On Special Education

Late last year I wrote an article on "universal design for learning," an educational philosophy that promotes using technology to supplement teaching materials and make them accessible to all types of students. UDL had found support among several disability advocacy organizations, who wanted the concept included in the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Ricki Sabia, an advocate with the National Down Syndrome Society, just sent me a link that shows an example of universally designed texts created by the Center for Applied Special Technology in Wakefield, Mass., which has spearheaded the UDL movement.

This is really quite cool. As Ricki noted, the site offers text-to-speech technology, pop-up definitions of words, comprehension questions at four levels of difficulty, links to encyclopedia entries and translations between English and Spanish. It's a great example of the promise that UDL offers to make educational materials broadly useful. And it's fun, too -- I'm enjoying going through "The Tell-Tale Heart," one of my favorite spooky stories from middle school, and clicking on all the extra resources included as part of the text.

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I can't be the only Generation X-er thrilled to hear about the return of The Electric Company, right? I was primarily a Sesame Street gal, but I remember many a leisurely afternoon hanging out with Rita Moreno and Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman.

I honestly didn't know at the time that these shows were intended to help me learn to read; I just thought it was fun with letters and numbers. But this incarnation of The Electric Company, just like the groovy 1970s version, is intended in part to help kids get past the "fourth grade slump."

The producers said that they hoped the show would help head off a vexing problem: the wall that struggling students hit in fourth grade, the turning point at which school is no longer about learning to read, but reading to learn. As it was for the first incarnation of “The Electric Company,” the target audience this time is the economically disadvantaged child.

“Lower-income kids are already behind the eight ball by the time they reach kindergarten,” said Karen Fowler, the show’s executive producer. “By second grade language is flying by them, and they have no reference for it. That’s devastating.”

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I was hoping that Implementation Study of Smaller Learning Communities: Final Report (pdf) released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education might have some tidbits about how these school structures have affected students with disabilities. The federal government provided funding to districts so that they could start these programs. And, if the idea is to break large, impersonal schools down into nurturing structures that cater to individual students' needs, students in special education would seem to be an ideal audience.

But, no luck. The only information about students with disabilities contained in the report, which examined 119 small schools in 2002 and 2003, is that they tend to have fewer students with disabilities on a percentage basis than do large high schools overall. About 61 percent of large high schools have a population of 10 to 15 percent students with disabilities, compared with 36 percent of small schools.

The small schools also reported needing more resources for special education: 49 percent said there was "some need" for more special education resources, while 13 percent said there was a "great need."

The study's authors note that the results focused mainly on school structure. Only limited information was available on student outcomes.

Others people have serious problems with small schools and how they enroll students with disabilities. From an article I wrote last year about the small schools movement in New York City:

...school size is no excuse for not offering services mandated under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, said David C. Bloomfield, a professor and the head of the educational leadership program at Brooklyn College, a branch of the City University of New York. Mr. Bloomfield, the past president of New York’s Citywide Council on High Schools, has been an outspoken critic of the enrollment policy at the small schools...

New York officials tout the success of the small schools, which have higher graduation rates than other schools in the city, but those that enroll special-needs students accept children whose disabilities aren’t very serious, Mr. Bloomfield said.

Then the schools “wave a banner of success,” he said, “when they have a thumb on the scale in their favor.”

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My colleague David Hoff has a great article on our Web site now about a group that contends Asian-American children are being shortchanged under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund noted that the NCLB provisions for tracking ethnic subgroups are not adequate for Asians, and that Asian children who are English-language learners may have different needs and struggle in different areas than Hispanic students. Too often, the group contends, the unique struggles of Asian children are ignored because they're often seen as "model minorities."

This complaint reminds me of what I've heard from some disability advocates. Monitoring students with disabilities is the only way they feel they can get schools to care about their kids. There's real concern, though, that all the "flexibility" in the law may mean that children with disabilities will be left out in the cold.

It'll be fascinating to see what will happen to NCLB under a new administration, especially for students with disabilities. Right now, the candidates are full of promises, but offer few details. I've already told my friend Michele McNeil that I will have to deploy audience members strategically during any potential town hall meetings to grill the candidates about special education.

