Trying Times for Special Ed

[MountainLaurel]

Shykell Pinkney is in the seventh grade, but her developmental age is three months. Her teacher communicates with Shykell the only way possible, by holding two or three symbols in front of her face and watching to see whether her head turns to focus on one of them.

Shykell has Rett syndrome, a neurological disorder. She cannot write, point or speak. But her teacher, Paula Gentile, had to spend nearly 30 hours testing her on a battery of academic tasks -- 10 in reading, 10 in math -- to measure her academic performance under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

So Gentile and her colleagues at Ruth Parker Eason School in Anne Arundel County found some tasks Shykell might be able to complete. With sufficient help, she could distinguish between the sounds made by the letters P and M and recognize the title of a picture book when a recording of it was played for her. Gentile and her colleagues went through the tasks one by one and watched Shykell for any hint of a response.

"Half the time you were trying to get information, this poor little girl would be falling asleep," Gentile said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501477.html

This is fucking INSANE! Even more insane than schools that have to give the regular standardized tests to kids who literally entered the country the week before and have no functional English skills, all because the school is penalized if too many students are exempted from the test or "absent", even if by law they should be.

I know we've got some special ed teachers here -- Can any of you report on what you're having to deal with?

:grr:

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. In NYC, our severely disabled kids...

are assessed through an "alternate curriculum"... a pretentious collection of psuedoscientific jargon designed ( and re-designed, and re-re-designed... educational bureaucrats have *limitless* energy for this sort of thing)to measure the kids' progress, or lack thereof, against objective benchmarks.

We don't have to administer the test described but we spend an outlandish amount of time with alt assessment and data portfolios ( you collect samples of kids' work, put em in a folder then fill out about forty million pieces of paper related to each one... all of which produces precisely NOTHING in terms of describing accurately the kid's level of functioning and what he needs to learn.) The folios stay in the building for a while and then are shipped to, I'm guessing , a file cabinet in a warehouse in Albany, somewhere, where they go unread and unlamented.

You are correct about the "insane" part.

[msongs]

2. most of the special ed bureaucracy are nothing but PARASITES whose

primary function is to find ways to justify their own jobs and pay.

Parasites is actually too kind. Millions of dollars go to their paper pushing travesties...that money should be used to benefit the kids or the schools in other ways.

Can you believe giving a verbal test to completely deaf kids,a written test to kids who cannot read or write, a test in English only to students who do not understand ANY English, then averaging the scores into the tests of the regular students, then using those scores to say teachers and schools are failing?

That is what the special ed bureaucracy does, starting with the US Congress.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[FourStarDemocrat]

4. the localized special ed bureaucracy has little to do with this...

Just to be clear, this is all policy brought down from congress and the dept. of education. The special ed "bureaucrats" at the state and local levels are tearing their hairs out over this.

[FourStarDemocrat]

3. I'm in special ed and I agree that this whole policy is insane.

It is abyssmal how public schools must be forced to test severely disabled in order to avoid getting penalized by withdrawal of federal funds. And the millions of dollars spent to test is spent out of the district's pockets because these are unfunded mandates. Not to mention that test results say nothing about the quality of teaching that takes place at a school. They are all but useless, and will eventually cause public schools to decline more severely disabled children and redirect them to private special ed schools, which goes in the other direction-away from the goal of inclusion.

Thanks for alerting us to this article.