a struggle
between states and the federal government that has seen legislatures lodge
various protests over the law, and at least one state education commissioner, in
Texas, issue an order this year that appeared to directly contradict a federal ruling.
Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said he was
announcing his plans now because he was going to be contacting attorneys
general in other states, in the hope that they would join the suit. He said he
expected to file within weeks.
"The federal government's approach with this law is illegal and unconstitutional,"
Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview. He declined to predict whether any of his
colleagues in other states would join his action, but he said he was finding "fertile
ground."
"There is burgeoning unhappiness among both Republicans and Democrats," Mr.
Blumenthal said. "The dissatisfaction is felt across the country and is across the
board, politically. So I can pretty much call any of my colleagues and get an
earful."
Legal scholars said that previous lawsuits brought against the federal
government over so-called unfunded mandates had had mixed success. But
Connecticut's suit could gain traction because the No Child Left Behind law
includes a passage, sponsored by Republicans during the Clinton administration,
that forbids federal officials to require states to spend their own money to carry
out the federal policies outlined in the law. The federal law requires Connecticut to
spend some $112.2 million to expand its testing program and to help local districts
carry out other federal requirements over the next three years, while Washington
has appropriated only $70.6 million, leaving the state with an unfunded burden of
$41.6 million, Connecticut's commissioner of education, Betty J. Sternberg, said in
a report issued last month. In a statement issued yesterday, D J Nordquist, a
federal Department of Education spokeswoman, said Connecticut had based its
planned suit on flawed accounting and she called Mr. Blumenthal's
announcement "a sad day for students in Connecticut."
"The basis for the state's lawsuit appears to rest on a flawed cost study of the No
Child Left Behind act that creates inflated projections built upon questionable
estimates and misallocation of costs," Ms. Nordquist said. She added, "It is very
disappointing that officials in Connecticut are spending their time hiring lawyers
while Connecticut's students are suffering from one of the largest achievement
gaps in the nation."
Connecticut is not the only state to have charged that the federal government is
not paying for all the requirements it is imposing on school systems under the
three-year-old No Child Left Behind law. And many states also complain that the
federal law interferes with states' rights and their own efforts to improve schools.
In Utah, the House of Representatives, for example, has passed a measure that
would require Utah officials to give higher priority to the state's educational goals
than to the federal law, and the Utah Senate is to vote on the measure at a special
session this month.
Connecticut currently tests public school children in grades four, six, eight and
10, while the federal law requires all states to administer standardized tests in
every school year from three through eight. Expanding Connecticut's testing
program to cover grades three, five and seven will force the state's Department of
Education to spend $8 million of its own money over the next three years, Dr.
Sternberg said in a report to Connecticut's General Assembly last month.
In preparing the lawsuit, Mr. Blumenthal said he had relied heavily on Dr.
Sternberg's educational views. "I'm the lawyer, she's the educator, and we have a
good partnership," Mr. Blumenthal said. "Our legal action will vindicate the
policies that she has advocated so eloquently in recent months."
In a letter to Margaret Spellings in January after her designation as education
secretary but before her confirmation, Dr. Sternberg noted Connecticut's
"effective 20-year history of testing in alternate years," and requested that
Connecticut be relieved of the requirement to expand the testing. Annual testing,
Dr. Sternberg wrote, "will cost millions of dollars and tell us nothing that we do not
already know about our students' achievement."
In a reply faxed to Dr. Sternberg on Feb. 28, Secretary Spellings refused that
request, saying that "annual testing is important." The secretary followed up with
a March 20 opinion article in The Hartford Courant that chided Dr. Sternberg for
requesting the waiver, saying many Connecticut students "would welcome the
chance to be tested only every other year, but the adults in charge of their
education surely know better."
That article angered many Connecticut educators and parents, to judge from
letters to the editor and e-mail messages received at the state's Department of
Education, and one of those offended was Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, who
wrote Secretary Spellings on Thursday.
"As Connecticut's governor, and as a parent who deeply values high-quality
education for every child, I was offended by your commentary," Governor Rell's
letter said. "You disparaged the knowledge and judgment of Connecticut
educators who - with the full, bipartisan support of governors and legislatures
over more than 20 years' time - have conducted a highly effective student testing
program since 1984."
Governor Rell also said Secretary Spellings's Feb. 28 letter "included incorrect
information, data stated in misleading ways and a suggestion that Connecticut
might consider not adhering to federal law" and was "hardly becoming to the
federal Secretary of Education."
Yesterday, the governor's spokesman, Dennis Schain, said: "On the one hand the
Department of Education fails to provide states with the funds needed to
implement the law and on the other, it resists requests for flexibility. "Governor
Rell understands there are reasons for bringing the lawsuit but believes the best
solution for our children is for the federal government to grant states flexibility."
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What are mistakes school districts make in dealing
with the needs of children with disabilities and their
parents? Partial Interview With Peter Wright
Question: What are some common complaints from parents about special
education programs?
Wright: The two most common issues are related to a school's refusal to either
provide services, or an inability and or unwillingness to provide quality services.
Sometimes parents consult with me because the school refused to find a child
eligible for special education services. If services are provided, the parents
consult with me because the school is providing services that are not appropriate
and the child is falling further and further behind and is not receiving educational
benefit.
Typically, a child with a learning disability is placed into a "resource learning
disabilities class." In too many cases that I see, after several years, the child has
made little or no progress in the acquisition of basic skills since entering the
special education program.
Another problem that drives parents to seek help is schools' insisting on using
the same educational method that they have used for years, regardless of whether
the child is learning and benefiting from that approach. This is a common problem
for children with autism and children with cochlear implants [which allow deaf
children to hear.] I've had cases where schools insist on teaching sign language
to children who have cochlear implants -- and refuse to teach these children to
listen and speak. Bizarre and absurd!
Question:: What advice would you give people about navigating the maze of
special education services?
Wright: Parents must obtain a comprehensive evaluation of their child from an
evaluator or evaluators in the private sector. I often consult with parents who
relied on the subjective, well-meaning opinions of educators about the wonderful
progress the child is making. After the child is evaluated in the private sector and
the parents understand the application of standard scores, percentile ranks, and
the bell curve, the parents see that the child's percentile rank scores have
dropped.
Parents also must learn to control their emotions when dealing with school
officials. They must learn the basics of negotiation, how to write letters and create
paper trails, and how to measure their child's educational progress with norm
referenced testing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Articles for March 2005
Study Finds Poor Performance
by Nation's Education Schools
By GREG WINTER
Published: March 15, 2005
American colleges and universities do such a poor job of training the nation's
future teachers and school administrators that 9 of every 10 principals consider
the graduates unprepared for what awaits them in the classroom, a new survey
has found.
Nearly half the elementary- and secondary-school principals surveyed said the
curriculums at schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, lacked
academic rigor and were outdated, at times using materials decades older than
the children whom teachers are now instructing. Beyond that, more than 80
percent of principals said the education schools were too detached from what
went on at local elementary and high schools, a factor that made for a rift between
educational theory and practice.
"I thought there were problems in the field," said Arthur E. Levine, president of
College at Columbia University, who is to release the findings in a report
today. "But I didn't realize the depth of the problems."
In the report, Dr. Levine - who when interviewed described the program at his own
school as strong but "absolutely not" ideal - said he and other experts who
worked on the study had focused their efforts on finding education schools
capable of producing excellent principals, superintendents and other
administrators. They found none in the entire country.
Much of the problem, the report said, stems from what Dr. Levine called "the
consumer mentality" dominating the nation's education schools. All states, and
nearly all public school districts within them, award higher salaries to teachers
who take additional courses and earn advanced degrees. One result of this has
been an "army of unmotivated" educators looking for extra credits "in the easiest
ways possible" during their off hours, the report said.
The universities, in turn, capitalize on this demand by viewing their education
schools as "cash cows," setting low admissions standards and offering "quickie
degrees" instead of investing in a quality curriculum, the report said. In fact, while
criticism has often focused on the questionable academic qualifications of many
teachers, the report found that school administrators typically had substantially
lower scores on the Graduate Record Examination than the teachers they
supervise.
Principals and superintendents need to be better trained than ever, the report
contends, a necessity that puts added pressure on already faltering education
schools: federal law is demanding that students make measurable academic
progress; where local districts once set the bar, more states have adopted
uniform exit exams that students must pass in order to graduate; and the
population itself is changing, with more immigrants whose English is limited.
But others contend that these same conditions are precisely why education
schools cannot be held wholly responsible for the failures of their graduates. In
the era of federal demands for quick and consistent test-based results from even
the most troubled districts, some defenders argue that education schools have
little power to set the tone of what goes on in the nation's classrooms, and
therefore are often inappropriately blamed for it.
"We've got to blame someone, so we blame the education schools - easy target,"
said Theodore R. Sizer, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Though these schools are far from exemplary, "we're asked to prepare people to
go out into a field where their chances of survival are limited; it's like training
kamikaze pilots."
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Conquering the Shame and the Fear, Then the Syllables
By MELANIE D. G. KAPLAN
Published: March 9, 2005
The New York Times
BOSTON - "Did you do any avoiding behaviors last night?" Adriana DiGrande
asked the young men at a conference table at Emerson College. The men, ages 17
to 29, have stuttered since they were children, and in late January, they were
wrapping up a four-week program to help them change lifelong habits and feel
more confident.
One by one, the students answered Ms. DiGrande's question about avoidance, a
term that describes any behavior used by stutterers to deal with their speech
disorder. People who stutter often do not answer a ringing phone or order their
own meals at restaurants.
"Last night I had to call you, and I was hoping to get your voicemail," said Dan
Tichacek, 24, from Wilbraham, Mass., stuttering every few words. "When I heard
you answer, I was tempted to hang up, because I hate talking on the phone." Mr.
Tichacek was taking time off from his job as an overnight security guard - a shift
that does not require much talking - but his dream is to manage a hotel.
Ms. DiGrande told Mr. Tichacek, "O.K., your job today is, if you feel the stuttering,
don't run away from it."
Part group therapy, part speech boot camp, the New England Fluency Program
teaches students how to use breath, eye contact and timing to improve their
fluency. Students also learn about the "pullout," a technique that calmly manages
a moment of stuttering rather than pushing forward with words that do not want to
come out.
The program is offered several times a year at Emerson and at Boston University,
for adults and children. It costs $4,200 and includes six months of weekly follow-up in person. Students are responsible for their own housing and generally pay
their own way, with the exception of limited scholarship support or insurance
coverage.
When she started the program five years ago, Ms. DiGrande defined success as a
97 percent fluency rate - only three syllables per 100 as stutters - or better by the
last day of class. Now, she looks more for a change in attitude.
"Success means confident, comfortable communication," said Ms. DiGrande, a
speech pathologist who teaches at Boston University and has been working
exclusively with people who stutter since 1982. "The fear of stuttering is the core
issue here. Getting through the shame is perhaps the most difficult part, but also
the most important."
Stuttering affects 5 percent of children, according to the Stuttering Foundation of
America. But 75 to 80 percent of them outgrow their stutter. Of the 1 percent of the
population left stuttering, there are about four times as many men as women. And
it is common for a child to reach his late teens without ever bringing up the issue
with family or friends because of his embarrassment.
On the first day of the program, Ms. DiGrande videotaped each of the participants.
