Obama vs. No Child Left Behind

Well that's absolute bullshit hawkeye.

MOST mainstreamed SpEd kids are ones like Mo, who has a very minor learning disability, or they have a dysfunctional home life which makes getting the homework done too hard. They're a bit behind, not "retarded".

I've known of two kids that had their own aide and they were mainstreamed only for a small portion of the day.

Mo was isolated during first grade (don't EVEN get me started, we're still dealing with the fallout from that baloney) because the teacher didn't want to deal with him so she stuck him in a corner and ignored him. THEN she would complain about him being "socially inept".

That woman was a frikken monster.

That woman does seem to be something of a monster! One thing I don't like - it is way too hard to fire a teacher. I don't think it should be easy (the whim of a parent, or the year her dad died, etc). But, we have some seriously sucky teachers out there.

Not literally, but kinda sorta, yes. Although I'm certainly not saying that regular kids strive to be like handicapped kids, I do think that they benchmark themselves against the whole group of peers. And if this group includes members with dramatically worse abilities, the same dynamics that lift up the handicapped will make the non-handicapped slack off. Something along the lines of, "Hey, I'm already doing much better than X, and he's going to be fine too. So why work hard?"


Interesting! Thanks.


As a proxy to that, what goes on during recess on the schoolyard? Do the students with and without special needs play a lot with one another, or do they tend to keep to themselves? Is that behavior individualized, too?

They don't interact at all in my daughter's school and I don't think that
this is an isolated case. I am not so sure that integrating disabled kids with
regular kids is beneficial to them. Kids can be cruel and they are cruel to each
other - maybe they're civilized in the classroom but lunch and recess are off limits.

My boy had a reading problem, so that he had to do first grade over, get tested, get pulled out of class for a special ed teacher....that is not what we are talking about here. These kids were in the schools during the 1960's-1970's when I was there, they were never special ed school kids thus are not part of the debate about mainstreaming/inclusion or what ever we are calling it this week.

a bit of history: around 1968 when I was in second grade they built a special ed school right next to my grade school, my school was over ten years old at that point. THe idea was that we could mix, but mostly be where we belonged. Not sure why they decided that did not work.

boomer, I still think you should opt for private school, especially if Oregon's
public school system is such a mess.

Part of the inclusion business is explaining to kids that everyone needs different things in school. Teachers know what to expect of each of their students. The only way sped kids get any breaks is with extensive testing and a legal document stating exactly what breaks they get.

I think you're still stuck in this over-generalization trap. As I said above, different kids get different treatment. In middle school there is no recess. I have a few students who everyone wants to be friends with. Socializing, in some cases, is the biggest educational setback. I work with a girl who is dating quite frequently - she's stunning. I have kids who play sports and belong to a team that is happy to have them. I have one kid who is so caught up in his disability that he tries to hide it. He tries to act cool and tough. He is probably the most outcast student I have this year and he has faced bullying. But, it's not because he is a sped student.

In elementary school the sped kids played with their friends during recess. I know a non-communicating student in a wheel chair who had girls fawning all over him, a blind student who cracks jokes and thoroughly entertains his peers, and a girl from China who peed in the playground during recess. None of these kids has been ostracized so far as I can tell. Other kids have to be careful around the blind boy during recess so he doesn't get knocked down. They deal. However, there are a couple of kids who I've known who are really non-verbal -they can't read the intentions of others. Some times they learn (often they do), but until they learn they have a hard time making friends. Even still they do usually have one or two friendly peers who they hang with during recess, and I don't see kids being mean to them.

<shrug> I've worked in only one school district (3 out of the 6 school buildings). Maybe my district is special. Maybe there's a horrible bully problem I don't know about. Bullying certainly does exist, but it doesn't seem to be targeted specifically at sped kids. And it isn't rampant.

That's quite possible -- and it's part of why I was interested in hearing about your specific experiences. So thanks for sharing them!

Maporsche -- Kennedy and Bush worked out a compromise. KEnnedy agreed not just to vote for the bill but to persuade other senators to do so as well in exchange for federal funds for another project. Bush reneged on the funds and Kennedy was upset with the way NCLB turned out and withdrew his support after the fact.

