Maybe your kid is not as LD as you are being led to believe.

Well as someone who has passed the Basic Skills tests, I would say that failing the test may not necessarily mean the teacher does not have these basic skills. It is a standardized and LONG test. I have heard of teachers failing due to fear of testing and other factors— mostly related to sitting and taking a test.

People who have been out of school a few years may not have good test taking skills. I know people who have gone in cold and not done so well. You need to study, just like people who study for SATs or GREs. People who study get much higher scores. (I think people sometimes do go in this without the knowledge that they need to study.)

Also in my own case, I have an ld in math. I REALLY had to study but the I actually would not have passed the whole test, if my score had depended on it. However, I am an excellent math teacher (though maybe not quite so good as Victoria!). I understand why kids have difficulty in math and can compensate. BTW, the test is up to 8-9th grade in math. The test should NOT include HS math, there is a separate test for math teachers at the HS level! That is a bit of mis-info. The Basic Skills test is for anybody whether they teach Kindergarten or 12 grade. It is logical that a kindergarten teacher would not need 12th grade math skills, and to require such may deprive the country of many excellent primary teachers. (Most people in our country, perhaps in most countries, do NOT have 12 grade math skills, even if they are college grads.)

We don’t know anything about the kids who said it was “easy”. I tend to think they were NOT randomly selected kids though. Yes a high school kid could definitely pass it, given the kid had good test skills. The kids problems with the reading section were not problems that they would have and adults would not have. I would guess that adults might have MORe problems reading into things and interpretation. That’s why test prep is necessary. The writing test requires actual writing but the grammar test is not what you would think. There are various errors in a passage and you have to find them. This is MUCH easier to do if you have had test prep. BTW, I feel the person who wrote the article selected the easiest (and perhaps least ambigious portions of the grammar test to illustrate. There are also plenty of questions determining placement of semi-colons, etc.)

I’m sure there is some “real failure” involved in this where the teacher could not pass the test because of real basic skills deficits and no particular disabilities (I would never teach hs or even JH math). The article does NOT differeniate between flunking the test due to test anxiety, poor standardized test skills, lack of test prep and true defiencies in basic skills. (I would guess someone who flunked it ten times or so has true defiencies, there is no excuse for that sort of thing.)

Since most of the multiple failing teachers were in inner city schools (which I agree represents a true problem), most of the kids who have learning disabilities here are not in those schools. Your kids prob. all really do have learning disabilities. The tests do not measure how teachers actually teach though. There are real teaching disabilities, most of them have more to do with HOW the kid is taught vs whether the teacher knows high school math. Most kids are taught math without sufficient concrete math practice. You could have the highest scoring teachers tested by college level math tests, and it won’t teach them math better. The same goes for reading thru the “Whole Language” approach. A teacher with a perfect score on the reading test section and teaches via whole language will still get terrible results. (There is a test on Teaching Competencies, but that doesn’t much measure those things either.)

Though I agree that a teacher who can not pass the tests after say the third time, shouldn’t prob. be in the classroom. (I did wonder what level the spec. ed teacher who failed it 17 times or so was teaching at. I think if it’s severe profound we shouldn’t worry too much. :-))

I didn’t think it was a brilliant piece of investigative journalism because it did not mention *any* alternative explanations for test failure (at least after the 1-3 times); did not mention there is a test for HS teachers teaching math (or other subject areas); did not discuss test prep. (or lack thereof) in adults. Or any possibility that the test itself is poor. (I have heard there have been errrors in several of the tests in large states.)
There is a national test, but mostly there is a test for each state (done thru major companies), I have heard several complaints re the test company that does the Illinois test).
At least in my rather quick reading of it.

—des

I am quick to criticize teachers when I feel the need, but I have never agreed with the testing thing for many of the reasons Des mentioned

We all forget what we dont use and I think its unrealistic to expect teachers to remember what they arent teaching on a regular basis. When helping my kids with area of triangle and circle type questions, I have to flip in the book to find or at least double check the formula-and I was a strong math student!!!!! I would expect the same for a 2nd grade teacher who spends her days teaching addition and subtraction

Besides, the ability to teach is not related to knowledge acquired IMO. My DH has a PhD but no one in this family wants him to teach them anything!!!!

One of our biggest arguments EVER was when he tried to teach me how to paddle a canoe. He is very inflexible-explains it one way and, if oyu dont understand it, he explains it again in the exact same wording but louder.

Teaching is about understanding how people learn and being flexible and patient enough to keep trying until it sinks in

Well, if this is the best piece of investigative journalism you haveever read, you definitely need to get out and read more. It isn’t a bad series of articles, but the author takes a dozen or so facts and repeats them over and over and over again in nearly every article of the series.

These articles listed the numbers and percentages of teachers failing the skills tests; these failure rates ranged from 1% to 10%. It is to be noted strongly that this means clearly that the *pass* rates were from 90% to 99%.
Certainly that means there are some failing teachers out there — but the vast majority are passing, and in a normal distribution, probably as many are scoring very high as are failing.