Leo Sousa, 29, a severe stutterer who moved to Lowell, Mass., from Brazil two
years ago, looked into the camera and talked about his stuttering, in a whispery,
stammering voice.
"I get out of breath; I have to open my chest," he said, gesturing with his arms.
"It's like not having control." For several years, Mr. Sousa, who has dark curly hair
and wears a small silver hoop in his ear, played the guitar in a touring band in
Brazil, and he plans to go to Berklee College of Music next year. He says that as
an artist, he is full of ideas that he aches to express, but he has always backed out
of conversations because of his speech impediment.
Later in the week, Mr. Sousa called some flower shops, stuttering badly: "Hello,
my name is Leo, and I stutter. Do you sell long-stemmed roses?" The technique
he used, called advertising, forces students to be open about their stuttering. The
theory is that once they have declared their stutter, there is no need to hide it or be
ashamed of it.
"I believe strongly that one has to change their relationship to stuttering," Ms.
DiGrande said. "If we can take the emotional power out of that moment of
stuttering - so they can experience it in a calm way - they can actually treat it."
People who stutter also experience fear - not only of stuttering but of a negative
response from listeners. In the program, students talk about comments that have
been hurtful to them over the years. Mr. Sousa said his father, who died when he
was 14, used to be impatient. "I'd say 'v-v-vase,' " he recalled, "and he'd say,
'What is v-v-vase? Just open your mouth and speak.' So I learned to talk less
around him."
Ms. DiGrande tells her students that once their speech improves, family members
might think it will be stutter-free in the future, an unrealistic expectation. So she
teaches them a trick: When someone compliments you on your speech,
deliberately stutter through "thank you" so that person realizes that you do not
expect your speech to be perfect, nor should they.
Along with making more than 100 phone calls - which are monitored, recorded
and evaluated - participants work with Emerson graduate students in speech
pathology, using voice monitor machines, and they practice asking for directions
at downtown stores. Assignments include writing letters to their stutter and
drawing their stutter.
The final assignment of the program is to give a speech. The night before the
presentation, Lucas Benedeti, a 17-year-old from Panama City, Panama, called Ms.
DiGrande at 10:30 - she often asks students to call her in the evening, for phone
practice - and read his three-minute speech on her voicemail.
Before friends and family gathered to hear the students' speeches, Mr. Sousa,
whose voice has become louder and stronger, made some practice calls to a
limousine company. He asked several questions about rentals, with only one
stutter.
"Beautiful!" Ms. DiGrande said, putting her arm on his shoulder.
Mr. Sousa says he never realized speaking could be pleasurable, rather than
something to avoid. For the first time, he is enjoying phone conversations. In the
past few days, he had talked to his fiancée's aunt, his 6-year-old son and his
mother, in Brazil. "She told me, 'Oh, you sound great,' " Mr. Sousa said. "And I
said, 'T-t-t-thank you.' "
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sobriety Tests Are Becoming Part of the School Day
By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY
March 3, 2005
New York Times
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. - For years, schools across the country have deployed
breath analyzers at proms, pep rallies and other after-school events to catch
students who arrived drunk or smuggled in alcohol.
After some resistance and fevered debate, student advocates and even lawyers
gradually came to accept that schools were within their rights to use every means
to ensure that students were not toting six-packs and liquor bottles to after-school, night and weekend events.
Quietly though, a few districts around the country, from Indiana to Connecticut to
Long Island, have begun to integrate breath-testing devices into the regular
school day, a move that adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing struggle between
students' privacy rights and a school's duty to limit drug and alcohol abuse.
Schools say they need to ensure that no students are drinking in class. Civil
rights lawyers worry that high school students pulled out of class and forced to
take a breath-alcohol test could be unfairly stigmatized for goofy or strange
behavior.
Manufacturers of breath analyzers say they have sold their devices to thousands
of schools across the country, but it is impossible to say how many districts have
started using breath-alcohol tests during the school day. Officials with the Office
of National Drug Control Policy and the National School Boards Association said
they knew of no statistics tracking schools' use of breath analyzers. But lawyers
who argue cases involving students' civil liberties said that tests during the
school day are rare, and represent untested ground for most districts.
On the East End of Long Island, the East Hampton School District is venturing
into this terrain with a proposal to use breath analyzers on students suspected of
being intoxicated in high school.
District officials said they grew concerned after hearing of rampant student
drinking. Teenagers were caught drinking on school trips to Costa Rica and Italy.
A drunk student vomited on a bus on the way to a field trip. Then there were
students showing up in class drunk, sometimes after having alcohol at lunch.
Things seemed to be getting out of hand, even for East Hampton, a summer oasis
for wealthy New Yorkers that reverts to a rural small town in the off-season where
teenagers can get away with holding beach bonfire parties where alcohol flows
freely, and year-round residents describe 16 as the de facto drinking age.
So, to stop what seemed like a swell of student drinking, school administrators
this winter proposed administering breath analyzers to students while high
school is in session. Any student suspected of being drunk in class would be
tested by a trained staff member, and not a police officer, board officials said.
Results showing alcohol consumption would mean suspension. Refusing to take
a test would be seen as an admission of guilt.
In central Connecticut, officials in the Avon School District are writing a plan
similar to East Hampton's. A school district near South Bend, Ind. has had the
policy in place for several years. Other districts around the country may well use
their breath analyzers during the school day, even if their policies were originally
intended for events outside of school.
But on Long Island, only one other school district - the Sayville School District -
already has an in-school breath-alcohol test policy, and in that case
administrators say they have not tested a single student in the seven years it has
been in effect. Still, they say it has merit. "It's really preventative," said Geri
Sullivan-Keck, Sayville's assistant superintendent for curriculum.
Prof. Bernard James of Pepperdine University, who specializes in constitutional
law, said such policies easily survive legal challenges, but often crumple under
community opposition. "In policy, it's an extraordinarily controversial issue," he
said.
News of the plan has roiled East Hampton. Last month, parents and teachers
crowded a school board meeting to cheer the proposal. The op-ed pages of The
East Hampton Star overflowed with letters, many of them calling the plan heavy-handed and invasive.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
High Court to Hear Md. Special-Ed CaseSchools Must Prove Adherence to Disabilities Law, Couple's Suit
Asserts
By Tim Craig and Miranda S. Spivack
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page A06
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear the case of a Montgomery County
couple who contend that school officials, if challenged, must prove they are
meeting their legal obligations to special education students.
The justices will try to decide whether lower courts should place the burden of
proof on schools or the plaintiff -- presumably the parents -- when a party sues
under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The law requires that public
schools grant every disabled child a "free appropriate special education" tailored
to the child's specific needs.
The case, which has taken a tortuous, seven-year path through the educational
and legal systems, could have a major impact on millions of parents and their
children with special needs. It involves Brian Schaffer, who in 1997 was a seventh-
grader with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and was attending a private
school that offered no special education programs.
When Jocelyn Schaffer, Brian's mother, sought to enroll him at Herbert Hoover
Middle School, the county offered a specially designed curriculum for Brian called
an Individual Education Program. It called for 15.3 hours of special education and
45 minutes of speech therapy each week. After the parents expressed concern
about that school's fairly large classes, according to court filings, the system
offered the same individualized program at Robert Frost Middle School, where
classes were smaller.
The parents rejected both offers as inadequate and instead enrolled Brian in the
McLean School of Maryland, a private school in Potomac. They subsequently
requested a due process hearing, available under the disabilities act, during
which they sought reimbursement for school tuition.
An administrative law judge ruled that the Schaffers had to prove that the school
system's plan for their son was lacking. The parents then filed suit in U.S. District
Court, which ruled that the burden of proof rested with the schools. The case was
returned to the administrative law judge, who ordered the school system to
reimburse the parents for part of their son's private school tuition.
The Montgomery County school system appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the 4th Circuit, which ruled that the burden rests with whatever party is filing the
suit, effectively ruling against the Schaffers, who appealed to the Supreme Court.
The case is being closely watched by school systems and special education
advocates. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act offers no clear standard
for how such cases should be resolved. Various appellate courts have come
down on different sides of the question.
"We regard this as an important civil rights case," said William H. Hurd, the
Schaffers's attorney. "We believe the implications are very large."
Jerry D. Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County schools, said the case
"demonstrates the overwhelming litigious nature that has evolved under special
education in which school systems have been presumed at fault until proven
otherwise."
Weast said most school districts settle similar cases to avoid litigation.
Montgomery County, which has about 15,000 students enrolled in Individual
Education Programs, is contesting the issue, he said, because "educational
services should be decided in an appropriate way based on the educational
needs of the student, not the whim of a lawyer."
Last year, 26 Montgomery cases were sent to an administrative law judge for
mediation, according to the State Department of Education.
The National School Boards Association, which represents the nation's 15,000
school systems, backs Montgomery's' position that the burden should not rest
with the schools if a parent brings a suit.
"The bottom line is that there are plenty of protections in the law, and you should
follow the general rule that the challenging party has the burden of proof," said
Naomi Gittins a staff attorney for the association.
Attorneys for the Schaffer family argue that it is the school system's responsibility
to prove that it is adhering to federal law.
"This is a case where the school district has an affirmative obligation to develop a
plan for the child," Hurd said. "It ought to be willing to step up to the plate and
explain why it believes it has met its obligation."
As the case was wending its way to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of
Justice under the Clinton administration filed a brief supporting the Schaffers.
Hurd said he was hopeful that the Bush administration would maintain that
position at the high court. Justice Department officials did not return phone calls
yesterday seeking comment.
_____________________________________________________________________
Articles for February 2005
Breaking News!
U.S. Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Burden of Proof Case!
Today, February 22, 2005, the U. S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear Brian
Schaffer's appeal of an adverse ruling from the U. S. Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit. This decision assigns the burden of proof to the party who initiates
a special education due process hearing.
Split Among Circuits
In the decision, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit noted, "Other
circuits are split - and splintered in reasoning - on this question. Three circuits
assign the burden to the parents, and four (perhaps five) assign it to the school
system."
2-1 Decision
In their 2-1 decision on July 29, 2004, the majority held that:
"In sum, the IDEA does not allocate the burden of proof, and we see no reason to
depart from the general rule that a party initiating a proceeding bears that burden.
Congress was aware that school systems might have an advantage in
administrative proceedings brought by parents to challenge IEPs. To avoid this
problem, Congress provided a number of procedural safeguards for parents, but
assignment of the burden of proof to school systems was not one of them.
Because Congress took care in specifying specific procedural protections
necessary to implement the policy goals of the Act, we decline to go further, at
least insofar as the burden of proof is concerned. Accordingly, we hold that
parents who challenge an IEP have the burden of proof in the administrative
hearing. We reverse the judgment of the district court and remand for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion."
Judge Luttig, in his dissent, wrote:
"I fear that, in reaching the contrary conclusion, the majority has been unduly
influenced by the fact that the parents of the disabled student in this case have
proven to be knowledgeable about the educational resources available to their
son and sophisticated (if yet unsuccessful) in their pursuit of these resources. If
so, it is regrettable. These parents are not typical, and any choice regarding the
burden of proof should not be made in the belief that they are. For the vast
majority of parents whose children require the benefits and protections provided
in the IDEA, the specialized language and technical educational analysis with
which they must familiarize themselves as a consequence of their child's
disability will likely be obscure, if not bewildering. By the same token, most of
these parents will find the educational program proposed by the school district
resistant to challenge: the school district will have better information about the
resources available to it, as well as the benefit of its experience with other
disabled children. With the full mix of parents in mind, I believe that the proper
course is to assign the burden of proof in due process hearings to the school
district."
