Where Have all the Special Ed Teachers Gone - Long Time Passing

Read His "Sickening" Post

Motel Special Ed loses another good one.

Sickening

Pragmatic Semiotics

Teachers should not teach - Teachers should help students to learn.

Teaching to-the-test does not a teacher make.

Being taught to-the-test does not a student make.

--------------------------------------------
Teacher: a person formally engaged in facilitating learning
Student: a person formally engaged in learning

The Special Ed Concierge Dictionary full of unabridged words of wit. (pun intended, so laugh heartedly)

After Wilted Lettuce and Rotten Tomatoes will it be Jumping Beans and Po Boy's?

The unfair obstacle to receiving high stakes money. If we can get rid of SpEd kids, next we can get rid of migrant children and poor children -they are mudding our red carpets.

May 07, 2007Students with Special Needs Are Wilted Lettuce and Rotten Tomatoes ? by Daunna MinnichI have not found much time to post blogs recently because of IEP season and my impending office move. My electronic friend and loyal reader and commentator on this blogsite, Daunna Minnich, has come to my rescue with the following blog. She puts a big spotlight on another example of school people publicly sharing their real feelings about students with special needs, and the truth is not pretty.Daunna Minnich is a guest author for the blog and a special education advocate in Palo Alto, California. A former teacher, she is mother of two teenagers with special needs. She derives a lot of satisfaction from helping parents find their way through the special education maze via an online education forum, which she helps moderate for the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation and via a hotline sponsored by the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) for Special Education in her school district. Deeply committed to the work of the CAC, which she chaired for three years, Daunna enjoys advocating directly with school board members and administrators, writing articles for the CAC newsletter and organizing monthly parent education programs. She never has enough time for all the ideas that pop into her head.Analogies are a favorite tool for educators in explaining concepts. Well-chosen analogies can be highly effective, but ill-chosen analogies…. Well, judge for yourself the effectiveness of this culinary analogy made by an elementary school principal to describe the excellent education provided at her school: the principal compared her teachers to chefs whose ability to fashion gourmet salads is limited only by wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes.In her analogy, chefs represent teachers and gourmet salads represent quality education. But what about wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes? Those are special education students. It is to be hoped that Principal Annette Grasty of Lakewood Elementary School in Sunnyvale, California is wilting with remorse for this thoroughly rotten analogy. Surely she did not intend to be insulting or hurtful.Her comments came about in reference to the penalty that schools face under the No Child Left Behind Act if they fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in standardized testing conducted each spring. If even one subgroup of students (such as special education) does not meet the AYP goal, the entire school is labeled low-performing. Like many educators, Principal Grasty believes it is unfair to flunk an entire school for the low performance of a single subgroup.As reported in the San Jose Mercury News [Download wilted and rotten.doc] , she thinks education should follow a business model: "If I were running a business, I'd try to control the product coming in," she said. For instance, she said, a chef wouldn't prepare a gourmet salad with wilted lettuce or rotten tomatoes. In a public school, she said, "I can't control who walks in that door. I take kids with learning disabilities, I take everyone. They come in at different levels and with different ways of learning."Whether it’s fair to flunk an entire school for the low performance of only one subgroup is a debate for another time. But blaming students with disabilities for a school’s problems and calling the students disparaging names is more than unfair — it is hurtful and hostile. Let’s hope none of the students at Lakewood Elementary ever hear of the principal’s blunder. Being called a wilted lettuce or rotten tomato would humiliate any student who has a disability, and hearing such talk from the principal could only encourage the repetition of these epithets on the part of students who do not have disabilities.Even if children at Lakewood never hear the analogy, the damage will not be contained. How many readers of the only major newspaper of San Jose, the tenth largest city in the country, got the message that students in special education are considered by an educational leader to be wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes? This kind of talk perpetuates myths, encourages prejudice, and portrays students with special needs as unworthy of education. Not all children with disabilities will achieve the success of Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or Steven Spielberg (super stars with learning disabilities), but if educators do right by students with disabilities, these kids will grow into self-respecting taxpayers.Disability happens. It’s no one’s fault and it can’t be helped. However, students with disabilities can be helped by principals who put out the welcome mat and model the attitudes and behaviors we want all our children to learn and practice. From kindergarten on, school children are taught a simple rule: “No name-calling.” When children violate the rule, they need to be reminded. When teachers or principals violate the rule, maybe they should go back to kindergarten. While Principal Grasty brushes up on playground rules and analogies, here’s one last lesson for her on culinary arts: a gourmet salad can be made of many different kinds of lettuces and tomatoes, but pouring rancid dressing over it all spoils the entire salad.Posted by Charles Fox on May 07, 2007 at 04:53 AM in Schools Behaving Badly, Special Education News Permalink

Our District is safe from these National Trends

I know this doesn't happen in my Motel, but I was just curious how all of these other Motel Chains deal with these pressures.


