You know, I have had an e-mail conversation going back and forth with a special ed. attorney who thinks NCLB is good and represents parents.
Today I woke up and just felt overwhelmed. Maybe it was that meeting we just had, administration required it, to look at test scores of our sped. students and decide how to raise them.
Firstly, in CA every student must reach “proficient,” a score of 4 on a 1-5 rubric. In the sped. department, most kids are a 1 or 2 in language arts, with a smattering of 3s.
I looked over names It is a no-brainer. The 3’s are the brightest of the LD group, the IQs above average. Period, amen, end of story.
The 1s are the very low average, low 80s and lower, in most instances. These students have low verbal IQ scores, they have no vocabularies and they have weak higher level thinking and reasoning skills. Might we get them to a 2, certainly, but a 4? Probably never in a million years, no matter what we do.
And what we do, we have been doing for years and years (I am at H.S. this year) and I know many of us work very, very hard. So, we are asked to try to fit more into our already busy day, nothing is ever removed to create the instructional time.
When did we, the professional educators, promise our nation that we COULD educate every person to the same standard, or beyond?
Public education was once a priviledge, my parents and grand parents believed that we were fortunate to have an opportunity to learn, free. They understood that you appreciated an opportunity and used it, responsibly.
Now, I read the parent sped. law websites, and one in particular is full of parents who are angry that the school doesn’t do enough for their children, despite sometimes significant behavior problems that make doing our teaching jobs very difficult. One recently expressed anger that her child received a 10 day suspension for marajuana (just crumbs in his pocket and he smelled of pot when he returned to class), afterall, he has ADHD, how can he possibly control his own behavior! Or, my child has been suspended, I don’t want my child in detention, or my child was suspended when her behavior plan states that she is supposed to be warned of consequences before she commits the act and was not. Excuse me, how can you watch everything every moment. How can we even know every sped. student in a H.S. of over 300 sped students? How can every teacher, proctor, secretary, paraprofessiona and clerk know the child and her behavior plan and be watching for an incident throughout the day? Just what do they think we do with our time.
Excuse me, I am frustrated trying to chase the students on my caseload who are failing classes for the pure and simple reason that they DON’T DO THEIR WORK (almost every F on my caseload has this cause and when I check I find the child can almost always DO the work, but choses NOT to). How do I teach and deal with this all over campus all day long? I already use my weekends to prep and get home at 9:00 two nights per week to do IEP and prep work in my classroom. Just how am I supposed to BE what these parents demand? And this is with a monitoring and a prep period?
This CR*P is nothing more than entitlement. We have taught a group of students and parents that their child does not have to perform in the same society with everyone else. I refer to students being asked to do modified and accomodated work and parents who won’t take the time to MAKE SURE the work is done at home every night. I am happy to e-mail assignments, call parents, you name it. Little changes.
We cannot be held responsible for what we did not create and cannot change.
No, I don’t mean to paint a complete doom and gloom picture. There are some good hard working LD students. There are great parents, but when you don’t have the necessary ingredients to produce achievement, how can we be REQUIRED to produce achievement , or ELSE.
Here, guys, take this bowl, some air, water and a spoon…..bake me a cake, why don’t you.
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
I hear you. You are fortunate to have only one bad teacher. I am not excusing this teacher, just that you will encounter this in life, everywhere.
Our worksheet science teacher lets them use the study guide he prepares to take the test. I think that is fair.
The sped. staff can educate some of these teachers. However, we are soooo stretched. If I were a collaborator in a class such as you have described I would make certain the vocab. was taught, etc. But, I am not. I teach every period I don’t monitor. There are not enough of us to get around.
Yes, you do need to push hard to keep the program appropriate, but your child does the work. I have a few students on my caseload like your child and they generally do well (that is when the bad teacher sticks out, the child earns A, B or C in every class but one where he has an F).
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
My son is 10 and truly LD. Having an LD child, even one who has had a lot of remediation, in school s a tremendous amount of work. You are talking high school. I wonder if the kids not doing their work and the parents not keeping track are just tired. My son works three times as hard as anyone else and I wonder somedays how long he can keep it up. We spent twice as much time working with him than we do with his two siblings put together.
I am not complaining. He is doing things we couldn’t even hope for two years ago. And I am reconciled to the fact that it is just going to be a lot of work on everyone’s part to get him through school. But I also know that I am on the high end on the commitment part—and that a lot of other parents don’t do what I do.
