More Proof Harvard Is Nothing But a Degree Mill

The dictator of American education's latest outrage is also seen at this link.

This is yet another reason why this would-be national superintendent of education needs to either be impeached or forced to resign. He is pathetically unqualified to head an education department, and also he made a complete mess out of Chicago. He is the worst cabinet pick in the history of the United States. He operates above the law and thinks he IS the law. He is intellectually unfit to head a government agency.

If he knew one thing at all about special education, he would know that the vast majority of students in sped programs are LD (learning disabled) and HAVE to take the same standardized tests as students in the general population, but with accommodations and modifications as required by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. He also should be well versed in IDEA and NCLB, but I doubt this guy even knows what the acronyms mean, let alone what the laws are.

Students who are severely disabled take alternate testing. You cannot expect severely autistic students or students who are severely disabled because of cerebral palsy or FAS or shaken baby syndrome to even be physically, let alone mentally, able to take regular tests.

This cabinet official needs to be sent packing, like yesterday.

News, Etc.

It's goodbye and good riddance to Hosni Mubarak as he leaves Egypt for good, presumably.

Too bad Americans are too apathetic not to demand the same thing of our Congress and the White House. These politicians are all worthless neoliberal birds of a feather.

The crowds in Cairo get angrier as they don't believe Mubarak is really gone for good:

Angry protesters, who had swarmed by the thousands into the streets here Friday morning, were hardly mollified by the news of Mr. Mubarak’s exit and an accompanying statement by the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces over state television and radio. The protesters said they would not believe he was gone until he had formally relinquished his title as president, and until Mr. Suleiman, his handpicked successor, had been ousted as well.

The protesters did let out a cheer at news on state radio that Naguib Sawiris, a wealthy and widely respected businessman, has agreed to act as a mediator between the opposition and the authorities in carrying through the political reforms.

More is here.

Meanwhile, our country continues to engage in apathy while our leaders steal and destroy everything in sight.

_____

Leave the ESDs alone in Oregon; it's much more cost-efficient to pool resources than to have duplicate services. Not to mention special education students will get the shaft if the programs are implemented by individual school districts.

Remember, special education is a big cash cow for school districts, and abuse is rampant, not to mention teachers are under extreme pressure to cheat for administrators.

I can't believe Kitzhaber thinks this is a good idea to ditch ESDs. He has NO fucking clue what goes on in education:

In his recommended budget released earlier this month, Gov. John Kitzhaber proposed cutting that funding and sending it instead directly to school districts. The move could starve some ESDs, but Kitzhaber says it would introduce competition and force the service districts to provide top-notch programs. School districts would have an option to continue using their ESD, find another provider or perform the services themselves.

You stupid, stupid asshole. This is special education services, which are mandated by federal law, and special education is widely abused in school districts because of the money.

You want tons of lawsuits? Just piss off sped students' parents.
_____

Only a religious sect which devalues single people in general and single women in particular would create a conflict on whether to have sex outside marriage and long after most people have already "done it."

I never thought much of the Mormon faith because it is so sexist towards women.

News, Etc.

Special education students already get the shaft as it is, but districts are looking for ways to save money while still "complying" with federal law.

There really is no evidence "inclusion" is more beneficial to sped students, at least in terms of learning. The whole point of "inclusion" in the first place was to save money on rooms and even teachers. Socializing with the general student population is certainly to be encouraged, but let's not kid ourselves the students will improve academically when they really need intensive instruction without outside distractions.

What I have seen being a substitute "aide" (trying to survive the winter if I can) I can only describe as appalling because the life skills special education teachers don't actually teach the students by and large up here in Oregon, unlike Nevada. Instead, the teachers plan the lessons and write the IEPs, but they serve basically as supervisors to the aides, who do most of the work, even work that is really legally questionable. Aides should NOT be allowed to teach whole class lessons, not even do "read alouds"; it is illegal unless the aides are special education certified. Having an AA degree is not equal to being certified to teach. Even though I am a certified special education teacher, I am not Oregon certified, so I am not legally allowed to teach students. I would not unless or until I am certified.

News, Etc.

The Medford (Oregon) School District is in major legal hot water because it decided not to have the life skills high school students be in with the general student population at the new high school. The excuse the administrators are making will not wash when in fact it is federal law which states students need to be in the "least-restrictive" environment. Putting these students in the same school building with kids with behavior problems and not having any contact with the general student population is NOT complying with the law. Having the life skills class at the new school with students being able to take electives with the general school population while still having their own self-contained class IS complying with federal law.

The parents are correct in being upset with the district; a major lawsuit is appropriate.
_____

Next Friday an American television institution, As the World Turns, will air its final episode.