..."Special Education students are written out of the tests, which raises the overall test scores"...
Are Schools Really Like This?: Factors Affecting Teacher Attitude Toward School Improvement By J. Gary Lilyquist
http://books.google.com/books?id=RX5vprYFNJ0C&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=why+special+education+teachers+hate+school&source=web&ots=wqQlE7C0jm&sig=Na8ksWURSrmJ9iqx_8v_JVTHmS4#PPA166,M1

________________

29719. Lori Giguere Frustrated teachers in our the district are mired with the unreasonable task of focusing on test scores instead of learning, and the children loose out. Every year more children stay back a grade, so they won't bring test grades down. Teachers try to have kids labeled on documents with disabilities so those scores won't count. Between these tests, and state tests, to receive funding, children are pushed harder, nurtured less, and hate school more. There is little time to make learning fun and real, and the poorest schools are still the poorest schools, in every aspect.

http://www.educatorroundtable.org/teachersspeak9.html
_________________________
In addition, further studies, some with as many as 4,500 teachers, indicated that key variables causing burnout and attrition were: job stress, weak support by administrators, unreasonable caseloads, large class size and ineffective in-service programs.
The research in this article examined an often neglected, but nevertheless equally important, factor in the burnout and attrition rate of special education teachers. This factor was a lack of school supplies, materials and resources. This shortage was largely due to a constant "tug-of-war" with regular education personnel for the same resources.In addition, further studies, some with as many as 4,500 teachers, indicated that key variables causing burnout and attrition were: job stress, weak support by administrators, unreasonable caseloads, large class size and ineffective in-service programs.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCG/is_3_33/ai_n17134806

Borrowed Post Title - A Teacher Supply Problem

A Teacher Supply Problem ---

Special education is a VERY tough business, no doubt. The attrition rate 3 years ago when I last saw the figures was a 50% turn-around within 5 years. Less than 3 years in some areas such as teaching those with emotional behavior disorders and those serving children with severe disabilities. And NCLB has probably increased those figures considerably. At this point, school districts are happy with any warm body, let alone someone who is reasonably competent and experienced. posted by Dick on a blog
http://specialed.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/a-teacher-supply-problem/

Communication is so tricky

The inability to convey inflection in what I write frequently impedes my ability to communicate effectively. As an example, suppose I wanted to talk about the business of education. When I say it, it is more like the business of education, but I have reason to believe that when I write it, it is incorrectly perceived that I am saying the business of education.

I have recently discovered another interesting point. It has to do with the phrase "those who can, do - those who can't, teach". I have always viewed that phrase from an athlete's perspective. I never perceived it as a derogatory or castigating statement about teachers. I also did not limit the action of whatever could or could not be done to just the skill itself. I kept it specific to the area involved, which means I did not expand the set. I did not come up with the logic of - teachers are people that can't do. Nor would I say that people who do are not teachers.

It used to be so simple when I looked at this way: I will use high school baseball as an example. As a high school student, if the student could play high school baseball, he did. If the coach could not play high school baseball, he taught. I never looked at it that the coach could not perform the skills of baseball, he was just too old to be in high school. He used to play high school ball. He may have played triple A or minor league. He could still play high school ball better than the kids. But the fact remained -for those who could play high school baseball, they did - for those who could not play high school baseball, they taught.

Unfair Set Up

Today, I am opening the doors to my "hotel". It will be heaven or it will be hell. I was in another "Special Ed Motel" for 21 years in several different wings. Some times I was treated as a guest, and some times I was treated as a recalcitrant. The constant was me - the variable was how honestly I was "handled".

For this post, I want to expose and explore an inane dichotomy of Special Education. Special Ed has a set of rules(Federal laws) that school personnel and parents are supposed to follow. The disparity in the level of knowledge of these rules (Federal laws) by either party seems to me to a problem that could easily be changed by having a forthright program designed to educate all the true intent of the rules (Federal Laws).

That is not what happens. What does happen is that as long as there is collaboration between teacher and parent, the system works as well as the regular ed system. When this collaboration becomes strained or challenged, the resulting actions of both school personnel and parent leads to what ultimately is an unfair set up for both of them.

The worst scenario is when the parent knows the rules (Federal Laws) and tries to enforce them vs. the school personnel who knows them and chooses to obfuscate them.

This "unfair set up" could be rectified by a sincere effort of an administration.

I think I know why it doesn't happen. I am curious if anyone else knows.


We need to deny that there's anything "special" about being disabled, so we can stop getting "special treatment" instead of justice -John R. Woodward, M.S.W.
http://www.jik.com/ilclang.html#TIME_TO_GET_RID_OF_SPECIAL