An experience nearly every new teacher has: The day comes, just before a holiday or whatever, when a large number of kids skip school. The teacher is very disappointed and gives the class a lecture about how harmful this is and how bad she feels about it. If the school administration is any good, someone takes the teacher quietly to the side and explains something important — you’re criticizing exactly the *wrong* group here. The ones who are here are the good kids, the ones who did *not* skip! The kids who skipped out are not getting the benefit of your heartfelt criticism, and the others are hurt because they are getting criticized when they did the right thing. You are losing support from exactly the folks who at least started out on your side.
The teachers who are here on this board are the literate ones. We read the web page and we write, and most of us can spell and use grammar properly. The teachers who are here are the ones who do care about improving students’ learning — we spend the time on this work-oriented website instead of amusing ourselves. You’re criticizing exactly the wrong group here. And you are losing the people who might actually support you. If you really do want to see improvements in education, try working with the good guys instead of calling them names.

I’ve seen a number of those incompetent teachers over the years, and agree that they do need to be weeded out. Your attacks on everyone here are just going to make people close ranks for self-protection, and work against the goals you claim to want to achieve.

By the way, I happen to be a very high scorer on tests. it’s a very limited skill, not much use out of public school. That doesn’t make me a good teacher. I worked hard at other skills in order to be good at what I do, and I still have a lot of limitations, work better one to one than with large groups for example.

Am I the only one who is disturbed by the appaantly high peorcentage of inner-city teachers who fail to have demonstrable grammar and math skill? This report mirrors a report done by the NY Times back in 2001 which found an extraordinary number of teachers working in the City who no proper license, no relevant skills and in fact represented “warm bodies” to place before the class.

I imagine the same will hold true in many of our other urban jungles, most likely because it can be so difficult and dangerous to work in some of those locations that schools are forced to make the best with who they have to work with.

Looking at the Sun article above, (and I think it was a pretty well written series of pieces actually) I can’t help but wonder where the rest of the teachers who could not pass basic skills tests. My gut instint says that most of the ones who are not in Chicago will be in the poorest, rural schools.

Those of us who either work in or have children enrolled in relatively affluent suburban schools do not realize how good things are there in comparison. (DISCLAIMER: I am not saying ALL inner city or backwoods schools are bad; but generally speaking the sububurban schools have far more going for them, not the least of which are parents who are far more likely to value education and far more involved in their schools in positive ways.)

I am sorry, I understand about diverse and obscure knowledge slipping one’s grasp after years of not using it, but basic grammar is used DAILY and how does one forget how to conjugate verbs? I can forgive those who grew up speaking a completely foreign language to an extent, but people born and bred here should have had more than ample opportunity to learn the rules of our language. It p!sses me off when I call customer service and get someone whose command of English is equal to my boy’s, I most certainly do not think that they should be teaching small children in our schools.

While I do not think that teacher competance is the sole issue to be corrected in all things LD, I do think that it has to contribute to the problem, if only to the extent that less-than-competant teachers will fail to reach kids who can be helped.

I do believe that articles like this one which highlight an unpleasant truth about the system as it stands now will be grasped by those who have a singular view of the problem we know as LD, and will be over-emphasized in the formula to correct the problem.

But here is an example of what I mean:

If we take as true the high percentage of teachers who are “professionally challenged and have skill deficits” being in the urban schools, how do we explain that the highest rates of recognized LD are most often in the suburban schools, which have a far higher rate of competant teachers?

It is my belief that teacher competance is not only a desirable goal, it is an imperative. I do not think that is the ONLY solution we need to work on.

“how do we explain that the highest rates of recognized LD are most often in the suburban schools”

It takes a good organization to maximize the number of students who are appropriately diagnosed in order for the system to receive the additional funding available. It also takes involved parents pushing for those diagnoses and/or appropriate services. The fouled-up urban systems just aren’t as organized.

My professional experience over the past 30 years leads me to conclude that there are bad systems everywhere, but the suburban ones tend to be a little better than the rural ones. I can’t imagine that there is a city system as bad as the one in Richmond, Virginia. Okay, I guess I can imagine it, but that’s about it. :)

