I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! As befits the season, I’m spinning interesting bits of news here and there into a blog post. I wouldn’t call these “leftovers,” though...more like yummy tidbits:
J.G. Fabiano, a teacher in York Maine writing for the Portsmouth Herald, says that special education has morphed into an “800 pound gorilla:
I am by no means saying the special education laws protecting our real-special- students should be eliminated. For the past few decades, I have watched wonderful committed educators help children who could not have survived in any secondary environment. The problem I have is too many children are being coded into special education because the school and the parents do not want to take responsibility for the child.
Milwaukee Public Schools has entered the third phase of a class-action lawsuit that claims the district did not properly education students with special education needs:
The latest round in court was focused on what should be done for children who were in the school system from 2000 to 2005, the timeframe the suit addresses. MPS leaders fear that the "compensatory education" that could be ordered by a federal judge would cost additional millions. Disability Rights Wisconsin, the organization whose attorneys represent the class, argues that MPS has done little to correct its flawed system since September 2007, when U.S. Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein found that the district had failed to meet the requirements of federal special education law related to identifying and evaluating students suspected to have disabilities.
A new center for family and child research at Chattanooga, Tenn.'s Siskin Children’s Institute promises results for students with disabilities.
The Rhode Island School for the Deaf struggles to survive. (See my story on deaf education here.)
Maria Lourdes Angala, a special education teacher in Washington D.C., has a wealth of interesting posts and links on her blog, found here. Be sure to check out her posts describing her quest for national board certification.