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I have to admit that the connection to special education is pretty tenuous, but I was transfixed by a story on NPR Wednesday about two families coping with transgendered young sons. One family decided to let their child live as a girl while another family is trying to make their son feel more comfortable in his biological gender, including taking away his "girlish" toys. Now, the child's mother says, her son has some friends who are boys and is no longer saying that he's a girl...but she senses that he's leading a double life. At school he plays with girls; at home, he knows that behavior is not acceptable. It's a compelling tale.

(The second part of the series, about a family that is considering hormone therapy to delay puberty for their transgendered son, is available here.)

Though the school/education angle was only a small part of the NPR stories, a quick Google search shows that this is hardly the first time that schools have had to make accommodations for transgendered youth. This article, which ran Saturday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, talks about the controversy that erupted when a 9-year-old third grader planned to transition into life as a girl. The school held an assembly for students to explain the situation. That didn't go over well with some parents.

"I did not think that the letter needed to go out," said Valerie Huff, whose daughter is a friend of the transgender student. "The kids don't make any big deal about it at all."

Mary Beth Lauer, district director of community relations, said there were no easy answers for school officials.

"This is something that was going to come out," Lauer said. "Isn't it better to be proactive, and let people know what is happening and how we're dealing with it?"

Does anyone have personal stories about schools and transgendered youth?

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It might be risky to draw attention to another special education blog, but I can't ignore the recent launch of Wrightslaw Blog.

Wrightslaw has been a reliable source of information for me since I started covering special education four years ago, when I didn't know IDEA from FAPE. The perspective is that of a parent advocate, which Peter Wright has been for decades. In 1993, he represented the parents in a Supreme Court case, Florence County v. Shannon Carter, in which the court unanimously held that parents can be reimbursed by a school district for tuition when they place their children in private schools, even if the private school is not previously approved by the district.

I've used Wrightslaw as a handy source for documentation in special education cases. I also appreciate his measured advice to parents; his website advises parents to know the law, stay polite and professional, and get everything possible in writing. Not a bad set of suggestions.

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G. Reid Lyon, a key architect of the Reading First program and the former chief of the child development and behavior branch at the National Institutes of Health, weighed in today on the interim report on Reading First released last week.

His in-depth responses on the ednews.org website offer a different perspective on the report, which showed no difference in reading comprehension levels for students who were instructed in Reading First, and those who were not.

Thanks to JohnL at Teach Effectively for the tip.

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The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates and other like-minded organizations want you to spend May 6 calling your congressional representatives on behalf of a bill that seeks to award expert witness fees to parents who win due-process disputes against schools.

H.R. 4188 seeks to undo a policy created by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Arlington V. Murphy. In that case, the court decided that parents who prevail in special education cases are not entitled to be reimbursed for the fees they pay to experts, such as educational consultants.

(Education Week covered the case extensively, as you can find here and here. I wrote a profile of Marilyn Arons, a parents' advocate at the center of the case, in a story here.)

COPAA's take on the issue is that "few parents can afford the thousands of dollars needed to pay qualified medical, educational, and technical experts. While parents must hire expert witnesses to testify, school districts can use therapists, psychologists, and other expert witnesses on their own payroll, or hire outside experts with taxpayer dollars."

Charles Fox's Special Education Law Blog has more information about the May 6 call to action.

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Everyone should check out the article written by my colleague Kathleen Kennedy Manzo about a major federal report on the $1 billion Reading First initiative. Students in schools receiving grants from the program perform no better than students in comparison schools in reading comprehension. Many states use their Reading First dollars to implement response-to-intervention frameworks in their schools.

The interim report and Kathleen's reporting suggest that Reading First has done a great job improving the ability of kids to decode words, but their ability to derive meaning from what they've read still falls short.

RTI is just a way of providing instruction, and districts have their own twists on how they implement it. But, in visits to schools, I've seen the kind of highly structured, scripted instruction on basic skills that this report points to as a potential problem area. Does such instruction get better results than less-scripted efforts? If nothing else, the report suggest that instruction in reading comprehension needs to get more attention as part of an RTI framework.

After you finish Kathleen's article, check out other articles in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church Church of Christ in Chicago, doesn't just have a lot to say about politics--he also has some thoughts on special education as well, which he shared during his April 27 speech before the NAACP in Detroit:

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient....Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale's research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning....

Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, TMH, and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip-hop radio station half of whose words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the griots in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history....

"Black cultural learning styles," anyone?

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for the tip.

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