The sad news is no more episodes will be made, but the good news is thanks to YouTube and the internet, the show will live on.
_____

The number of homeless families has gone up, thanks to this depression.

Special Ed Kids Will Get the Short End of the Stick

with these "reforms" being pushed by the World Bank and Obama. What's going to happen to them if they are no longer taught by professional teachers?

Concerns now are nothing compared with what is in store.

If Crist vetoes the horrible SB6, he should probably be considered a candidate for president in 2012--not as a Republican, either. The party won't have him.

Clueless Administrators

That principal over at this school still hasn't a fucking clue what "CLS" is.

It's not just cooking, for crying out loud. It's COMPREHENSIVE life skills, which runs the whole gamut from learning vocational skills to personal hygiene to social skills (including outings). It's about LIFE.

More violation of special education law at that school, but nobody there dares take this dipshit to task.

The whole point of comprehensive life skills is that it is a self-contained classroom program geared for the moderate to severe special education students and learning disabled kids who are not MR or autistic but several grade levels below and that they are taught LIFE SKILLS they can use for a lifetime such as social skills, simple vocational skills, cooking, mending, arts and crafts, simple money management, and academic skills in reading and math. In high school it is more vocationally oriented. These are kids who cannot take regular classroom courses because they would never be able to do it apart from electives or science (which can be easily adapted for these kids). These kids are such they will not be able to go to college or take vocational courses but they will be functioning members of their communities. At the heart of CLS, in times past was THE "special ed" class in schools around the country, are the community outings where students take regular field trips to businesses, movie theaters, museums, bowling alleys, skating rinks, shopping malls, stores, and so on because important life skills are taught in the field. It's real life experience. Kids learn how to spend money that they have earned in classroom projects. They learn how to act in restaurants and order meals (don't assume parents teach kids this). The kids use public transportation to go to these trips, not school buses, so they know how to use an important source of transportation.

What this principal did was destroy a perfectly good program and thought he could "combine" Home and Careers, a completely different program with a completely different emphasis, with CLS, and wrongfully put ESL kids in a class which they don't need to take but could take an elective, Home and Careers, with the regular student population. If I had still been at that school, I would have fought against him tooth and nail. This is the dumb shit who tried to get me to cheat for him regarding alternate testing.

This is What Happens

when school district administrators think they ARE the law. To hell with state law, for "directives" from school districts supercede them:

We did our own research and found that parents do have a right to refuse state assessments. Since the parents had expressed their opinions to us, we thought this was all that was needed. So we didn’t give the test.

The way the district sees it, we were given a directive and didn’t follow it. The reason why held little significance to them.

The district feels we influenced the parents. Nothing could be further from the truth. As teachers, our job is to work with parents and guardians and, with informed minds, determine what is best for their child.

Administration did not contact the parents to ask whether they wanted their children tested, nor did they tell us the parents request had to be in writing — not until our first meeting about suspending us for 10 days without pay.

The Education Wars: Another IDEA Goes Out the Window

or, in this case, the poor kid is booked as a juvenile for something that is part of his disability and can't help it.

If even one tenth of this story is true, the school district is in deep, deep, deep doo-doo.

Carole Reynolds is desperate to help her eleven year old autistic grandson, Zakhqurey Price, who has been charged with multiple counts of felonious assault against two school district employees. The school is Beard Elementary in Fort Smith School District, Arkansas.

Reynolds says, "On August 18th, my 11 year old grandson started the school year, and we requested an evaluation be done as he was returning from another district that recommended he have an aide with him at all times. We tried to get an IEP together before school started in July and were refused and told to wait until school started."

Reynolds has been refused access to Zakh's records in spite of repeated requests. She said, "We have made requests to receive a copy of his evaluation/assessment results before the October 15th temporary placement IEP meeting and were refused because they said it was not allowed by state law."

The guardian has the absolute right to see the records or get copies; this is a no-brainer.

What the fuck is the matter with that district?

More here and here.

Spec ed is a landmine for lawsuits, which is one of the reasons teachers don't stay in it long as a rule. Teachers are also vulnerable to being pressured to break the law by unscrupulous principals.

Here is more about Arkansas law regarding special education:

Zakh’s current home-school placement resulted from a disciplinary removal and he has been suspended for 12 school days this year. This constitutes as a change of placement pursuant to Arkansas regulations. This makes the need for a functional behavioral analysis mandatory at this point.

If an FBA was conducted previously but failed to result in a positive behavior intervention plan, then the family could disagree with the district’s FBA and ask for an Independent Educational Evaluation (“IEE”) in the area of behavior as a corrective remedy. Clearly any assessment of his behavior performed failed to result in a legitimate offer of FAPE since it failed to produce a positive behavior intervention plan. It’s more likely, however, that the FBA hadn’t been done. If it remains outstanding, then the family may be stuck with a District assessment at this point, though it’s long overdue if so.