"I respectfully dissent."
_____________________________________________________________________
In my district, special ed kids are sent home from school
early - 30 minutes to an hour earlier than "regular ed"
students. This doesn't seem right. When I asked about it, I
was told, "All special ed students are released early" and
"That's the rule."
Is this legal?
Wrightslaw Answers
No. When your district says, "All special ed students are released early - that's
the rule," they are discriminating against these children and violating the law.
What can you do?
When the parents unite and work together, they are a powerful force. Here's how
one group of parents tackled the problem. A group of parents in Tidewater
Virginia formed a parent advocacy group called PIER.
PIER knew that their school district routinely sent disabled kids home early.
Working together, members of PIER came up with a Creative Solution to the
"transportation problems" in their district. This is how they handled it.
An OCR Complaint
In December 1998, PIER filed a compliant with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
Download the OCR COMPLAINT: http://www.wrightslaw.com/law/pleadings/va.
vabch.pier.ocr.pdf
In their Complaint, they alleged that Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS)
discriminated against students with disabilities. Here are some excerpts from the
Complaint:
"Students with disabilities were routinely dismissed from school before the end of
the instructional day, required to use separate bus loading and unloading areas,
arrived to school late in the morning, rode segregated buses, and endured
unreasonably lengthy bus rides."
"Students with disabilities who are dismissed before the end of the school day are
given no meaningful opportunity to cover or makeup the instruction, knowledge
or benefits they have been denied due to early dismissal."
"Consistent with School Board policy, nondisabled students receive a minimum
of 6.5 hours of instructional time per day. In violation of this same School Board
policy, students with disabilities are guaranteed only 5.5 hours. "
The Evidence: Parent Observations
PIER supported their claims by conducting a series of observation at the
schools:
"To document the early departure of students from schools, members of the
community conducted organized observations of school bus departures from
school property at 39 randomly selected VBCPS schools.
Documented observations by PIER and data provided by VBCPS revealed that at
35 of the 39 observed schools, school buses transporting only students with
disabilities departed from schools before the ending time of the instructional day .
. "
PIER advised the school district that they were making these observations:
"Throughout the observation period, PIER kept the VBCPS administration
appraised of the fact that observations were being conducted. In late spring
VBCPS was verbally reminded that PIER intended to file a complaint regarding the
early dismissals. Final observations were scheduled, and occurred on June 15,
1998."
"The morning of June 15, PIER telephoned VBCPS to inform the school district
that observations would be occurring that day."
Cover-Up That Failed
At that point, Virginia Beach school administrators initiated a "cover-up." Their
"cover-up" backfired:
"When PIER observers arrived at the schools on the afternoon of June 15, they
observed buses being rerouted back to school parking lots by security guards
and heard announcements on PA systems and bus radios that buses were not to
leave school property until the general education students were dismissed."
"Students with disabilities were observed to be waiting outside of the school
building or sitting on buses for up to thirty minutes until the end of the school day
for nondisabled students."
"PIER faxed a handwritten note to VBCPS the next morning, after being unable to
reach VBCPS Administration by telephone the afternoon before. The note
informed VBCPS that PIER was halting observations because of the hardship
placed on the students with disabilities the day before while waiting outside in the
heat and on stifling hot buses."
"Apparently, instructions had been sent by VBCPS Administration to schools on
June 15 informing the schools not to allow buses to leave the school property
early. However this directive merely stopped buses from leaving early, not
students with disabilities from being dismissed before their nondisabled peers."
"Predetermined Policy"
In their OCR Complaint, PIER alleged that:
"VBCPS has a predetermined policy that students with IEPs will have a 5.5 hour
program as evidenced by the VBCPS's current IEP form that states, "All students
should have the availability of receiving a full (5.5 hours) program if determined
appropriate by the IEP committee and included in the student's IEP."
"Parents are not advised during IEP meetings or at any other point that their
children with disabilities are entitled to a school day of 6.5 hours as provided to
nondisabled students."
"VBCPS discriminates against students with disabilities by applying a more
limited length of the school day for students with disabilities as compared to the
length of the school day provided for nondisabled students . . . "
"The majority of students with disabilities need intensive remediation and
services in part due to prior mis-education and denial of equal educational
opportunity . . . With this intensive need it is inappropriate to shorten the school
day for students who perform poorly on State-based testing . . . Indeed a strong
argument can be made under Section 504 that these students are entitled to
additional, supplemental services in order for them to attain outcomes expected
for all students."
Virginia Beach Schools Agree to Resolve Allegations of Discrimination
(from Press Release, November 8, 1999)
On November 8, 1999, PIER issued a Press Release about the case. A portion of
the press release is quoted below.
"Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) has entered into an agreement with
the federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to address allegations of discrimination of
students with disabilities. Protecting Individuals with disabilities Education Rights
(PIER), a local community group, filed a complaint with OCR in December alleging
VBCPS systemically discriminated against students with disabilities who required
transportation services."
"Students with disabilities were routinely dismissed from school before the end of
the instructional day, required to use separate bus loading and unloading areas,
arrived to school late in the morning, rode segregated buses, and endured
unreasonably lengthy bus rides."
"In 1998 PIER conducted observations at 39 randomly selected schools. Ninety
percent of these schools dismissed students with disabilities before the end of
the instructional day. PIER observed 347 incidents of buses leaving school before
the end of the instructional day. VBCPS provided documentation indicating that
all of these buses were used to transport students with disabilities."
"VBCPS has agreed to take additional steps to resolve the complaint."
"The agreement with OCR requires VBCPS to modify the school district's
individualized education program procedures to include a particular written plan
to address transportation issues, to provide transportation information to parents
through a newsletter, and to develop a brochure to notify families of
transportation requirements."
"The agreement by VBCPS to resolve the complaint closes this phase of the OCR
investigation initiated in February that included a four day on-site investigation by
OCR staff in May."
"Some students with disabilities may need separate transportation services, a
shortened school day or other special transportation services. PIER fully
supports the right of parents to have these needs met through the IEP
(individualized education program) process."
"The resolution agreement between OCR and VBCPS will advance the civil rights
of students with disabilities. PIER is pleased that VBCPS has agreed to resolve
the complaint rather than continue with an even more lengthy and expensive OCR
investigation. Cooperation by VBCPS with parents will result in more dollars
being spent on education and fewer dollars being used for administrative and
legal fees. Children with disabilities have won a significant battle to receive equal
educational benefits."
"Parents of children with disabilities who continue to experience discrimination
can contact PIER at 757-461-8007 or OCR at 202-208-7670."
The full text of the Press Release is at http://helios.whro.
org/cl/eci/bbs/messages/128.html
If you work in the system, be careful that you don't become a lightening rod for
conflict. My assumption about the people calling the shots is:
They don't know any better, or
They've gotten away with it for years and think they can continue to get away with
it.
You may want to print this information and take it the school, saying "Gee, this is
what happened in Virginia when they sent kids with disabilities home early."
As you see with this OCR Finding, the practice of sending kids with disabilities
how early is illegal. If your district has information that they are acting illegally,
they are "on notice" that they need to "mend their ways" - now!
_____________________________________________________________________
My Child with a Brain Tumor Was Dismissed from the Team -How Can I File a Complaint?
by Suzanne Heath, Research Editor, Wrightslaw
My child has a brain tumor. He wants to attend school but is often absent for
medical treatments. A few days ago, he was dismissed as manager of a sports
team.
He is devastated. This was one of the only ways he could socialize with other
students since he has so many medical appointments during the day. I am angry. I
want to file a complaint. How should I handle this?
Although he has a 504 plan, there are ongoing problems about grades and
completing work. I was told that parents are not involved in designing 504 Plans.
Since I have firsthand information about his medical problems and needs, I think it
is my responsibility to provide the school with information and have a say in what
they provide.
I reported problems with his Section 504 plan to the Office for Civil Rights but my
complaint was not upheld.
From Sue:
You have an immediate problem and an ongoing problem. We need to tackle the
immediate problem about his dismissal from the sports team first.
Dismissal from the Team
You need to talk to the school principal and tell him/her what you have told me.
Something is getting lost in the communications. If the principal will not help, go
to the superintendent, and then to the school board.
Make sure you frame your discussions in human terms, not legal ones. The child's
has a serious medical problem that requires him to miss some school. This is not
a reason to deny him participation in extracurricular activities.
The school is required to accommodate HIM, not accommodate who they would
like him to be.
You may be reluctant to tell the whole story when you talk to people. The fact that
your child has cancer is a difficult subject that causes most people to react
emotionally.
Make sure you say the words that are necessary to communicate the situation,
even if it is difficult for you to get them out. You may need to practice with a friend,
and bring someone with you for support when you talk to the principal.
Section 504 Plan
Now let's look at the problems with Section 504 Plans - getting an appropriate
plan and ensuring that the school implements the plan.
Since you have already gone through the process of complaining and been
unsuccessful, you need to go back to square one and put things in place again.
On the site of the American Diabetes Association, you will find a Sample 504 Plan
(11 pages) and a Medical Management Plan (5 pages).
Although these plans were designed for a child with diabetes, you can use them
as templates for your child's plans. Revise the plans so they reflect your child's
conditions.
Medical Management Plan
The Medical Management Plan outlines the student's specific medical needs as
determined by his/her health care team. Describe every situation that has come
up, or is likely to come up. Make sure you frame the issues in terms of medical
need or disability. Ask your son's primary doctor to sign the Medical Management
Plan.
Deliver the plan to the school nurse and provide copies to his teachers and the
principal. This ensures that school personnel have accurate information about his
medical condition and needs.
After you take these steps and provide the school with the Medical Management
Plan, it will be up to the school to make their case for a lesser 504 Plan. This will be
hard to do after the child's doctor signed off on your plan.
At this point, you will have more facts to use if you decide to file a complaint.
I have questions about the appropriateness of a Section 504 Plan for your child.
Since he has cancer and is often absent from school because of medical
appointments, it sounds like he has a disability that adversely affects educational
performance. If this is the case, he is a child with a disability under the Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act and is entitled to an Individualized Educational
Program (IEP). A disabled child with an IEP has more rights and protections than a
child who has a 504 plan.
Filing a Complaint
Be sure you understand how to file a complaint. If you complain to the school
district first, you CAN lose your ability to complain to the Office of Civil Rights.
(See Questions and Answers on OCR's Complaint Process) You need to decide
who you want to resolve an issue before you bring it up.
Also be sure you know WHAT YOU WANT if the complaint is found in your son's
favor. If you don't ask for anything when you file your complaint, you will not get
anything when it is resolved.
There is an electronic form that people can use to file an OCR complaint. I would
not use this form. If you write a letter, you are in a much better position to make
your case. Use the form as checklist to make sure you include all the information
that a person reviewing the complaint will want to see.
You have 180 days after an event to file a complaint.
________________________________________________
James Wendorf, Executive Director, National Center for Learning Disabilities
(NCLD). NCLD increases public awareness and understanding of learning
disabilities and conducts educational programs and services that promote
research-based knowledge, and provide national leadership in shaping public
policy.