Still, it must be discouraging for you to see kids you’ve worked with or similar to the kids you worked with not seemingly using what they do have well.
Beth
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
I’ve seen the entitlement trap too, and the administrative butt-covering at the expense of actually DOING our jobs. If we could be realistic then we could work *together* — aargh…
Frustration
Anitya,
Stick in there. Try to find a local conference so you can be with colleagues who can empathize. The next few years are going to be tough, but remember how dross is refined to gold. Ken
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
I’ll have to agree that the part about ALL children reaching grade level proficiency is a joke. Whoever wrote that is living in the of land of denial. I am delighted that schools are being pressured into improving scores of minority children and special ed. kids. I am delighted that they will be required to use research-based reading methods. But ALL at grade level proficiency? What do they want us to do, turn back the clock, take them home at birth, raise them in an enriched environment, and then get them to grade level? Come on, the school is just one piece of the picture. We have little control over all the other components that make a student successful. I want the schools to do their best. I want special ed. teachers taught good remediation methods and regular ed. teachers need to be required to have a minor in special ed. But parents have a huge responsibility that they have basically turned over to the school. Parents like Beth are one in a million.
Janis
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
Well all children can never be at grade level, regardless of parenting. Unless we went back and could change genetics or something. There are moderately to severely retarded kids after all, kids with multiple disabilties (my nephew may be gifted but he is gifted with dyslexia and Aspergers), etc etc. You could have the most amazingly enriched environment and it won’t change certain things.
Even then people would have to know how to create a very enriched environment. There are a lot of people wanting to create gifted children who feed them facts. It isn’t how to do it. But it is an understandable confusion.
Yes, I believe in increasing expectations of all kids, even very severely handicapped ones. It doesn’t mean you will make “normal” kids out of them, whatever that means.
—des
“normal” is a dryer setting
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
Oh, yes, of course, des. I certainly did not mean all kids could be on grade level if their home environment was changed. I know some cognitively delayed and multihandicapped kids that have the best parents, but they will never be on grade level.
Jnais
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
The dabate in my mind rages, just how much of a factor is the home environment in the overall educational success of a child?
I offer a few realities I have encountered that cause me to think it is HUGE:
1. A disproportionate number of Asian students are honor students, despite some having arrived here with no English. Hmmm, to whom do we award the applause for their achievements? The school or their parenting? I vote for the latter.
2. A disproportionately large number of our Hispanic students are struggling and placed in special education, many failing to learn the English language well-enough to succeed in rigorous academic curricula. To whom do we award the blame? Why, the school of course.
3. A mentally retarded Asian student (IQ of 60) who academically outperforms white, black and Hispanic peers who have IQs that measure 80 to 100 or more. Hmmm, to whom do we award the applause? This is my student. I award it to the parents for working diligently with this student, despite several years of schooling in Asia (yup, this student is bilingual). Lest you fear the bilingualism is the cause of the low IQ, rest assured the student was born in the US and returned to Asia with family for about 2 years during grade school and attended school there. Student is adaptively and emotionally behaviorally consistent with IQ score. Academics are closer to average.
My intent is not to appear racist. I merely note as I work with students factors that are present and missing. When the family is strong and emphasizes teaching and learning, the student may become an “overachiever.” When the family structure is weak due to poverty, family size, head of household being an overworked single parent who may not speak our language, etc. the student comes with many strikes against.
I really doubt that public education can level the playing field. I have not seen that we can make up for the paucity of experience impoverished students enter school with and continue to live with throughout their childhoods. The impact on education costs them years and years.
I believe we can strive and improve. As far as research, well this call for “research-based” instruction is overused. There are teaching methods that work better with some than others. There are also pedagogical issues that are being ignored in this nation. We continue to emphasize more and faster as better. Instead of being permitted to thoroughly teach mathematics concepts to youngsters, we are required to teach more faster and cover huge numbers of concepts and skills per year. How do we deal with reading scores, we teach more younger.
There is alot wrong and it is far more than just teachers using so-called untested methods. Too many laypersons, parents, administrators and congress persons don’t understand the issues involved in LD. They seem to think we can fix all LD, that we can teach each LD child the general curriculum using the magic words accomodations and modifications (yes, we can at times, but not all times).