The fact that this family has a court date on January 12, 2010 on the felony assault charges means the charges obviously haven’t been dropped and Fort Smith schools are prosecuting handicapped children for manifesting the symptoms of their handicapping conditions rather than providing them with a FAPE. What is more, in addition to the claims that this family most likely has under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”), they probably have actionable claims under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 for discrimination on the basis of handicapping conditions. While the IDEA claims can only pursue remedy in the form of special education services, the 504 claims can pursue monetary damages.

The Education Wars III: Special Education Funds

Now it's special education students and funding that are getting the shaft from the federal government and school districts.

From further down in the article, which really gets to the point:

But supporters of special education say special-needs students are being shortchanged. The biggest rub: To shift the funds, schools must show they have met certain criteria, which may include graduation and drop-out rates of special-education students. To allow more districts to qualify, some states are ignoring or lowering the standards.

"This is a slap in the face," said Candace Cortiella, director of the Advocacy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-area nonprofit that advises students with disabilities. "This is historic funding that could have had a huge impact with [special-education] students, and states and districts have instead chosen to minimize the amount of good."

At the heart of the debate is a provision in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, a version of a statute originally enacted in 1975. The provision says that in years in which there is an increase in federal funding for special-needs students, districts already meeting certain standards can choose to reduce their local spending on special education by as much as 50% of the federal-funding increase -- and, in turn, divert the freed-up money to other uses.

In past years, increases, if any, in IDEA funding were generally small, so the provision -- intended to give districts some flexibility -- wasn't used much. But the Obama administration's economic-stimulus plan boosted IDEA funding by an unprecedented $11.3 billion over this school year and the next -- roughly equal to the total amount states received a year ago.

The Education Wars III

K-12 education isn't the only thing under siege thanks to our worsening economy:

BERKELEY, Calif. — As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent.

In chemistry laboratories that have produced Nobel Prize-winning research, wastebaskets are stuffed to the brim on the new reduced cleaning schedule. Many students are frozen out of required classes as course sections are trimmed.

And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation’s higher-priced public universities.

Among students and faculty alike, there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline.

As California goes, so does the rest of the country.
_____

Predictably, special education complaints are increasing in New York City, at least.

The Education Wars II

I wish I had known about filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against Washoe County School District when one of my principals wanted me to illegally put all of my students on alternate testing, regardless of their eligibility, so as to not drag down the schoolwide test scores. I probably would have prevailed in court, as this woman ultimately did:

A California special education teacher has won a suit for retaliation because she spoke out about the limited services provided to her special education students.

According to an article in Disability Scoop, Susan Barker was a resource specialist in Riverside, Calif. in 2005 when she raised red flags about the limited services provided to students with disabilities in the school district and that the school district was "non-compliant to federal and state laws".

She made a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. At that time, she says, her superiors in the school district began to retaliate and made the work environment "intolerable".

Instead, my union and its attorneys, both of which KNEW about this principal's violations, decided to cover up for the son of a bitch and not advise me to seek legal help when I could have filed a lawsuit.

What I Truly Object To

is the increasingly more difficult mathematics concepts being taught to elementary and middle school students, which are totally inappropriate because most students are not able to process abstract ideas. I am referring to the push for algebraic concepts in the early grades, a recipe for academic failure.

Not only are most elementary school teachers not versed in algebra and therefore can't teach it and shouldn't, but the idea of shoving high school and college level mathematics ideas will almost certainly result in an increase in special education students. Special education students, in turn, are more likely to drop out of school and end up in low-level jobs, assuming they can get them. Besides, algebra is basically a useless concept for job and career preparation; the only purpose it serves is to teach abstract thinking.

But perhaps that's the point: create a two-tiered education system with the "dregs" being shoved into special education, while the "smart" kids are pushed into college.

Here is an opinion piece that sticks in my craw.

The same garbage has been done in language arts with the whole language bullshit, which is nothing more than shoving high school-level concepts onto little kids, when in fact they should be learning phonics, grammar, spelling, the whole building blocks of reading and writing, and then gradually move into "real" books. Now we have millions upon millions of students who are way below grade level because of crappy curriculum.

I am going to go out on a limb and say 90 percent of students in special education should not even be there in the first place. They have no behavioral or real cognitive problems such as mental retardation to actually qualify. But because they are taught absolutely inappropriate curriculum and more often than not by inexperienced teachers who themselves were trained in college with nutty concepts such as whole language, reading recovery, reading workshops, and "new math" ideas, these students end up further and further behind. A generation ago, this would never have happened. The second-language excuse doesn't fly, either; after all, this country was made up of second-language learners and almost all of them made it through the traditional curriculum just fine.