The following interview with Mr. James Wendorf was conducted in Washington
D.C. on September 11, 2003. Mr. Wendorf is dedicated to improving the learning
and life opportunities of children and adults with learning disabilities. The
following is the transcript of our conversation. It has not been edited for final
journal publication. Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of
the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or
tones of emphases that occurred during the interview.
Personal Background:
David Boulton: First of all I’d like to start by saying welcome and thank you. I
really appreciate you making the time.
James Wendorf: David, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
David Boulton: How do you come to be here and what is the National Center for
Learning Disabilities? Why does it exist? What does it do?
James Wendorf: Well, I’m here because my career over the last twenty-something
years has been primarily about building literacy and learning programs for kids.
Working with not-for-profit organizations, working closely, especially recently,
with people in the research community as well as with practitioners, to bring those
programs to the field. To get them to kids, to get them to teachers so they can start
to make a difference.
Prior to coming to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, I spent many years
at Reading is Fundamental. The goal there was to provide access to books for
kids who generally did not have access. The challenge that I faced in coming to
the National Center for Learning Disabilities was to address this access issue in a
new way. To ensure that kids with learning disabilities had access to not just
books and to learning materials, but also to a curriculum, to teachers who were
well trained, and to the kind of evaluation procedures that would really test what
they knew rather than what they didn’t know or couldn’t do. So that’s what
attracted me, and why I came to the National Center about four and half years ago
as the executive director.
David Boulton: What personally hooks you about this work?
James Wendorf: I think all of us are challenged by the toughest cases. When you
look at the kinds of struggles that children with learning disabilities face, you
quickly realize that these kids must overcome a lot of obstacles; there are a lot of
challenges. I, and the people I work with in the research community and in the
advocacy community, are very much attracted to this group of kids and adults. We
want to help make their lives better - to give them opportunities that they wouldn’t
otherwise have.
Defining Learning:
David Boulton: The ‘National Center for Learning Disabilities’, implicitly you must
have some operational definition of learning itself.
James Wendorf: I think when you talk to people in the field of learning disabilities
and ask about learning, you quickly start zeroing in on processing. How does
information processing impact learning as a very, very key component of the
learning process? For kids and adults with learning disabilities that’s where the
chief problem is--how the brain either does or does not process information. How
the brain sometimes very inefficiently retrieves information, stores information,
processes it and expresses it. So any theory of learning for us is very practical.
How do people make sense, especially sense of language, and of other kinds of
information that the brain has to work with?
David Boulton: So rather than it being subject-specific or topical in the outer
boundaries of experience, you’re focused more on the ‘core process of
processing’.
Learning Disabilities:
James Wendorf: Information processing really is an issue that cuts across so
many different disabilities. The term “learning disabilities’ is itself an umbrella term
that encompasses a wide range of disorders and problems, the biggest one being
dyslexia or reading disability. And even within reading disability, there could be
problems with decoding, there could be problems with comprehension, there
could be problems with expression, any number of things. So it’s the processing
of information that is really critical. Rock bottom: how does the brain either work
or not work in dealing with that information?
Neurobiological Vs. Acquired Deficiencies
David Boulton: An important distinction here is the difference between a
biological insufficiency or mis-development of the capability to process, as
distinct from an instructional or learning environment inefficiency or deficiency
that’s led to a learned or acquired learning disability. How are those two related
and how does that spectrum play out?
James Wendorf: I don’t think we draw that kind of distinction. I think there is a
difference between a student who is an ‘instructional casualty’; in other words, a
student who has not flourished in the schools, who has not had access to the
right kind of teaching, a student whom the schools have failed in some way. There’
s a difference between that kind of student and a student with an underlying
neurobiological disability. Learning disabilities are not acquired; they are there -
they are life long - they are real. They can be expressed in any number of ways
early on; they could appear later in a school career, even as late as high school or
adulthood.
David Boulton: They come in at different developmental stages.
James Wendorf: Different stages depending upon the kinds of learning tasks that
a person might actually face.
David Boulton: So you don’t make a distinction between this across the spectrum
as to what might be the cause of it?
James Wendorf: Well, we’d love to know the cause. We’d love to know the cause.
David Boulton: I mean the distinction between what’s neurobiological in origin
and what’s a consequence of instruction.
James Wendorf: Well, I think for most people, and especially teachers, the kinds
of problems that they’re trying to deal with, the weaknesses that they’re trying to
address in children, whether they have a neurobiological cause or whether the
cause has been simply lack of access to a certain kind of instruction or teaching,
makes very little difference. An appropriate scientifically research based
intervention that’s delivered in the right way can address both of those problems.
That’s good news for teachers; it simplifies the task. It says that what works for
kids with learning disabilities, reading disabilities for example, also works for
students who may have problems with reading because they didn’t have access
to books or spoken language as they were growing up…kids from poverty.
Instructional Casualties:
David Boulton: Right, and I totally understand and appreciate that. And with
respect to what to do, how to be helpful to any particular individual child, defining
the cause is less important than meeting them on the edge of whatever they’re
showing and learning to work with them at that level. But, in terms of the kind of
education that we need to provide, we do need it to reduce the amount of
instruction related casualties. In that sense, the more that we understand, the
better. For example, in our conversation with Dr. Lyon, he suggested that about
ninety-five percent of kids failing to read are instructional casualties they are not
neurobiologically deficient.
James Wendorf: There’s good research that points to the dramatic efficacy of
good instruction. It is true that not enough good instruction is getting to kids. Kids
just don’t have the benefit of it. Teachers need to be trained in order to carry out
the kind of instruction that is effective. And, there is good research to show that
up to ninety-five percent or so of reading problems, reading difficulties can be
effectively addressed if that instruction is there and delivered in the right way.
That still leaves about four to six percent of the student population that is not
responding, that is still struggling, that needs some other kind of intervention,
some other kind of instruction.
And interestingly, the percentage of children in the school age population who
have learning disabilities right now is about five percent. And they need even
more intensive, individualized instruction in order to address their underlying
problems. Not all the problems are going to be solved simply because we get
classroom teachers up to a certain level.
Most of Our Children Not Reading Proficiently:
David Boulton: If we look at the basic and below reading stats and the proficient
and below reading stats, and if we aggregate the populations, we’re talking about
most of our children reading less than proficiently. Most of them.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: And we know that the consequences of not reading well are
profoundly influencing and shaping the core information processes that you’re
talking about. So to some degree, all of the children who are not learning to read
well are developing/acquiring some degree of disability to learn.
Profound Reading Crisis:
James Wendorf : I wouldn’t go there. I wouldn’t go there. I think it’s important to
maintain some distinctions. (see Postscript) There’s a reading crisis in the United
States. It’s undeniable. Thirty-nine percent, almost forty percent of fourth graders
do not read even at the basic level, and as we know, a majority of students do not
read at the proficient level. In inner cities the percentages are much higher. So,
there is a profound reading crisis in the United States.
Children with reading disabilities and other learning disabilities are part of that
reading crisis, they are part of that group, and their problems need to be
addressed as well. We need to reach children - whether they have learning
disabilities or whether they have reading difficulties - virtually in the same way,
and reach them early on before they even get to kindergarten and identify their
strengths and weaknesses and then step in with the appropriate kinds of
instruction.
By doing that, by reaching out to all of those children, we can ensure that the
children with difficulties can actually be brought up to speed, can be brought up
to grade level in reading and they have a very good chance of having that happen.
But we also ensure that children with reading disabilities and other learning
disabilities are identified early on and have the opportunity to get better
instruction, individualized instruction, special education services early on rather
than later in upper elementary school or middle school when it’s very difficult and
very inefficient to address their problems.
David Boulton: Good. I appreciate and agree with your distinction and focus. I’m
just wanting to stretch us out here.
James Wendorf: Not a problem. We’re not going to go, as some will say, that
fifteen to twenty percent of the population has a reading disability. The data don’t
support that. About five percent of children in the schools have been identified
with a learning disability. (see Postscript)
None of us is happy or satisfied with the methods that are currently being used to
identify at risk children. However, there’s pretty good history over ten to twenty
years to suggest that we’re in the right ballpark regarding the percentage of the
population that might have a true disability.
Stewarding the Health of Learning:
David Boulton: Right, but let’s suppose for just a moment that your position wasn’
t the National Center for Learning Disabilities, but the National Center for
Stewarding the Health of Learning.
James Wendorf: Absolutely.
David Boulton: And you were the executive director for stewarding the health of
our children’s learning.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: From that vantage, we then take a look at reading and the
consequences of reading, the consequences of not reading well early. There’s the
Matthew Effect, what reading does for the mind in terms of developing self-
reflexivity, core cognitive processing ecology, information processing efficiency,
the infrastructure of our abilities for abstractions, generalizations and on up to the
more obvious educational implications. Then the down side, the downward spiral.
For example, Lesley Morrow said in our interview last Monday that reading is so
powerfully predictive that some states use literacy data to project how many
prison cells to build.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: Some research is saying that how fast a child comes up to speed
in reading in first grade predicts where they'll be in the twelfth grade.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: It’s that solid of a correlation. So how well children come into
learning to read profoundly effects how healthily they learn in their life.
Reading is the Gateway Skill:
James Wendorf: Reading is the gateway skill. It leads to all sorts of success,
both academically and in life. It is the skill that undergirds most of the curriculum,
and if children aren’t learning that skill by the end of third grade, they are in
desperate trouble. For kids with learning disabilities it’s a double whammy. You
know seventy to eighty percent of students with learning disabilities have their
main problem in the area of reading, with reading based learning disabilities.
For us in the learning disabilities world, we’re very much concerned about
literacy, about getting children up to speed in reading, and that usually means an
early diagnosis and very intensive intervention…breaking skills down into
individual steps so that students can actually learn step by step the decoding
process, everything that goes into that plus comprehension strategies. It’s
incredibly important.
You said, if I were looking out for all kids. Well, in many ways we do. The National
Center for Learning Disabilities is very interested in the well being of all kids. That’
s why we’re calling for universal early literacy screening. Every four year old
should have the chance to have his or her skill development in literacy screened
before entering kindergarten. That should be universal just as it is for vision and
hearing. We should know where a child is in making progress or not making
progress on the road to reading because reading is so important. It is the gateway
skill.
David Boulton: Excellent. I totally agree. I guess where I’m trying to go with this is,
again, most of our children aren’t learning to read well. Most!
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: And not learning to read well is learning capacity diminishing.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: So most of our children in the process of their struggle to learn to
read are going through a process that is diminishing their ability to learn.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: That seems to me to be the nation’s biggest learning disability.
James Wendorf: There is a reading crisis and the reading crisis leads to an
education crisis, and also is certainly connected to an economic crisis as you
look at job formation. Do we have people coming through the school system who
can really perform the job functions that American business has to have? The
answer to that now is clearly no. The schools are not producing.
And what we’re really talking about is lost human potential. And it’s absolutely
tragic. It’s tragic. Parents who have children with learning disabilities have lived
this tragedy for many, many years. They know what’s it’s like to see a child not
able to fully embrace what a school has to offer. And they’ve seen schools that
have failed in reaching the children…have failed in actually addressing the
children’s individual methods of learning and addressing their needs.
