Remediation

Some children are behind in a subject like reading but do not have low enough test scores to qualify as LD, although they very obviously may need help. Different schools handle this in different ways.

Janis

“Remediate” means to try to get you back in the middle of the group — to take a lower skill and work on bringing it up.

There can be lots of reasons for somebody to need remediation — if your background is less than enriched, you’ll tend to be behind others who’ve already been taught things. (I don’t just mean home background… could be a school/teacher that didn’t teach a skill.)

Often, though, different methods work for kids with different reasons for needing remediation. (Case in point: Reading Recovery does admirably for some kids — but it’s simply not designed for kids with the more neurologically based LDs.) If a student has an LD, then the IEP team should figure out how that individual student’s skills can best be remediated (assuming that’s the appropriate thing to do); ideally they *don’t* say “oh, we have a remedial class, he can go there.”

Generally special ed students *are* their own group — if for no other reason than they tend to require a certified special ed teacher if they’ve got that label.

The big question is whether students are being grouped because somebody’s taken a good look at their needs, or whether it’s a groupingbecause it meets some legal requirement and to heck with what they need.

How is it that people would know that a student would need remediation if they haven’t been tested for LD? How can they be remediated if they have not been tested? Is there any way to know for sure that it isn’t LD if they haven’t been tested?

Children presumably have difficulty in regular classroom instruction for a time before they would be referred for testing. And it’s very appropriate to try some interventions to see if it would help the child before referring for testing. A good teacher should certainly be able to identify skills that are weak just from regular classroom interaction and assessments. Of course, sometimes it is the poor regular classroom instruction that causes the delay to begin with, but that’s another topic.

Janis

You can know you have a fever, without knowing what the cause is, and know you need something to take the fever down.

Remediation means you are going to get a person’s skills back up to the level where they should be.

You would not need to test for a learning disability to know that someone had not yet learned how to read or do math. Testing for LD involves testing to see why a student would not learn those skills even though they were being taught them, so it includes tests in how a student processes different kinds of information and does tasks taht require different kinds of thinking.

[quote=”strawberrygirl”]How is it that people would know that a student would need remediation if they haven’t been tested for LD?

If they’re behind in a class or if their skills are low for their grade, it can be assumed that the student would benefit from remediation.

How can they be remediated if they have not been tested?

Well, that’s a very good question. Without testing, the remediation is kind of hit or miss. It’s rather like a doctor giving a broad spectrum antiobiotic without testing for the specific bacteria that’s causing the illness.

Is there any way to know for sure that it isn’t LD if they haven’t been tested?[/quote]

No and the reality is that most of us have learning differences of one kind or another. At least in my school when students are struggling it’s usually because they have learning differences.

A reasonable compromise or happy medium is required here.

You can test and test and test forever. Many parents can tell horror stories of their kids being tested, waiting, being tested again, literally for years. Meanwhile, the child is not learning anything, is falling further and further behind, and is developing all sorts of stress and self-esteem problems from both the continual testing and continually failing. What starts as a moderate reading problem can blossom into a major personality disorder - I’ve tried to work with kids like this and it’s bad.
Human psychology/behaviou/physiology is extremely complex and it is very hard to get an exact diagnosis of *anything*. Even the common cold presents itself with different symptoms from one person to the next — you have a mild cough, she has a headache, and I collapse in bed unable to breathe. So when it comes to something as complex and hard to define as LD, you are *never* going to get an exact point for point diagnosis and an exact recipe for what to do about it.

On the other hand, just dumping kids into a program and seeing if they float is not exactly positive either. The “one-size-fits-all” style doesn’t work in special ed any more than it does in regular ed.

Yes, you should test and try to find out what is going on. Meanwhile, a *good* teacher will have a variety of materials and approaches at her disposal and will do an awful lot of informal testing and will match the child up with a program that seems to fit the child’s needs. Good teaching is good teaching, phonics skills are absolutely necessary for independent reading, and a good teacher can teach a lot while you are still waiting for the appointment with the specialist.

Going back to the medical analogy, one time my daughter age 4 was getting over her thrice-annual tonsillitis, on the last day of the penicillin, and I took her on a fairly long trip that I had to do for work. I left her in an excellent family daycare, and then got a call at noon that she had suddenly, within less than thirty minutes, developed a high fever. We headed straight to the emergency room of course. There they found that she was 104F (40C) and no sign of dropping, red, glassy-eyed, etc. An excellent nurse didn’t waste time; they stripped her down and put her into a cool shower, and immediately gave her the largest possible dose of Tylenol (acetaminophen). Once she was cooled off we waited for the doctor as usual. It turns out that she had scarlet fever — the strep from the tonsillitis had not been killed by the penicillin, but had invaded her whole body. The quick action of the daycare provider, myself, and the nurse prevented further damage; untreated scarlet fever can cause heart damage, blindness, and death. She has an eye problem that may be a result of this, but thankfully no worse. Now, should we have sat and waited for the lab tests to come back to say why she had the fever? Should the daycare have sat and waited until I came back? Should everybody have waited until we got all her records from home? Of course not — we had a fire and we had to put it out. And should we go back to giving her penicillin? No, clearly either her pet bugs are too strong or else her body destroys it; since then we have used other antibiotics.

In education, often you have a problem right in front of you and you have to take some action right away. The kid cannot afford to wait six months or a year or more while people discuss exactly what kind of LD it is and what would be the ideal solution if you could have started it two years previously. You try to treat the symptoms as best you can — and if you know the best treatments, keep up with the latest developments, and work interactively with the child to find out what is going on, you can often find ways to make things work quite well. You can also avoid repeating treatments that have failed badly in the past.

Of course if the testing finds something else and if additional therapy can help, that’s great. It’s important to avoid turf wars.