On Special Education

A new study of prekindergartners found that gathering information on children's skills and providing targeted interventions to those who need supports to learn, is a successful strategy that teachers could accurately implement.

The study is the first to look at a new approach to teaching pre-K students, called "Recognition & Response," which is based on Response to Intervention methods, said researchers at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The researchers found that a target group of students who received language and literacy interventions made greater gains than their classmates at skills including: letter naming, vocabulary, sound awareness, and print knowledge. The target group made gains at the same rate as their classmates on other language and literacy skills, the study said.

The study also showed that pre-K teachers could successfully implement the approach with a 97 percent rate of accuracy. Also, 92 percent of the teachers reported that they would recommend the R & R approach to other teachers.

The study followed 353 4-year-olds in 24 child-care, Head Start, and public pre-K classrooms in Maryland and Florida. The pre-K teachers conducted universal screenings on every child throughout the year. The results were used to select a target group of four children in each classroom who then received a language and literacy intervention in a small group for 15 minutes a day for two months.

"We are encouraged by this significant finding about the efficacy of progress monitoring and tiered intervention in prekindergarten," said Ellen Peisner-Feinberg, the project's principal investigator. "We expect this to be the first of many findings in a growing body of research that will help the field of pre-K education more precisely meet the needs of young children."

Posted by Lisa Fine at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The National Center for Learning Disabilities has revamped its Web site LD.org in the hopes of making it a one-stop shop for parents seeking a variety of information.

It offers several new sections with lots of user-friendly resources. The "LD Basics" section discusses various types of learning disabilities and helps to make sense of the latest research. "In the Home" is a section that offers tips that would help parents with daily challenges and expectations of having children with learning disabilities. "At School" includes information that would assist parents with advocating for their children in the school system.

For parents of older children, the "College and Work" section offers strategies and tools for helping children transitioning from high school to work or college environments. The "On Capitol Hill" section features education and civil rights legislation that affects students with learning disabilities

Posted by Lisa Fine at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I worked at Education Week, I spent six years as a reporter for The Washington Post, where I covered the Prince William school district in suburban Northern Virginia. I covered everything that happened in that district, not just issues related to special education—in fact, I tried to avoid such stories, because they all seemed so complex and difficult to write about.

So, I felt a pang of recognition when I read this column by my former colleague, Jay Mathews, about a mother who is seeking a specialized placement for her son that her local school district appears unwilling to give:

I admit that education writers in general, and I in particular, write very little about learning disabilities and the many failures of federally mandated public school programs to help students who have them. I often say the cases are so complicated I have difficulty translating them into everyday language, and even then readers struggle to understand.

But that is not the whole truth. I also avoid special education stories because they all seem the same, one tale after another of frustrated parents and ill-equipped educators trying but failing to find common ground, calling in lawyers while the children sit in class, bored and confused.

Kelli Castellino's son Miguel has learning disabilities that have been covered under a "Section 504 plan" rather than under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. I've written about the differences between the two laws in this blog post. I also wrote a post about how changes to the Americans with Disabilities Act could affect Section 504 students

Mathews doesn't offer a solution to this situation. Instead, he throws it to readers, and like many of these articles, the comment section is as interesting as the story itself.

I actually see many potential "solutions" to this particular problem, keeping in mind that I don't know what has already been tried. Perhaps this dispute can be resolved in mediation. Perhaps Miguel can move to another school. Tutoring might make up for some of his academic deficits.

But the questions posed here are bigger than just one student. As Mathews says, "The old way is rutted, bumpy and slow. It is not taking us very far. We need something new."

If there were one piece of the special education "industry" that you could change, what would you do?

Posted by Christina Samuels at 6:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The National Center for Learning Disabilities, based in New York, has just released an excellent report that offers a broad overview of the state of students with learning disabilities nationwide.

The center pulled statistics from several reports, including many maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, and put them in an easy-to-understand and useful format. Among some of the highlights collected in State of Learning Disabilities 2009:

• The identification rate of school-age students with LD has consistently declined for the past 10 years.
• Learning disabilities disproportionately affect people living in poverty.
• People of all races are identified with LD at about the same rate (except people of Asian descent).
• The cost of educating a student with LD is 1.6 times higher than a regular education student (compared with 1.9 for all students with disabilities).

I was surprised to see that the rate of identification of learning disabilities is going down, even though the classification "specific learning disability" is still the most common one among children eligible for special education services: 44 percent of children in special education had that classification in 2007, according to government statistics. (Within that broad category, dyslexia—difficulty understanding written language—is the most common learning disability.)

In comparison, autism, which receives a lot of attention, accounted for 4 percent of students with disabilities in 2007, the report states.

However, even at 44 percent, that classification rate marks a decrease from the more than 50 percent of students who were classified with learning disabilities in 2000.

The report hypothesizes that educational frameworks like response to intervention may be playing some role in the decrease of children classified as being learning disabled. Indeed, one of the prime movers behind the push for RTI is the belief that if children receive high-quality instruction when they are young, they won't be classified as having learning disabilities later in their school careers. Much more on that topic can be found here.