David Boulton: I just think that we, the parents of the sixty or sixty-eight percent,
or whatever number you want to say that are below proficient, don’t grasp the
significance of this in terms of how learning disabling, learning constraining the
effect of this is because it’s accepted as almost normal.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: There’s a gross miss on how significant this is to the
developmental process.
Good and Bad News:
James Wendorf: Well, there’s been some good news over the past ten, fifteen
years. Some good news is that I think there have been many campaigns with
some success in focusing on children’s books, reading to children, reading aloud
to children, making sure that children have access to literacy opportunities. There
has been a lot of talk and a lot of campaigning about that and it’s done some good
and it’s helpful.
What we’ve seen less of is sort of the hard edge of literacy: the instruction. What
kind of instruction in what kind of setting over what period of time is most
effective in getting children up to speed in reading? Now we have some reports
and good studies that have come out and there have been efforts to get the word
out not only to parents and the public, but certainly to schools - the 15,000 school
districts around the country that are making decisions everyday about how to
teach kids the skill of reading.
And the real problem, the tragedy, is that even now we see that school districts
are not fully embracing the most effective methods of teaching reading to
children. They are not doing it. And they need more help, they need more
guidance in making better decisions about the instructional materials they use
and also the kind of professional development that teachers need in order to be
effective. Because teachers do want to be successful. They do want to help kids,
but they’re not being given the chance.
We need to raise public awareness and we need to change the way that decisions
are made in schools. Parents can be a loud voice; they can be terrific advocates.
Not just for various kinds of activities in the school, but specifically, advocates for
curriculum reform to make sure that reading is being taught in the most effective
way. That’s what we want to hear. That’s what we need to produce across the
country.
Early Literacy Screening:
David Boulton: And as you said, we need a screening tool. We want to check
where children are at when they are coming in. Just like we want to check their
eyes and their ears to see where they’re at in their development so we can meet
them closer to where they actually are, rather than over generalize.
James Wendorf: We have the means now to screen children for early literacy skill
development. It’s not invasive; it does not involve testing kids. But with twenty
questions over a period of twelve minutes costing less than two dollars per child,
a teacher or a parent or a paraprofessional can be trained to actually screen a
child and understand what it means.
To understand how a four-year-old child is making progress in areas such as
knowledge of print or written expression or linguistic awareness, knowledge of
how language works is incredibly valuable to an early childhood educator, to a
preschool teacher. There’s much that can be learned, and once teachers and
parents can understand that, they can then become better teachers, whether it’s
in a home as a parent or whether it’s in the pre-school.
And there is a revolution coming. It is happening. Instruction, curriculum, an
emphasis on cognitive development, an emphasis on early literacy skill
development. It is coming to pre-school. Over the next five to ten years that’s
going to be a very important new frontier in the literacy movement.
Learning to Read is All But Fating:
David Boulton: One more step on this front end. What we’re saying is that how
well children learn to read is all but fating to their academic, economic,
psychological, intellectual, and cognitive health – that it’s that pervasively
powerful. A great deal of this depends on the soundness of the instructional
process, the educational process and also on the preparation of the child long
before they get to school, how well they are unfolding. That it is in fact critical,
how they come to school, how well they’ve started to develop and exercise the
kind of sound and letter distinctions and familiarity with the correspondence
between oral and written language, which are the ideal ground to pick up from
and move with in education. That solidly rests on the parents.
James Wendorf: All of us have a responsibility to kids, to our youngest kids.
Certainly parents have that responsibility to help them develop the language
skills, the literacy skills so that they are ready to embrace school when the time
comes. And it’s true that children who come from backgrounds of poverty are at a
tremendous disadvantage. By the time they actually enter kindergarten, they’re
lagging in skill development and their vocabularies are dwarfed by the
vocabularies of children of middleclass and upper-middle class homes who’ve
been surrounded by language in very different ways.
And so they enter the school door, they enter the classroom really lacking the
equipment, lacking the context to even understand a lot of what the teacher might
be saying. They don’t know the names of things. It’s not just that they don’t know,
in many cases, the letters of the alphabet. It’s that they don’t know the names of
things. They lack language.
Insufficient Oral Language Experiences:
David Boulton: There’s an insufficiently rich oral language facility from which to
move into learning.
James Wendorf: Correct. And as we talk about the development of literacy skills,
certainly we can’t neglect vocabulary development, oral language experience. It’s
probably one of the most difficult areas to work in and it’s the one subject with the
least amount of control. Most of it is not in the classroom; it’s out of the
classroom. And it’s oral, it’s not written; very difficult to control.
David Boulton: That is why it seems so important for parents, across the
spectrum socio-economically, to understand how significant this is.
Whitehurst’s Dialogic Reading:
James Wendorf: It is important. There are some things, some steps that parents
and teachers can take to help improve comprehension and to build vocabulary
development. One of the areas is actually in the sharing of children’s books. One
of the programs that Dr. Whitehurst has developed called Dialogic Reading
addresses this very issue.
Those of us who’ve worked in the literacy field, we’ve all said ‘Share a book’. But
we also know, those of us who have worked in this area, that many parents and
some teachers simply do not know how to effectively share a book with a child. It
may sound bizarre but it’s true. Videotape doesn’t lie when you’re actually
running demonstration programs and then studying what happens when a child
and an adult and a book share time together.
The Dialogic Reading Technique that Dr. Whitehurst has developed - and it’s the
only research based program of its kind - is really there to encourage a specific
kind of interchange between a child and an adult with a text as the shared
experience. A child is actually drawn out to answer certain questions, to use
language, to point, and in doing so is led through a series of exercises that
actually builds language skill and vocabulary development.
David Boulton: It helps them focus on distinctions.
James Wendorf: And to demonstrate that he or she knows what’s being said and
developed in a story. Whether it has to do with colors, characters, words on the
page, letters on the page, any of those things.
David Boulton: Or meta-cognitive summaries.
James Wendorf: Right. And understanding of plot and understanding of the
beginning, the middle, the end…all those things.
The Costs of Teaching Reading:
David Boulton: Do you have any sense of what it costs us to teach our children
to read?
James Wendorf: I don’t have a number for you. I don’t have a number.
David Boulton: Even a rough idea? A percentage?
James Wendorf: No. I can tell you that for those children who need remediation, if
children do not have reading fluency by the end of third grade, it’s going to cost
seven to eight times as much in time and in money to address their reading
problems and get them up to grade level in reading.
David Boulton: Seven or eight times ‘x’, an unknown?
James Wendorf: Right. In other words, I don’t have that. In terms of dollars, every
school district spends a different amount per child and that’s a statistic that is
usually a very important one for school districts to trot out and either pride
themselves on spending so little or pride themselves on spending so much,
depending on where you live and what the property tax is like. But, I think it would
be very difficult to come up with something like that for the country as a whole
because there’s so much diversity.
David Boulton: There’s a lot of talk about the aggregate expense of reading
difficulties from the 200 billion dollars in lost income opportunities to the adults
that can’t read above a fifth grade level to the costs that literacy organizations, the
federal government and so forth are spending to remediate reading. Do you have
any number, any scope at all that you can comment on? Even a magnitude of
order?
The Real Cost is Lost Self-Esteem:
James Wendorf: Well, it’s billions. Billions lost.
I think the main thing to emphasize for anyone who has worked with a child or
with an adult who has a reading problem, either who is low literate or is just
struggling with reading, is that it is very apparent that it is the lost human
potential, the lost self-esteem…that is the most poignant. And, in the end it’s the
most significant, because the loss in self-esteem is what leads to a whole host of
social pathologies that are very difficult to look in the face. Crime, substance
abuse, and the school drop out rate -any of those things - they are very difficult to
face. And there is a line to be drawn between low literacy skills and those social
pathologies.
David Boulton: Please say as much about this as you care to.
James Wendorf: There is a twenty-seven percent drop out rate of students with
learning disabilities; that is more than twice the rate of the general population
…lost human potential. And there are problems with substance abuse and
juvenile justice problems. And certainly looking at the general population of
students that drop out, one can go to prisons and see that it is very apparent the
majority of inmates lack reading skill.
What We Have Learned:
David Boulton: When we first began our conversations on the phone you
referred to an interview in which somebody had asked you, and I’ll repeat the
question for you…what have we learned in this last decade? What have we
learned about the center of this problem?
James Wendorf: Over the past ten years we’ve learned that learning disabilities
are real. For those who ever doubted, it’s absolutely apparent now in the science
that learning disabilities are real. The brain research and the fMRI research
showing images of the brain at work reveal conclusively that dyslexia and reading
disabilities are real. We understand where in the brain the problem is and the
functioning that is not happening in those who are experiencing that disorder.
The research is also leading us toward instruction, leading us toward ways that
we can address the problem. That really is the challenge for the next ten years: to
apply the basic science, the research that’s taken us so far in understanding the
neurological based root causes and issues, and moving towards practice. How
do we train teachers so that they can carry out instruction in a way that effectively
addresses the reading problems, the reading disorders of children in the
classroom? Because the children are there day in and day out and they need that
kind of help.
The teachers being trained today in schools of higher education are simply not, in
many cases, getting access to the kind of training that is based on the insights
that the research has revealed to us. We need to close that gap and we need to
ensure that our teachers are ready for the schools of the twenty-first century.
Inside the Brain Visualization:
David Boulton: We’ve designed a set where we’re going to be able to look at the
text the child is reading. Then we’ll move, almost like a virtual tour, from the text to
the face. Then we’re going to mirror it in such a way that we can see the face and
the text together so you can see what’s going on in the face while the child is
attempting to articulate as he or she is looking at the code. And then we’re going
to spin around and while still maintaining that shot overlay a multi-media
animation that’s illustrating what is happening in the brain.
James Wendorf: fMRI, where the brain is firing.
David Boulton: Yes, at one point a simulation of that and another time a multi-
media neurological schematic visualization showing the relationship between
these various processes happening in real time, in relation to the code, in relation
to the expressions of the face, the tone of voice, as we go in and out of decoding
fluidly, from happy satisfaction into stuttering up into shame. We will actually be
able to see the correspondence between this code confusion and the stuttering of
the mind, the movement into shame and the dark downward spiral into the
collapse.
James Wendorf: The stuttering of mind - I haven’t heard that one before - that’s an
interesting way to put it. With the fMRI’s, it looks very much as if the brain of
dyslexics is working overtime. So often kids with learning disabilities are accused
of being lazy. ‘They’re lazy; they can’t do it; they’re not trying hard enough’. And
when you look at the fMRI’s you see very clearly that that brain is trying to work
very, very hard to make sense of what is in front of it. And it can’t do it. It’s firing
away very inefficiently, ineffectively and the code is not being broken if it’s a
decoding task, or the words are not being comprehended if it’s a comprehension
task. It’s absolutely fascinating.
David Boulton: They’re not co-implicating. These various processes that have to
cooperate in such great synchronization, aren’t.
James Wendorf: The point for kids with learning disabilities is that again, it
demonstrates that this is not an issue of laziness; it’s not an issue of not trying.
Kids with learning disabilities try very, very hard. I think your demonstration
showing a person, the child, engaged in the act of reading and showing that and
then also demonstrating what is happening in the brain, I think that would be
fascinating to show. I think understanding what works can sometimes best be
done by showing what doesn’t work for some individuals.
