Problem: Students too disruptive for a "normal" classroom.

IDEA
Our United States Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1990. All schools receiving federal funds must comply with IDEA.

Each child with a disability that prevents the child from taking full advantage of educational opportunties must be evaluated. School authorities must develop an individualized education plan (IEP) for each child. If the child cannot be "mainstreamed," the child must be educated in the least restrictive environment.

Depending on the individualized needs of each student, special education services might include tutoring, special classrooms, or special schools (including residential treatment centers).

The problem that concerns me the most is with children with ODD, ADHD, and other behavior disorders. All too often, schools are referring these children into the juvenile court system in order to shirk responsibilities under IDEA. When the juvenile court gets involved, parents risk losing custody of their children. I once represented a child who was incarcerated in a juvenile detention center with criminal offenders simply because "he needed an education." (Bang my head against the wall!)

Just figured out last night my g/f's 12 year old can't look up words because he doesn't know the alphabet...I'm in shock

Evaluation


Wow. Your girlfriend ought to request that her son's school conduct an evaluation. Perhaps the child has a learning disability that can be corrected through special services.

Twelve is not too old for the alphabet song.

My 16-year-old stepson informed me that there were 24 doughnuts in a dozen. Within 90 seconds, he was wiser--or if not wiser, better equipped for this commercial world.

It is too hard to know that some children can't go to school because of some problems that can be solved by the days . It is not fair that those students are separated from other students because of that . I think if they were in the same classes and have another separate classes as they need . it will be better than studying alone of not studying at all.

He's had special classes all his life He was even held back in kindergarten...lol. But the school system has given up on him I think. They just want to move him along.

BAD TO HEAR THAT PENZADE

yes...don't know what to do. The x box battles are killing me

How?


I am really puzzled as to how your girlfriend would not have known this.

Surely parents talk to their kids, look at what they write, regularly look at homework and research being done at home, read the written "report card" or the child's work samples AND communicate with the child's teacher(s) every five or six weeks.

How did knowledge of the son's deficiency with the alphabet bypass your G/F? Surely he'd have had a home reader or some English/literacy homework sometime in his school life.

If he's 12 and doesn't know the alphabet well, I dread to think back 6 or 7 years to his potential readiness for school.

This is the real tragedy. Rather than give special needs students special attention, all too many schools and teachers are prone to just automatically promote the kid to the next higher grade, to head him towards graduation whether he's equipped for the real world or not. I teach incarcerated adolscents at a detention facility. These are young men 13 to 17 years of age who are accused of some crime or misdemeanor, awaiting trial in juvenile court. I am constantly appalled to meet people who are in the 9th or 10th grade who cannot read. Lierally. They are illiterate and yet somehow got promoted right into high school. The ones who have IEPs are the lucky ones. They get special tutoring. The others just sit in their chairs, marking time. I cannot understand by what process of reasoning such youngsters get promoted.

Probably because most schools don't have the resources to properly address their needs, Andrew. Sadly, I think it's as simple as that.

I didn't see this one the first time around. Hmmm.

On the one hand, a lot of what I've actually accomplished educationally is convincing reflexively inclusive administrators that it is GOOD for deaf kids to be in an all-deaf or at least all-ASL environment. (As part of the two nascent deaf charter schools I was involved in.) For deaf kids who are mainstreamed, the supposed "LRE" (least restrictive environment) has a whole lot of restrictions. While hearing kids in a classroom get to look out the window, look at their friends, pass notes, etc., the deaf kid has to sit and watch an interpreter constantly, usually at the front of the class, and be chastised for not paying attention if his/ her attention wanders. The hearing kids get all kinds of incidental information -- conversations at lunch time and recess, things overheard while in the halls, things they overhear from other groups while working in groups in the classroom, etc., etc. Even a deaf child with a crackerjack interpreter (and I say "even" because in fact many of the terps at this level are lacking in skills -- one of the lowest-paid and most frustrating jobs an interpreter can have) has many, many restrictions.

Additionally, when I was student teaching, I taught a class that had "normal deaf" and multiply disabled deaf kids. This latter group is growing and growing as, for example, extremely premature children are kept alive.

"Normal deaf" are kids who have only one disability -- deafness. Adequately exposed to ASL, their progress exactly mirrors a hearing child adequately exposed to spoken English. You can just take the same educational concepts and apply them via ASL.

Kids with multiple disabilities have way, way more going on. ASL is no panacea. You have to do all of these other things to get through to them, too. It's really daunting.

In fact, part of what I was going for with the charter schools -- and had a hard time figuring out how to formulate it in a legal way -- was to provide a place where "normal deaf" could receive cutting-edge instruction and truly excel. There is no reason why a Deaf person can't read or achieve just as much as a hearing person, but in these one-size-fits-all deaf classrooms, they are often dragged down. And as I already said, mainstreaming is not much of an option, either. This is a huge problem for the deaf community. Deaf-of-deaf (deaf people with deaf parents) can often do well in mainstream settings, while they get a rich language environment at home. But only ~10% of the deaf population is deaf-of-deaf.

At any rate, I've certainly wished as a teacher and an administrator that I could teach a classroom without any disabilities (beyond deafness -- revealing my bias there I guess. :-)) It just makes me very anxious as any kind of applied policy, though. Because aside from deaf kids, who have specific language issues, the evidence is strong that mainstreaming helps disabled kids a lot. So what alternative are we talking about?

Pretty funny, that...

Had an argument a couple of years ago with a family friend who was lambasting public education. His evidence for how terrible it was that his kid was 10 before the school figured out she couldn't read. And, hey, that's more than a valid criticism -- but when I asked him why he didn't know she couldn't read, he responded, "That's the school's job." And this is a well-to-do family with a stay-at-home mom; plenty of opportunity to see if the kid is learning anything. Meantime, the same guy will vote for any proposition of initiative which decreases state revenue -- resulting in the exploding California class sizes that have plunged it into the bottom 20% of states in education.


(Man, what tortured English I'm typing out -- CA public school student, I...)

That ain't right.

He didn't know she couldn't read? I mean, how does that happen?

That's kind of it in a nutshell -- it's the school's job, but it's not JUST the school's job. And if the school has so little participation/ accountability from the parents, it makes the school's job that much harder. (Not to excuse the school in this case -- again, ain't right.)

"Can't read," I'm sure, was exaggerational. (Wait, hyperbolic's the word...) Clearly, though, she wasn't reading as well as Mr. B expected, and he placed the blame squarely and fully at the feet of the beleagured California public education system.

And the school's job is getting progressively harder as classes get bigger to accommodate funding cuts. (I'm talking about Victoria, Oz here, but it sounds like similar things are happening in other "developed" countries ..).
As a classroom teacher I'm receiving a constant stream of detailed reports of particular students' learning difficulties - everything from behavioral problems, to a variety of other syndromes & conditions ... The problem is, apart from having little or no specialist training to address the needs of these students, my classes are growing larger & larger. To the point where some of them feel more like lectures rather than good teaching/learning environments where students can receive the individualized, personal attention they need. It is incredibly frustrating to know of the difficulties that some students are experiencing & to have so little capacity to supply the assistance they require. I'm strongly of the belief that you can't have it both ways: large classes AND numbers of students in them requiring specialized help. Not at the same time.