TTFN to all.
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
You know I saw something on tv on the schooling practices of Asians (in Asia), specifically Japan. And yes they definitely value education and in some cases push their kids so much that it is appauling. But one thing I noticed, that no one mentioned was the diet. Did they eat the frosted flakes and pop tarts? They did not. Breakfasts were eggs, fish, rice, etc. The kids carried their lunches and they included things like rice, greens, fish, etc, instead of lunchables, etc. I wonder if someone is missing something here.
—des
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
I think diet is a part of the picture and I also agree that Asian parents can push too hard. On the other hand when American parents cry disability from everything to smoking marijuana at school to not doing and turning in modified and accommodated work, we may be teaching a group of students that they don’t have to be accountable like other people are.
I think the diet piece does not get the credit it deserves. Regularly we read what is issued by the AMA and its members stating diet has nothing to do with, for example, ADHD. How can we really say that? Maybe one meal of sugared breakfast cereal is not the culprit, but years of nutritionally deficient foods that fill but don’t nourish may have subtle effects on development.
We really need research carefully comparing the indcidence of ADHD and other childhood “disabilities” in different cultures. Somehow we need to factor our what may or may not be attributed to tolerance.
Finally, we do need to discriminate between the energetic active individual and the truly ADHD individual. Some of the more flattering theories of ADHD (Thom Hartman and his hunter/farmer hypothesis) really don’t compare ADHD with nonADHD, they compare a temperment style with another temperment style. True ADHD is marked by a significant immaturity in the executive function area and generally manifests in an inability to control and direct attention and self-discipline. I daresay, hunting requires significant levels of self-discipline.
Does a lifetime of poor diet effect neurochemical balance? It may.
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
I have long maintained that if people can have ADD iwthout the hyperactivity, then I can be hyperactive w/o the ADD :-)
I have to agree fervently, though, that diet and other ways we expose our bodies to environmental factors is something that we’re not dealing with well. (And if I’m H without the ADD, how much of that is because my parents really did rather strictly regulate our foods long before it was “cool”?)
And bottom line is that when you have bureaucrats whose job it is to make things *appear* a certain way — raise test scores so it appears schools are better — then the appearance becomes far too much more important than the truth. Then somebody tries even harder to make people “accountable” — but what are they accountable for?
me too!
I know exactly where you are coming from! I have to fight administration daily to comply with IEP’s. I have students in my room every hour of the day. When I tell adminstration that we don’t have enough staff to cover everything, they tell me to send students back to the reg. ed. classroom! Today, I attended an IEP meeting with 7 community services and 4 staff persons. After the meeting I was cornered by the principal and told that becauce we missed the K-12 staff meeting, we would be required to meet with him tomorrow, to make it up(he reported on the schools state test results). I feed my students because they missed breakfast or lunch. I provide them school supplies. I am working on my masters degree. I have figured out finacially, I will break even by the time I retire. It will mean that if I am still alive by then my retirement will be slightly higher.
I give 120% a day, and then get asked why I am not doing 130! I am sick of it!
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
So, I’d bring some grading to do while you find out the excitgement about the state test results — and if the principal says anything, ask just when you should do that stuff.
I agree with original poster
I just wanted to add that I totally agree with the original poster . . … I share so many of your frustrations! :(
share your pain
It is frustrating, especially when you are a committed teacher. Pardon the garden analogy, but I feel as if we know the row is long and hard to hoe but that we believe the fruit in the end is worth every drop of sweat and blood spent. Unfortunately, we can only control the sowing and the weeding—the composition of the soil, the amount of sun and rain, and the occasional crippling storms that blow over our seedlings are often more than our desire and dedication can compensate for. When we are blamed for the outcomes that are affected by the things we have little or no control over, it is very disheartening. We are left to wonder why we picked this plot of ground to work, why we are not celebrated for the good we have reaped, why we are not assisted with our noble task.
Another analogy that I have heard recently had to do with the expectation that surgeons be required to save every patient and criminal attorneys be required to keep all their clients from jail—without regard to the extenuating circumstances. I have maintained for some time that our elected officials have been using educators and education as scapegoats for the underlying societal ills that are plaguing our nation. Making these bold statements about all children being proficient without be able to define what proficient means (we’ll let every state figure that out) or without providing the direction (use scientifically based methods) and without providing the funding (we’ve increased educational spending even though we have never fully funded IDEA and states are in financial crisis with spending frozen in most school districts) only serves to further blame teachers and public educators and does nothing to improve the lives, education, or outcomes for our nation’s youth. Cheap shot if you ask me.