The Social-Educational Challenge:
David Boulton: When we talked on the phone you mentioned that ultimately this
could be thought of as a social-educational challenge. That we need to get the
teachers up to speed on what we’ve learned in brain science. And we need to get
the nation as a whole to reframe its sense of how important this is and to come
into an alignment with what we’ve learned, rather than to hang on to its tradition
based approaches.
James Wendorf: I think public awareness of the reading crisis has taken us so
far. I think there’s an awareness certainly that there is a problem. There’s an
awareness that there are certain kinds of activities that make sense for parents
and teachers to engage in. What hasn’t happened is for that awareness to be
translated into action and decisions about curriculum, decisions about
educational materials, and decisions about the way teachers are prepared for the
classroom. That kind of awareness needs to be built. We need to do it.
Dispelling the Myth that Reading is Natural:
David Boulton: Let’s go all the way back to something you said about self-esteem
and connect the dots between where we just were and there. My sense of talking
to parents and teachers is that they have this undifferentiated sense, even though
they may have some intellectual awareness that reading is unnatural, their gut
level sense is that it is natural.
James Wendorf: That reading is natural or what?
David Boulton: Yes, that kids should be able to read. ‘I can read, why can’t they
read? There must be something wrong with them.’ Rather than understanding
that reading is a radically unnatural challenge to the human brain of which there is
no evolutionary precedent.
James Wendorf: Right.
David Boulton: And it’s in relation to this technology…this code-thing is as much
a machine as a VCR or dishwasher. And this machine is pretty confused because
of the way that it’s grown to be here. It is a 2,500 year old invention; it’s not been
carefully watched over.
Venezky, and other orthographists, linguists and other language historians pretty
much all agree that nobody was minding the store when all this mess just kind of
happened.
Reading is not Natural:
David Boulton: Most of our children are in some degree of struggle that is
diminishing their ability to learn because they’re trying to interface with a
technology that is a mess because nobody’s ever paid attention to it or tried to do
anything about it - as if how well the children could learn it was important. Now,
my sense is that parents and most teachers don’t get that.
James Wendorf: Reading is not natural. Speaking, language, oral language is
natural. What does a baby do when it’s born? It cries. It’s natural. But reading has
to be learned and has to be taught. It is not a natural activity. It is a difficult activity
for a significant percentage of children. It is not difficult for a certain percentage of
children. They can pick up reading very easily, no matter which way it’s taught.
Why? We’re not sure why. But it happens.
Other children need to be taught in a very different way – very systematically,
intensively, breaking the process down into its components and they need to
learn it hands on in a multi-sensory fashion. The good news is that almost all kids
can learn to read if they have access to that kind of instruction.
And your point about language, I don’t know if I can actually address about it
being a mess or whatever. Reading, as you point out, is only a few thousand
years old and our brain is still getting used to it. You know, we’re evolving.
David Boulton: The mass of our population has only been reading for the past
couple hundred years.
James Wendorf: For mass literacy.
David Boulton: Yes. Right. Which would mean that whatever could effect any kind
of selective evolutionary-adaptation pressures hasn’t had time.
Lost Potential and Suffering From Self-Esteem Loss:
David Boulton: I want to circle back to the self-esteem conversation because, in
addition to the economic things, and as you said there’s this huge cost, from the
child’s point of view, from the family’s point of view: it is suffering.
James Wendorf: Yes, well anyone who works with children who have learning
disabilities confronts the issue of low self-esteem head on. By the time a child is
usually identified with a problem in reading and the further identification is made
that there is a learning disability…that child usually needs to be put back together
in some way. There’s been failure, and usually over a long period of time. And
usually by the time that special education services are provided or some other
kinds of services are provided, the child needs some serious help with self-
esteem.
Now we’ve actually looked into this at the National Center for Learning
Disabilities. We’ve worked with researchers, and one of the best ways to address
the self-esteem problem is through skill development. And children who actually
are able to build their skills show an increase in self-esteem that is every bit as
high as programs that might address their self esteem head on.
So by focusing on skill development, working on instructional issues, you can
often bring the self-esteem up in the same way that might happen if a child were
involved in some kind of social emotional development program that directly
addresses the issue of self esteem.
David Boulton: Parenthetically, a good friend of mine, John Vasconcellos, a State
Senator in California, is one of self-esteem's most visible proponents. He’s the
one Gary Trudeau cartooned for creating the California Task Force to investigate
the relationship between self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Back
in the 80’s his work brought self-esteem to national attention.
My own sense, based on engaging in dialogue with philosophers, scientists and
researchers in that space, is that the issue isn’t self-esteem, rather what happens
to children who learn to be self dis-esteeming. They learn to not trust, to not feel
good about themselves. It’s an acquired shame.
James Wendorf: I think low self-esteem causes a child to pull back, to not
engage. Why go out there and put yourself on the line if you know it’s going to be
another failure and you’re going to be called on it either by your teacher or your
classmates and you will be open to shame, to disapproval. Kids aren’t dumb; they
know when something isn’t working and they know what’s going to hurt, so they
pull back.
What children need is the experience of having success. That is what nourishes
self-esteem. And success in building skills is one of the best ways to do it. When
children have shown that they can actually master something and they have
proof, they can point to it and they can be legitimately praised for it. That’s what
works.
Self-Esteem and the Affect of Shame:
David Boulton: Back to reading, in addition to this summary level, shame and
consciously-volitional: ‘I don’t want to do that’, there’s an animal level, biological
shame mechanism. Human beings are shame averse. On the one hand, shame is
this great learning lens; at the deep biological-animal level, shame is a learning
prompt. On the other hand, at the self-reflexive level, shame is a feeling we want to
avoid.
There’s been a map that’s been made called the ‘Compass of Shame’ that goes
into all the different things we do to get away from shame when it happens. It
happens pre-cognitively; it is underneath the cognitive machinery that is
projecting our experience. This is not something that we’re volitionally controlling.
We don’t want to feel shame and the very experience of shame will cause us to
move away from it and how we’re processing what’s going on.
So it’s all the more critical that in the case of reading, we’re talking about a
situation where children are day after day, week after week, month after month
and in some cases, year after year, immersed in an environment that’s frustrating
them in some way and that’s causing them to feel insufficient. And the way the
context works, as if there’s something wrong with them, this shame aversion
starts to inter-script with the learning to read process. Once it does, there’s an
aversion to learning to read that is pre-cognitive. So this shame conversation is
really, really important.
James Wendorf: I think the low self-esteem, the sense of shame, is life-long. At
the National Center for Learning Disabilities, we have a wonderful board of
directors. We have at least two individuals on that board, both of whom have
dyslexia and both of whom are former governors. They are extraordinarily
accomplished individuals, both of them dyslexic. And both have talked at length
about the continuing sense, not just of frustration or memories of failure, but
precisely a sense of shame that is still remembered…classroom based, other
children around, a teacher, not being able to do what other children seem to be
able to do so easily. It stays for a lifetime.
How should we Educate?
David Boulton: Previously you touched on the relationship to education and the
evolving need for educated people by the emerging world market place,
particularly in our country. It used to be, fifty years ago, one hundred years ago,
certainly back beyond that, that the rate of change was sufficiently stable. That we
could say we need so many mathematicians, drafts people, whatever it was, and
develop a relatively crude and mechanical railroad track switching system about
aptitudes and almost grow and harvest people to fit what we projected to need. I’
m being crude, but you get the drift where I’m going.
Today, this is absurd. What we can say is children need to learn to read: we can
say that they need to have good mathematical skills; they need to be able to write
and express themselves. All three of which are artificial code processing skills
that happen at different speeds. And, they need to be able to interface with the
other kinds of codes and technology to be able to learn what they need to learn
when they encounter a need to learn it in the future.
Stewarding the Health of Learning 2:
David Boulton: All these things translate into how well someone learns. That how
well children learn is fundamentally more important than what in particular they’re
learning. What in particular they are learning is an exercise environment to help
enrich and extend their general capacity for learning as they unfold in life because
what is relevant twenty years from now, we can’t predict. Nothing in particular,
other than these basic skills we’ve said, will be more relevant to their futures than
how well they can learn when they get there.
So, we come all the way back to where we were a while ago. It seems like we need
to be stewarding the health of our children’s learning as our fundamental, central
educational mission. This doesn’t negate curriculum, but reframes it, reorients it.
How does that wash with you? What do you think?
James Wendorf: As we look at kids who struggle, who struggle to learn, whether
that struggle is related to an underlying learning disability, whether it’s related to
issues of poverty or English as a second language, we still have an obligation to
make sure that those kids have access to a curriculum. I think it’s one and the
other, it’s both/and.
The idea of creating simply a generation of students that are expert at thinking
and thinking things through at the expense of content knowledge, whether that
content knowledge is history, mathematics, literature, whatever it might be, I think
is absurd. You’ve got to balance the two. No one can be at the expense of the
other.
David Boulton: With technology getting to a point where it’s becoming more
pervasive, every television set is going to have the power of a computer ten to
fifteen years from now, so that any conceivable question that a human being can
come up with can be the basis for piloting through the ‘super Googles’ of the
future.
What is content other than an exercise environment for getting to be better
learners?
James Wendorf: I think, look at it this way. Think back to the fact that too many
kids right now are entering kindergarten without the context and the content that
vocabulary provides. They are at risk.
David Boulton: Sure, but it’s not the particular words. It’s the exercise, it’s the
distinction.
James Wendorf: It’s the particular words as well. I think it’s both the exercise of
the mind… and the content.
David Boulton: Are you saying that we could say with respect to first graders we’
ve got a word list that they should know? Or that they should know a list of
words?
James Wendorf: They should know a list of words. And there are some words
that are more important than others because they’re used so often - they’re the
building blocks of subjects and curriculum. But they’re needed; they have to have
them. I’d say the same thing about content.
There was a letter to the editor in the New York Times from a mother whose son
had just graduated from Harvard, and she was praising the curriculum reform that’
s underway at Harvard. She said gosh I wish this had happened when my son
was there; he is one of the best thinkers I’ve ever seen but he doesn’t know
anything. He lacks content knowledge and that means a frame of reference. He
might be able to Google anything, but understanding, whether it’s historical
content, literary content or whatever, may be lacking and puts that person at a
disadvantage.
David Boulton: We’re in sync about this. Now we’re talking about how is it that we
develop a sense of perspective, a sense of background from which to
comprehend one’s life, one’s civilization, where we are - that’s the background
reference for this ability to extend into learning about things we can’t predict right
now.
James Wendorf: Learning is life long, and what we know because of the work we
do at the National Center for Learning Disabilities is that learning disabilities are
life long. The problem doesn’t go away. It stays there and has to be addressed.
Tools have to be used, whether they are built by the person himself or because of
accommodations, whatever it might be, so that that person can access the kind of
content, the kind of knowledge that becomes important as you move throughout
your life.
The issue of curiosity, the issue of intellectual curiosity is extraordinarily
important. Henry James’ point, be a person upon whom nothing is lost, doesn’t
apply only to novelists and writers, but it should apply to all of us. That constant
inquiry, constant curiosity about how the world works, how to make sense of it, is
something that all of us not only have to encourage in ourselves, but also in our
children.