Improvement in reading instruction and widespread early-childhood education programs were also cited as possible causes of the drop in identification.

What didn't surprise me, unfortunately, is that identifications of learning disabilities are more common among students in poverty. The report suggests that children in poverty are more likely to be exposed to environmental toxins, poor nutrition, and other risk factors during early, critical stages of brain development.

The report also includes information on behavior, use of technology, graduation data and dropout rates, and legal protections. Anyone interested in knowing more about learning disabilities and their impact on students will appreciate this guide.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just as many children may have trouble writing words as reading them, according a study in the May 2009 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The authors titled their paper "The Forgotten Learning Disability" because they say there have been no epidemiological studies of how frequently writing disorders occur. According to their work, the prevalence of writing disorders ranged from about 7 percent to 14 percent in the group of children they studied, depending on what formula the researchers used.

Boys were two to three more times likely to be affected than girls. And there was a lot of overlap with reading disabilities, though interestingly, about 25 percent of the affected children didn't have an additional reading disorder.

The full study is available for purchase here. A short news article on the subject is here.

I'm aware of any number of lesson plans that are created to treat children with dyslexia. Is writing usually a part of the practice? There's such a large overlap between the two groups that it seems worthwhile to address both issues in tandem.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

When Amazon's Kindle 2 was released in February, the e-book reader was thinner and lighter than its predecessor--and also included a text-to-speech feature that could convert e-books into serviceable audiobooks.

That functionality attracted the attention of the Authors Guild, which has represented writers in this country since 1912. Audiobook rights are a potentially lucrative part of an author's publishing contract, and the group was concerned that the Kindle 2 offered the ability to breach an author's copyright.

In response, Amazon has offered publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech functionality of the device for individual books. But that move has attracted the ire of disability advocacy groups, which have banded together as part of the newly-formed Reading Rights Coalition. The groups represent people who have print disabilities, such as blind people or people with dyslexia.

The coalition plans to protest Amazon's move by holding a demonstration at 2 p.m. April 7 at the guild's headquarters in New York.

In a Wall Street Journal article, a guild representative said the group believes there's a way to work out this situation so that people with disabilities can have access to books. The Reading Rights Coalition is looking for a situation that allows full access to books by people with print disabilities. It's an interesting collision of technology and ownership rights.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Center for Learning Disabilities sponsored an online chat on universal design for learning with Patti Ralabate, a special education expert for the National Education Association. The chat is packed with links to great resources on this topic, which advocates creating lessons and classroom materials that are flexible enough to accommodate different learning styles.

Once upon a time, when lawmakers on Capitol Hill were still discussing the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, several education and disability advocacy groups came together in support of a provision that would promote universal design in the education law. It was noteworthy for being one of the few items that those many groups agreed on when it comes to educating students with learning differences. I wrote a story about the effort that you can read here.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in June, I wrote a blog entry about an Arizona appeals court halting a voucher program for students with disabilities and students in foster care. At the time, I wrote that I understood why people might support a voucher program for students with special needs, but I was a bit more skeptical that foster children have the same need for special schools.

This Houston Chronicle article, however, outlines some of the educational difficulties faced by children who are adopted, and I would imagine that children in foster care might have some of the same challenges.

Because of abuse, genetic issues and a lack of prenatal care, adoptive children are much more likely to struggle with learning disabilities, prompting their families to leave public schools in search of the extra help offered by often costly specialty schools.

While adoptive children account for 1 percent to 2 percent of the population, higher rates can be found in almost every mental health setting, including residential facilities and public school special education programs.

Dan Lips, a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, wrote a paper a year ago (before the Arizona program was stopped) talking about the need for such vouchers.

I'm still left wondering if foster care -- or adoption, as this story outlines -- is the issue. The children don't need extra help because they are adopted; they need extra help because they have special education needs. If you support vouchers, wouldn't a voucher program for students with disabilities cover these kids too?

Posted by Christina Samuels at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Candace Cortiella, the director of the Advocacy Institute and a member of the National Center for Learning Disabilities Professional Advisory Board, had an online chat yesterday about learning disabilities -- the transcript is here.

There's a lot of good basic information and statistics packed in this chat, particularly relating to No Child Left Behind and NCLD's perspective on how the law's testing provisions should apply to students with learning disabilities.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's something interesting: a college program in Washington state specifically for students with developmental disabilities. Students in the program at Bellevue Community College graduate with an associate's degree in "occupational and life skills."

The idea of a transition between high school and the "real world" sounds great. But the price tag of more than $27,000 is a bit of a show-stopper. There have to be less-expensive transitional programs in many communities. Seven years ago, when I was at another paper, I wrote an article about a woman with developmental disabilities who, after graduation, was going to work at this program. (Unfortunately, the story itself is not on the web, but if you're committed to enriching my former employer, you can buy it here.)

I do agree with one of the people interviewed that higher education for students with disabilities is a growing topic of interest. I have "transitions" down as a major topic that I need to cover sometime during the next school year.

Posted by Christina Samuels at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)