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