David Boulton: Really well said. For me that translates into the inverse of the
Baconian adage that ‘knowledge is power’: ‘the power of knowledge is its
resourcefulness to learning’.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you think we ought to?
We Don’t Value Reading in our Culture:
James Wendorf: Sometimes it’s through understanding disabilities that ability is
best understood. The majority of kids can read.. Some read with a lot of help,
some with almost no help. And then there is a group of kids that need
extraordinary help, intensive help in getting them to read.
David Boulton: There’s this gray spectrum between those that just can’t and
those that don’t do it so well - yet it may be shaping all their lives in some way,
going all the way up to the other side of proficiency, which includes most children.
James Wendorf: Yes, there is. Right. We’re not a nation of readers. We’re not. We’
d like to be, but I think our culture is still not supportive of reading in the way it
should be.
David Boulton: Which again comes back to this unnatural to the brain technology
interface skill and to the fact that how well a child acquires it is all but fating their
life.
James Wendorf: I think also so much of this is cultural - apart from the biological,
it’s cultural. Is reading valued? Is it promoted, not just with lip service, but is it truly
promoted, valued, encouraged, is it demanded; is it really part of family life? All
those questions have to be answered ‘yes’ if we’re really to have the kind of
change we need, if we are to move forward.
Reforming Society’s Understanding of Reading:
David Boulton: Which presupposes that our population generally goes through
a transformational reframe in its appreciation of how significant this is.
James Wendorf: Yes, and I think the understanding has to be that reading is
power. You said that knowledge is power, and we sometimes talk about reading
power. I don’t think we’ve been effective yet in showing the power of reading. And
if we show the true power of reading and the kind of impact it has on a person’s
life, I think then we’ll start to get the message across that it is worth acquiring and
that there is status involved in being expert at it. And we haven’t done it yet.
David Boulton: And that if you love your child and are interested in the health of
their learning, you’ve got to put the effort in to make sure that they don’t have a
struggle with this. You’ve got to help them, you’ve got to meet them with what they
need because this is shaping, all but fating, their life.
James Wendorf: What we know from a number of polls that have been conducted
is that many parents wait too long to take action…sometimes a year or more
before they actually go to professionals, whether it’s to a pediatrician or to the
schools to say I don’t think my child is learning at the proper rate; I don’t think my
child is reading. And parents are often reluctant to do that, they don’t want to draw
attention to a potential problem in reading, and for what reason? Because they
don’t want their child or themselves to be subject to shame. They don’t want to
appear to be a bad parent.
So what we have to do - and we’ve taken steps in this direction - is to encourage
parents at the first sign of what they consider to be a problem to take action, to
talk to a professional, to get help. And there are organizations and websites that
are out there, including ours, that are set up to reach out to those parents. (see
also www.ldonline.org , www.wrightslaw.org (more will be available on our links
page soon)
David Boulton: I’m hopeful that with your help and the help of all the other people
that we’ve brought together into this conversation/dialogue that we can co-create
a 'lightning rod' that calls attention to the fact that, as a society, we don’t get it.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: Yes, it’s about the ‘utility’ value of whether or not someone can
read this particular book or that particular book - it's about our nation’s economy
and how well the U.S. competes in the world. But, we are also saying, the
psychological well being of our children depends upon our stepping up to a new
understanding, a new appreciation of the unnaturalness of this challenge and
how critically important it is that we help children through it. We’ve got to
galvanize attention here in a way that has never been done before. That’s part of
what this series is about, to get this dialogue going in the thought processes and
pedagogies - in the minds and hearts - of teachers, parents and our whole society.
James Wendorf: Well you’ll do it. We’ll help you.
Postscript:
James Wendorf (2-20-04): A couple of things I'd underscore:
It's important to us to use the "disability" word non-metaphorically. That's why I
see myself pushing back on a couple of your questions regarding "acquired"
disabilities. The neurobiological nature of learning disabilities is rooted in
science, and also provides the foundation for federal protections and
opportunities (flawed though they may be). Saying that millions more children are
"disabled" due to instructional malfeasance is not something we would say or
encourage. That said, there is considerable evidence that a percentage of
children (hard to specify) are being labeled "learning disabled" simply because
they have not been taught effectively.
I encourage you to establish and maintain a distinction between reading
difficulty/problem and reading disability/disorder. As we discussed in the
interview, many millions of kids struggle to read and learn, but a smaller number
will truly qualify as having dyslexia/a reading disability.
David Boulton (2-24-04): I appreciate your distinctions. I understand that the term
'learning disability' has been tightly defined by legislation. I think its unfortunate
that legal political considerations have restricted our ability to use so important a
term. What language shall we agree on for the distinction between
'neurobiological learning disability' and 'learned learning disability'?
Standard dictionary definition of "learning disability."
learning disability
n. (Abbr. LD)
Any of various cognitive, neurological, or psychological disorders that impede the
ability to learn, especially one that interferes with the ability to learn mathematics
or develop language skills.
A human being functions as a whole, and in any given moment of learning there
are electro-chemical, neuro-muscular, motoric, affective, cognitive, memory,
anticipatory and environmental elements that need to operate in a coordinated
way. A disability to coordinate no matter the cause, is learning disabling.
(Contributed by Gary David)
As you indicated below, five to six percent of our children have 'learning
disabilities'
And interestingly, the percentage of children in the school age population who
have learning disabilities right now is about five percent. JW (context)
You also said:
There’s a reading crisis in the United States. It’s undeniable. Thirty-nine percent,
almost forty percent of fourth graders do not read even at the basic level, and as
we know, a majority of students do not read at the proficient level.
In our dialogue we said:
David Boulton: Most of our children aren’t learning to read well. Most!
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: And not learning to read well is learning capacity diminishing.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: So most of our children in the process of their struggle to learn to
read are going through a process that is diminishing their ability to learn.
James Wendorf: Yes.
David Boulton: That seems to me to be the nation’s biggest learning disability.
(context)
And also:
David Boulton: So to some degree, all of the children who are not learning to read
well are developing/acquiring some degree of disability to learn.
James Wendorf : I wouldn’t go there. I wouldn’t go there. (context)
I think we need to work this out better. 5 to 6 percent of our children are 'learning
dis-abled' by their neurobiology. Most (over 60% nationally) of our children are not
learning to read well and its all but fating how well they learn in their lives
(Wendorf, Lyon, Whitehurst ). Children who don't learn to read well, regardless of
why, are learning 'dis-abled' and learning 'dis-enabled'. Dis-abled because
automatic information processing capabilities that are critical to abstract and self-
reflexive learning have malformed and because the child's shame in relation to the
resulting poor performance further impedes their abilities to learn. Dis-enabled
because without the ability to read they lack the 'interface' necessary to function
in our education systems and more broadly in our culture. I realize that for most
in the neurobiological group the effects are more severe. But the 60 plus percent
of children who are learning dis-abled by impoverished home conditions and
instructional malpractice are no less innocent and the effect on their lives and
their families is also profoundly constraining. The impact on society, in terms of
social pathologies and economic costs, is obviously much greater for the larger
group.
If the National Center for Learning Disabilities is constrained to function according
to the 'learning disability' definitions you put forth, where is the 'National Center
for Acquired Learning Disabilities'? Whose mission is it to champion the needs
and rights of the children whose capacities for learning have been seriously
diminished or dis-abled because of how and what they learned in the
environments our society provided them? Whose job is it to get the message to
these children and their families that its not their fault - that there isn't anything
wrong with them?
Mr. Wendorf, thank you so much for engaging in this dialogue with us and for all
you and NCLD have done and continue to do for children.
________________________________________________
Articles for January 2005
Top 10 Legal Cases Downloaded in 2004
1. Honig v. Doe, 484 U.S. 305 (1988). Decision from U. S. Supreme Court in
discipline case on behalf of emotionally disturbed children who had academic and
social problems. The Court clarified that procedural issues are designed to
protect children from school officials; parent role; stay put; schools shall not
expel children for behaviors related to their handicaps.
2. Board of Ed. of Hendrick Hudson Central School Dist. v. Rowley 458 U.S. 176
(1982). First decision in a special education case by the U. S. Supreme Court;
defined "free appropriate public education.
3. Community Consolidated Sch. Dist. #93 v. John F. (IL) Important decision in
discipline; procedural violations, prior written notice requirements, manifestation
determination review, suspensions for more than 10 days, expedited hearings,
special education and related services under IDEA, "passing grades" and FAPE,
homebound instruction violates LRE, more. Word PDF
4. Stefan Jaynes v. Newport News Public Schools U. S. District Court, Eastern
District of Virginia. Parents reimbursed for ABA Lovaas program for child with
autism, procedural safeguards, notice, statute of limitations. Appealed to Fourth
Circuit (2000). In pdf In Word
5. Florence Co. Sch Dist Four v. Shannon Carter, 510 U.S. 7, (1993). Landmark
decision issued in 34 days by a unanimous 9-0 Court. If the public school defaults
and the child receives an appropriate education in a private placement, the
parents are entitled to reimbursement for the child's education. This ruling opened
the door to children with autism who receive ABA / Lovaas therapy. Links to all
decisions, transcript of oral argument in Carter
6. Pamella Settlegoode v. Portland Public Schools, U. S. Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit upheld 1 million dollar jury verdict, reinstated award to special ed
teacher who was retaliated against and fired for advocating for her students;
clarifies freedom of speech issues for teachers. Decision in pdf (April 5, 2004)
7. Brown v. Bd of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954). In this landmark decision, the
Supreme Court found that segregated public schools are inherently unequal;
decision is relevant to children in segregated special education placements.
8. Reusch v. Fountain, This is a leading case about extended school year (ESY).
9. Doe v. Withers. This case stands for two significant propositions: that schools
and teachers can be held accountable for refusing to follow IEPs and that schools
and teachers can be sued for dollar damages in jury trials. This was the first
special education jury trial against public school educators. Click here to read the
Complaint and here to read the Jury Order in Doe v. Withers.
10. W.B. v. Matula, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Availability of
damages under Section 504, IDEA, and Section 1983 when district refused to
evaluate, classify and provide appropriate services to disabled child; exhaustion,
qualified immunity, due process.
____________________________________________________________________
Complaint Ends Confusion about
Highly Qualified Special Education Teachers
by Suzanne Heath, Research Editor, Wrightslaw
In January 2004, the New Hampshire Bureau of Special Education issued a policy
memo to all school Superintendents and Special Education Directors. According
to this memo, special education teachers who were certified in Mental Retardation,
but not in core academic subjects, could teach children with disabilities.
The policy did not apply to the teachers of children from low-income families,
English language learners, racial minorities, or children who do not have
disabilities. This policy only applied to the teachers of children with disabilities.
Specifically, the policy violated the highly qualified teacher requirements of NCLB
(20 U.S.C. § 7801 (23) (Wrightslaw: No Child Left Behind, page 76) and the
Personnel Standards of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. (20 U.S.C.
§ 1412(a) (15)) (Wrightslaw: Special Education Law, page 47).
If the U. S. Department of Education permitted New Hampshire’s Memo to remain
in effect and failed to take quick action, all states could be expected to follow New
Hampshire in short order.
When the New Hampshire Department of Education did not correct or withdraw
the memo, I decided to file a No Child Left Behind complaint.
July 9, 2004: Sent Complaint Letter
On July 9, 2004, I sent a complaint letter to the Secretary's Regional NCLB
Representatives, the Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Inspector General.