Thanks for posting this. I worry about national standards because of Michigan's experience in the early 70s with meat processing standards. As MI had higher standards than the new national standard for sausage making (what is that quote about politics and sausage making being similar?), MI's had to be lowered as federal law supersedes state law.

Actually, the debate on how to fix schools probably began with the book, "Why Johnny Can't REad." That's more like 55 or 60 years ago.

I used to live in the town where LittleK teaches. It should be noted that the main employers of parents there are MIT and Harvard although that might have changed since I moved there in 1983 (moved out in 2007).

When I moved into that town with its vaunted system (always among the top 10 in the state), our elementary school's playground was a litter of broken glass. I am neither lying nor exaggerating. Parents took control of the situation. My daughter taught herself to read at age 3. I wanted a school system where kids read in kindergarten for that reason. The principal (who later committed suicide) asked me condescendingly, "What does she read, dear, signs?" I said that she had just finished Little House on the Prairie.

I will give you an example of firing/hiring principles . . . actually two.

One is from a suburban Boston system. The school board wanted to dump the middle school principal who was popular with parents. Her contract was not renewed and the parents protested. So the board renewed. Then, it came out that the principal was having an affair with the head of technology . . . who lacked the proper credentials for the job. She was let go at that point.

The other is from Amherst, home of the U-Massachusetts. THis is an upper class town with deep rural roots and a rich intellectual history. The town hired a consultant to find a principal! Really? I call that abdicating responsibility. The town was not happy with the man and rid themselves of him at the end of the academic year.

Consultants are a waste of money. She received nearly $40,000 for her efforts. That's the annual salary of a teacher.

Why? That sounds like you are against expertise. We train teachers and we train lawyers to solve/prevent problems. Why not use them for the tasks they were trained?

Sorry! That should be principals!

This was a big part of my studies in getting a special education master's, dated by now to be sure but what I've kept up on seems to indicate that what I learned then still holds true.

The kids with disabilities tend to do better than if they were segregated amongst other kids with disabilities, the kids without disabilities tend to do as well as they would otherwise, but the kids without disabilities tend to score higher on measures of empathy than kids who don't have to deal with disabled kids.

It really seems to be a rare win-win situation (as long as the teachers are aware and prepared, which as boomer indicates not all are, unfortunately).

An exception, as you know from what I've talked about before, is Deaf kids. That's a language issue more than a disability issue, though. (Deaf kids have complete access to ASL but very limited access to spoken English, and need a critical mass of ASL to be in an effective learning environment.)

Oh one more exception is the more extreme behavioral disabilities.

The "best" mainstreaming seems to be pure physical disabilities like kids who need to use wheelchairs or who are blind, developmental disabilities like Down Syndrome, some types of autism, and learning disabilities. (Probably forgetting others.)

Tiny piece of anecdotal evidence I happened to see yesterday as I waited to pick up sozlet for an appt (I was early). Another third-grade class was at recess and I saw a star of the school (smart, athletic, handsome) hanging out with a kid with Down Syndrome. Had his arm around him and was smiling encouragingly as the kid told a story.

That fits in with what I've seen in general. There are a lot of kids with some sort of learning disability (our district accepts kids that neighboring districts try to nudge out -- another story) and they seem to run the gamut in terms of how they do. Some are very popular, some are definitely "unique" but have their friends and niche, one guy I'm thinking of has a lot of social issues but that seems to just be him. There are other kids without learning disabilities who have those issues, too.

I'm curious about this; do you have any links or any other information I can reference?

Yes, that's the sense I'm getting from littlek's descriptions, too. Glad to hear it!

Yesterday evening, I acted as if I understood what you meant by "still", and what the antecedent of your "this" was. Today I'm discovering that I actually didn't; I just thought I did. Which over-generalization trap did you mean in the first place? My apparent failure to see that your students treat each others as individuals rather than members of the special-ed vs. regular-ed groups? My now-refuted assumption that if integrated schools lift handicapped* students up because they benchmark themselves against their peers, they probably make "regular" students slack off by the same token? I imagine there was some point at which you looked at one of my posts and thought to yourself: "Dude, you're seriously stuck in an over-generalization trap." But you didn't explicitly say it at the time. So now I'm somewhat fuzzy on where you're coming from with your "still" and "this".

* I do use "handicap" in a very general way, almost as golfers do. Whatever impedes students in their efforts to learn is a handicap to me.