It's the curriculum and teacher training, stupid.

More Education Wars

While I am glad a school district has been exposed for penalizing special education teachers for merely following the law, people need to understand what they are going through is very commonplace in education. I went through this with an asshole administrator at a middle school, when he attempted to get me to violate federal law--not just NCLB but IDEA as well--to put all of my sped kids in my self-contained life skills class on alternate testing, even though only two of my eight or nine students qualified. He didn't care about the legality; all he cared about what his own career and whether the schoolwide test scores would be pulled down by having most of my kids take a test they are required to take. I won this battle, but ultimately lost the war as he found ways to retaliate, and that in large part ultimately led to my wrongful termination. I think in the end, the district is going to pay very dearly for what it has done, and it should.

Seattle will because those teachers knew where to turn, but I didn't. I didn't realize I could have filed a federal lawsuit against this district and this administrator at the time, but the statute of limitations has run out, as I was told by an attorney friend. Asshole gets off scot-free, or so he thinks. I, though, have other ideas. I am not going to let the district get away with this and other malfeasance.

One should note this:

All the parents in Jackson's class refused the test.

Judy Kraft says that's their right. But in large numbers, those refusals would cause problems. Federal regulations say 95% of disabled kids have to take tests like the WAAS and the WASL. When districts and schools don't hit that number, their federal funding is jeopardized.

Jackson's teacher and her colleague have appealed their suspension. They're back in the classroom for now. Jackson's teacher didn't return a call for comment. Her colleague says their lawyer told them not to talk to reporters. Their spokesperson says they're filing a complaint with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Actually, this isn't exactly accurate. Just because kids are "disabled" doesn't mean they automatically qualify for alternate testing. Most "disabled" kids take standardized testing; only the most severely cognitively impaired students take the alternate tests. Federal law is strict about that in order to prevent cheating by unscrupulous administrators, although in my case it certainly didn't stop him from approaching me--completely illegal.

Those two teachers got off easy; they were only suspended. They HAVE their jobs, but my career is ruined in large part because of this prick of an administrator.

The Education Wars

This report is truly disturbing and shows how far schools and teachers need to go to deal with special education students, especially those who act out or are emotionally disturbed.

According to a report released today by the Government Accountability Organization, the widespread use of the often violent and abusive techniques of restraining or secluding students with special needs has led to hundreds of fatalities and injuries of American school children in the past two decades.

Of the hundreds of cases the GAO reviewed, at least 20 instances of restraint or seclusion resulted in the death of a child.

Scary shit, and special education is truly a legal nightmare. But it isn't just the student who is having the problem that teachers have to worry about; it's also the safety of other students. This is it in a nutshell:

Peterson called the decision on how to respond to a child's outburst a "delicate balance" and recounted two incidents in which parents sued because restraint was used on their children, as well as a case in which a school was sued for not restraining a child.

"Schools are in a bind," Peterson said.

Some students HAVE to be restrained in order to keep themselves and others safe. "Time out" rooms are hardly violations for crying out loud. Yes, there are some truly bad things going on, but those are obviously rare.

Read the comments after the article. Many of them are very good and have obviously been written by teachers who deal with these types of students.

Campaign Notes.

I will, incredibly enough, be able to watch tonight's debate on MSNBC just before I head out the door to take the long, long, long bus ride to Medford. I will be there for a week before I return back to Reno.

Because I work at a year-round school now, I have breaks scattered through the year. At first I was apprehensive about this arrangement, but now I think it might be better for me.

I won't get as burned out as I was before.

People who think teaching isn't hard are people who have never done it in their lives. It just about kills the hell out of a person, especially the deadlines, rules and regulations of special education. They're a nightmare.

The kids and teaching, however, are great.

Because So Many

Washoe County schools failed to do worth a shit under NCLB guidelines, thanks primarily to the fact they have so many special ed students, the trustees don't like the rules requiring virtually all special ed students to take the regular tests. They don't pass anyway, even with accommodations. And because they can't do grade level work, they get labeled special ed. In other words, if the kids could do the work and pass the tests, they wouldn't be labeled as needing special ed in the first place.

Which only goes to show that Congress and the creators of this disaster of a law don't know shit about special ed.

Naturally

most students who are special education have to take the same grade-level tests as their peers in the general student population.

That's nothing new or unique to one location; it is standard operating procedure throughout the country.

Most of the kids in special education are normal intellectually, but for whatever reason, including being taught inappropriate curricula early on in school, they are put in special education.