In my letter, I described the violations and asked the Regional Representatives to
require New Hampshire to follow the highly qualified teacher requirements in
NCLB.
I asked the Office of Civil Rights to address the policy because it discriminated
against children with disabilities. I also asked the Office of Inspector General to
address the violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Link to Complaint letter: www.wrightslaw.com/heath/nh/complaint.ltr.04.0709.pdf
August 23, 2004: New Hampshire Issues New Memo
On August 23, 2004, the New Hampshire Department of Education issued a new
memo to all Superintendents and Special Education Directors that replaced their
original memo regarding certification requirements of special education teachers.
The memo addressed the following issues:
*Special education teachers who teach core academic subjects must be highly
qualified.
* Activities that special education teachers may carry out if they are not highly
qualified in the core academic content area being taught.
This memo also clarified that "these requirements are part of the Parent's Right to
Know of NCLB for those schools that receive Title I funding. Parents Right to
Know Provisions include the following:
"At the beginning of each school year, a LEA that receives Title I funds must notify
parents of each student attending any Title I school that the parents may request,
and that agency will provide the parents on request (and in a timely manner)
information regarding the professional qualification of the student's classroom
teachers, including at minimum the following:
* Whether the teachers has met State qualifications for the grade levels and
subject areas in which the teacher provides instruction;
* Whether the teacher is teaching under emergency or other professional status
that the State has waived;
* The degree major of the teacher and any other graduate certification or degree
held by the teacher and the field of discipline of the certification or degree; and
* Whether the child is provided services by paraprofessionals and if so their
qualifications."
November 10 2004: Letter from OCR about Complaint
On November 10, 2004, I received a letter from the Office of Civil Rights. The letter
outlined their response to my complaint. They also sent me a copy of a November
4 letter from the Office of Civil Rights to the state of New Hampshire. The purpose
of this letter was to confirm that New Hampshire had "made sufficient changes to
its policy to resolve these issues."
Unexpected Events
I had no idea how or when the offices I contacted would investigate my complaint.
I was surprised at how quickly the investigators contacted the New Hampshire
Department of Education.
I expected the process of revising the memo from the New Hampshire Department
of Education to take longer.
I was pleased that the new policy was in place before the beginning of the 2004-
2005 school year.
Related Article: How to Report a Problem or File a Complaint (from Wrightslaw: No
Child Left Behind)
Note: The Secretary of the U. S. Department of Education appoints Regional
Representatives for different regions in the country. These Representatives are
responsible for helping states comply with the law and for monitoring compliance
in their region.
To find the Regional Representative for your state, click here http://www.ed.
gov/about/contacts/state/index.html, click your state, click the third item in the list,
then scroll to the bottom of the list to find the Secretary's Regional Representative
for your state.
Note: Impact of IDEA 2004
The section of No Child Left Behind that the Office of Civil Rights enforced as a
result of my complaint was clarified on December 3, 2004 when IDEA 2004 was
signed into law.
On that date, the definition of a "highly qualified special education teacher"
became -
(10) HIGHLY QUALIFIED.--
(A) IN GENERAL.-- For any special education teacher, the term `highly qualified'
has the meaning given the term in section 9101 of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965, except that such term also--
(i) includes the requirements described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) includes the option for teachers to meet the requirements of section 9101 of
such Act by meeting the requirements of subparagraph (C) or (D).
(B) REQUIREMENTS FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS.--When used with
respect to any public elementary school or secondary school special education
teacher teaching in a State, such term means that--
(i) the teacher has obtained full State certification as a special education teacher
(including certification obtained through alternative routes to certification), or
passed the State special education teacher licensing examination, and holds a
license to teach in the State as a special education teacher, except that when used
with respect to any teacher teaching in a public charter school, the term means
that the teacher meets the requirements set forth in the State's public charter
school law;
(ii) the teacher has not had special education certification or licensure
requirements waived on an emergency, temporary, or provisional basis; and
(iii) the teacher holds at least a bachelor's degree.
(C) SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS TEACHING TO ALTERNATE
ACHIEVEMENT STANDARDS.--When used with respect to a special education
teacher who teaches core academic subjects exclusively to children who are
assessed against alternate achievement standards established under the
regulations promulgated under section 1111(b)(1) of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965, such term means the teacher, whether new or
not new to the profession, may either--
(i) meet the applicable requirements of section 9101 of such Act for any
elementary, middle, or secondary school teacher who is new or not new to the
profession; or
(ii) meet the requirements of subparagraph (B) or (C) of section 9101(23) of such
Act as applied to an elementary school teacher, or, in the case of instruction
above the elementary level, has subject matter knowledge appropriate to the level
of instruction being provided, as determined by the State, needed to effectively
teach to those standards.
(D) SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS TEACHING MULTIPLE SUBJECTS.--When
used with respect to a special education teacher who teaches 2 or more core
academic subjects exclusively to children with disabilities, such term means that
the teacher may either--
(i) meet the applicable requirements of section 9101 of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965 for any elementary, middle, or secondary school
teacher who is new or not new to the profession;
(ii) in the case of a teacher who is not new to the profession, demonstrate
competence in all the core academic subjects in which the teacher teaches in the
same manner as is required for an elementary, middle, or secondary school
teacher who is not new to the profession under section 9101(23)(C)(ii) of such Act,
which may include a single, high objective uniform State standard of evaluation
covering multiple subjects; or
(iii) in the case of a new special education teacher who teaches multiple subjects
and who is highly qualified in mathematics, language arts, or science,
demonstrate competence in the other core academic subjects in which the
teacher teaches in the same manner as is required for an elementary, middle, or
secondary school teacher under section 9101(23)(C)(ii) of such Act, which may
include a single, high objective uniform State standard of evaluation covering
multiple subjects, not later than 2 years after the date of employment.
(E) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.--Notwithstanding any other individual right of
action that a parent or student may maintain under this part, nothing in this
section or part shall be construed to create a right of action on behalf of an
individual student or class of students for the failure of a particular State
educational agency or local educational agency employee to be highly qualified.
(F) DEFINITION FOR PURPOSES OF THE ESEA.--A teacher who is highly qualified
under this paragraph shall be considered highly qualified for purposes of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. [Section 602 (10), which will
become (U.S.C. §1410 (10))].
Highly Qualified Teachers: References & Resources
Improving Teacher Quality - Non Regulatory Guidance, U. S. Department of
Education (Rev. 1-16-04)
Title 1 Paraprofessionals - Draft Non Regulatory Guidance, U. S. Department of
Education (3-1-04)
Meeting the Highly Qualified Teacher Challenge: The Secretary's Second Annual
Report on Teacher Quality, U. S. Department of Education (2003)
State Reports on the Quality of Teacher Preparation - Title II Technical Assistance
Main page l State Reports
NCLB: Toolkit for Teachers, U. S. Department of Education (2002)
Information and Complaints (all states), U. S. Department of Education
_____________________________________________________________________
IDEA Amendments Take a New Stance on Attorney's
Fees, Litigation
Before reauthorization: A federal District Court could award reasonable
attorney's fees as part of the costs to parents of a child with a disability who is
determined to be the prevailing party.
After reauthorization: Adds provision to current law allowing prevailing state
or local educational agencies to recover their reasonable attorney's fees from
attorneys for filing, or continuing to litigate, any special education action
determined by a court to be "frivolous, unreasonable or without foundation."
Courts can also levy a fee against parents if their action is brought for an improper
purpose, such as to "harass, to cause unnecessary delay, or to needlessly
increase the cost of litigation."
_____________________________________________________________________
Zachary Deal v. Hamilton County TN Board of Ed (6th Cir. 2004)
On December 16, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a decision
in Zachary Deal v. Hamilton County (TN) Board of Education.
The case involves Zachary Deal, a young child with autism. After Zachary made
exceptional progress in a one-on-one ABA Lovaas program provided by his
parents, the parents asked the school district to fund the program. The school
district refused and offered to place Zachary in their one-size-fits all special
education program for young children with autism - an "eclectic program" with no
evidence of success.
In Deal v. Hamilton County, the Court found numerous violations of IDEA:
* Predetermined child's placement - The school system pre-decided not to offer
intensive ABA services regardless of the evidence about his individual needs and
the effectiveness of the ABA program.
* Failed to include a regular education teacher in IEP meetings
* Denied FAPE
The Court found that the school district's "eclectic" program "provides little or no
chance of self-sufficiency for an autistic child while, under the Lovaas approach,
self-sufficiency is a real possibility."
The Court also found that "While schools are not required to 'maximize' a child's
potential, there is a point at which the difference in outcomes between two
methods can be so great that provision of the lesser program could amount to
denial of a FAPE."
Analysis of Zachary Deal v. Hamilton County Department of
Education
by Gary Mayerson, Esq.
Using excoriating language such as "appalling," "evasive," "closed mind,"
"combative," and "untruthful," Administrative Law Judge A. James Andrews has
held in a 45-page decision that the Hamilton County (Tennessee) Department of
Education (HCDE) repeatedly violated federal law in failing to provide an
appropriate education to Zachary Deal, a seven-year-old Chattanooga boy with
autism.
Judge Andrews found that in violation of the Individuals With Disabilities
Education Act (IDEA), a federal statute which guarantees an individualized
educational program to children with disabilities, the HCDE embraced and
perpetuated an illegal policy of refusing to consider the very autism intervention---
intensive one-to-one Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)--- which Zachary needed to
make educational progress.
ABA - Lovaas Programs: Long Track Record of Success
The efficacy of the "ABA" intervention for children with autism was first
documented and published by Dr. O. Ivar Lovaas, a UCLA professor, in 1987 after
decades of research.
Dr. Lovaas' 1987 scientific study, which utilized experimental controls, reported
that with approximately three years of intensive, one-to-one ABA, nearly half of
young children with autism were able to succeed academically in mainstream
educational settings and be considered asymptomatic and "indistinguishable"
from their same age, typically developed peers.
The 1987 ABA study also showed measurable, post-treatment IQ gains that
advanced many of the children in the study into the range of "normal"
intelligence. As reported in the Court's decision, the evidence at the trial showed
that current replication efforts largely have been tracking the outcomes reported
in the 1987 ABA study.
Surgeon General Report Supports Intensive ABA
In 1999, as Judge Andrews found, the Surgeon General of the United States
published a report which endorsed intensive ABA, and which called Dr. Lovaas'
1987 study a "well designed study."
Judge Andrews found that "the Hamilton County Department of Education
consistently rejected providing ABA to Zachary or any other student [even
though] Hamilton County does not even have a methodology for educating
autistic children." Judge Andrews also stated that "Experts on both sides testified
that selecting the wrong methodology for an autistic child can mean the difference
between an independent adult life and a lifetime of dependency and support."
Zachary Made "Tremendous Progress" in ABA Program
Judge Andrews found that "the Deals made a correct and legally defensible
choice when, in the face of the school system's unbending intransigence, they
opted to continue [and fund] the successful ABA program Zachary had been
receiving."
In his decision, Judge Andrews found that Zachary had made "tremendous
progress" as a result of receiving intensive ABA and that "Zachary's greatest
gains occurred when he received no services from HCDE". Although the ABA
intervention can be costly, Judge Andrews found that ABA "may be