On Special Education

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.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a big crowd at a Friday morning panel on reaching childen with severe emotional needs through PBIS, also known as PBS or “positive behavioral supports.”

PBIS is another form of response to intervention. But, while the term “RTI” is often used to refer solely to academic interventions, PBIS is an intervention process for children with behavioral issues. As with RTI in the academic realm, all students in a PBS model are screened, and children who are believed to be at high risk for behavioral problems receive interventions that can hopefully nip such problems in the bud.

And, as with academic RTI, part of the challenge is creating a program at a school that is self-sustaining, and developing good interventions for children who are having the most difficulties. Coming up with good solutions is important—the same research cited by Thomas Hehir in his presentation earlier today shows that children with emotional and behavioral disturbances are still having the most problems in school.

Illinois, the focus of the presentation, has been working with PBIS for 10 years, and still struggles with issues of sustaining the program, said Lucille Eber, the statewide director the state’s PBIS Action Network.

Even with that experience, however, the state has had its own issues with implementing PBIS in some schools. Among the problems noted by Eber:

• Too low-intensity interventions for kids with the most significant needs;
• Habitual use of restrictive settings;
• High rate of undiagnosed mental health problems; and
• Difficulty in changing the routines of ineffective practices that are “familiar”

Eber told the group that the only way to create long-term change in schools is to create replicable systems and practices. Illinois and Kansas are working together on a project to develop a strong program for helping students with the most severe needs. Some of the solutions they have tried is increasing training of school personnel and prompting schools to assess their own work.

More information about PBIS as a nationwide initiative can be found here. The joint Illinois PBIS project has more information about the joint project with Kansas; scroll down the left and click on “tertiary demos.”

(Thanks to the Springfield, Ore. school district for the PBIS graphic.)

Posted by Christina Samuels at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)