I often find myself wondering if NCLB is really a smoke screen for Leaving All But the Very Rich Behind.
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
No, it’s not that… it’s just “Propelling those who can think of a slogan into office.” It sounds just peachy for politics — and who gives a hoot about the real students. (And I’m not waxing partisan there; politicians of all flavors have been using education as their lever for some time, and admins who don’t know what a classroom looks like have been handing down the dictum of the day for far too long.)
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
Teachers, I really do feel for all of you!! I know that we can improve teaching tecniques but that is not going to help some students that just don’t have either the IQ or parental support they need.I volunteered in my son’s 1st grade class to help with those struggling to read. They were seemingly bright kids but most of them didn’t know their letters and didn’t have a clue what sound a letter made. It was very frustrating that these kids were even in 1st grade. Since my child is gifted/LD I decided to home school him. The administration wouldn’t even talk to me about doing additional testing even though it was obvious he had a problem. They told me he would have to be 2 yrs. behind before they would do anything!! Why in #$%^ would you want a gifted child to fail before giving him testing? It is all so frustrating and I can totally empathize with all of you. Jan
Re: My Frustrations, just venting here
Welp, somebody’s got an album out called “LEave no Billionaire Behind.” Can’t remember who, though :)
I have worked as an SDC teacher, I have worked in the HS setting in SDC’s and I love it…but I have become one of the parents from $*%@ when it comes to my kiddo who is mainstreamed in HS. The RSP teacher is fine, she and I are good friends and we commiserate together.
But what is really making me mad is the Regular Ed teachers who know Jack squat about reaching Special education kids that are mainstreamed. Since I have district e-mail I fire off daily e-mails to my kiddo’s teachers. My kiddo is pulling a’s and B’s and science is an “F”.
Part of the problem is the science teacher is ADHD, and is a worksheet person, doesn’t use the textbook much but man can those kids fill out worksheets but guess what…They can DO the worksheets but they don’t master the material and are bombing the tests. The teacher just doesn’t get it.
I ended up having my brainy son tutor my kiddo since he had this teacher in the past and he knows how this ditzy teacher thinks. My son has been getting through to his sibling and he told me…”Mom, my sib just doesn’t understand some of the things this teacher has been teaching, even thogh the worksheets are done, the mastery of the concepts isn’t there. He has spent 4 hours this week prepping his sibling for a big test that is tomorrow and he said…I don’t know if the mastery is there yet but understanding is coming..
I am just about ready to take an independent study for this science class and teach my kiddo myself with my son’s support. So yes, there are those kiddo’s who don’t do the work and their home life is disasterous and some of those kiddo’s who don’t do the work have parents who are just as ADD as they are. And then there are parents like myself and others who work in the system and we can yell til the cows come home and try to educate our fellow teachers but things don’t change….they just keep shoving those xerox worksheet we call homework and expect them to turn it in for points and wallah they get a grade.
Heck no…I am going for mastery. That is what I told my kiddo’s reading teacher in HS. My kiddo has an A- in the class, reading narratives isn’t a problem, what is hitting the fan for my kiddo is the expository reading. Does the teacher pre-teach the vocab? No…he just has them do worksheets where they figure out what the word means from context.
I had to educate him and said…You know…What is obvious to you isn’t obvious to kids with LD’s you have to spell it out, you have to talk about it, you have to draw about it, you have to act it out you have to master it…I don’t care how many worksheets you can shove their way if they are failing vocabulary tests, your method isn’t WORKING!!
I then told him what I would do and how I would teach it…and hopefully he is listening because I have worked in HS and I know what I am talking about. But not all kids who get F’s aren’t doing the work, many are doing the work but they don’t have the schema to make the connections…Which is something my 17 year old son figured out in just 1 hour of working with his sibling. He had to think out of the box and the worksheets went out the window but the talking, acting and multi-modality exchange was creating mastery of the concepts. It was amazing.
My son said tonight, “You know mom, I am really enjoying tutoring, it is so rewarding, I am good at it too and it makes me feel good that I can share something with my sibling.” Pretty cool huh?