John

Dad — I agree entirely that it is a serious problem to have all these unqualified and often really uneducated people working in the school systems that need the most help.
Having been there, lived and worked for ten years just outside Washington DC which has a school system that spiralled out of control a few decades ago (and yes, probably it is worse than Richmond), I have to tell you that the problem is not quite what outsiders imagine.
I discovered, to my shock and amazement, that these unqualified and illiterate people are being hired as teachers because that is what many people *want*.
In one case, I was job-sharing with a wonderful gentleman from Nigeria. He had a PhD in math and had taught at the junior college for several years. So here was a person who was highly qualified, experienced, talented, and a wonderful role model for the African-American community of the region. The kids in the school, 98% African-American, reacted to him with a peculiar form of racism. They made fun of his accent — nice, educated, rather British, and far more grammatically correct than their speech. They called him all sorts of offensive names. They said that he smelled. After six weeks of this he left, no surprise, nobody needs this kind of treatment. His replacement was also a nice gentleman, a local man, who had a biology degree from a little country college with unfortunately low academic standards. So here we have a biology teacher with even less math background than he should have had for biology, teaching out of topic in math, Grade 12 pre-calculus. He told me point-blank that he didn’t understand all the stuff in the trigonometry chapter so since he couldn’t follow it he wasn’t going to teach it. He also left the calculator closet unlocked and several hundred-dollar graphing calculators walked off. He was deeply religious and spoke to the students of his religion — a good person, but improper in a secular public school, also a misuse of time in a math class that is already behind. Well, even though he didn’t know the subject and wasn’t covering the material and was preaching instead of teaching and couldn’t keep the equipment in the school, the community *loved* him. He was a local man, looked like them and talked like them and preached in the way they were used to, and even though he was not doing the job they believed he was a role model for academic success. He was tremendously popular with the students — it helped a lot that he wasn’t making them do any of the hard stuff in the pre-calculus book — and the guidance department started transferring masses of students out of my classes and into his.
If this is what the community *wants* and the school guidance and administration support it, it’s an issue of far more than a few tests and regulations.

One of the gems of wisdom my sainted momma told me when I considered getting a degree in education was that while some folks went into the major because they really liked teaching & knowledge… there was a group who did it because it was and is about the least intellectually challenging major out there. Sorry, it’s just a bald truth. You can get an education degree with very low skills and aptitude for learning. I could fill this page with alarming anecdotes from teaching in public schools.
My stats teacher who couldn’t do arithmetic made it kinda hard for people to figure out the stats when the numbers never agreed, but more than half of them were already convinced that they “couldn’t do math anyway” so they didn’t try to make it make sense. Yea, some of them are teaching our kids math… what’s worse is that it’s the cycle of bad *teaching* that is more to blame than an aptitude issue. We are taught so darnded well that math is really easy — if you are of the Elect (that other group of math teachers; the ones who think it’s all obvious and that only the Worthy deserve those grades anyway)… and if not, it’s as accessible as tasting whatever that funky bitter stuff is that some people don’t have the gene to taste. It just “isn’t in you.” Or, you have an “LD” in math (though, unfortunately, it’s considered rather “normal” not to be able to do math).

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether or not a student is “as LD as you think.” Focusing on who to call what name or label isn’t nearly as important as figuring out how to get the kids learning and the teachers teaching. Let’s face it, many of the teachers would have much better skills if *their* educations had been better — that same “maybe they’re not as dysfunctional as you think” could apply to them/ us (I say, reflecting on some of the gaping holes in my own education… history? history? and knowing that essentially *all* my formidable classroom management skills were learned poolside, not in schools.)

And, IMHO, for what it’s worth, having lived in both places & known folks both places, Prince George’s County is worse than Richmond … but it’s been more than five years from either. Each system had its positives though — I had great math teachers in PG & my godchild got excellent K-6 special ed, and some of the students I taught who came to New Community from Richmond had been served well there., and were getting their educations paid for without undue due process. And… some of the best teachers I have ever known had a missionary attitude in one of the worst systems (made Richmond look superb) anywhere… not to mention any names but it’s always at the bottom of those virginia lists of county scores in anything. So if I were in one of those systems, I’d be rallying ‘round and trying to bolster those positives… tho’ not pretending that the negatives don’t exist.

I agree with that there is a problem in inner city schools. There among very many other very serious ones— very low per capita spending
(whoever says money doesn’t matter does not understand that the per capita spending for inner city schools is many times thousands of dollars less per student than suburban schools), low parent involvement, unsafe conditions (schools and neighborhoods), etc etc. The inner city schools often only attract the people who were born in those neighborhoods, and these teachers are products of these same schools.

I agree with Victoria’s analysis of the data, that this is not a wide spread problem and does not really have to do with the vast majority of children who have LD dxes.

—des

Victoria - I understand the point you made about teachers being acceptable to the greater community. I do not think, however, that we should sacrifice competancy for appearance. I think that we can achieve both aims, although it will take some time to do so. I see a direct parallel with law enforcement which often has trouble recruiting cops of minority persuasion to work in neighborhoods filled with “people of color”.

Des - while I have not slogged thru all of the links provided by Jerry (yet) I recall the series published in the Times in 2001 about NYC schools which found that nearly 25% of the teachers were unqualified to teach the subjects they were assigned and nearly 20% of the Sped teachers did not even hold a teaching certificate at all. Again, I do not know how this compares to other cities, but I do not believe it holds true in suburbia, where the community at large and especially the parents of the students take a far greater interest in the operations of their schools.

John - my point was not to suggest that urban (poor) schools have either the resources or the impetus to diagnose LD’s in the manner that suburban (affluent) schools do. My point was the OP was implying that the reason so many children are labeled LD is because the schools have unqualified teachers. This is not a logical argument when one considers that the schools with the highest number of unqualified teachers (inner city) will be the same schools with the most undiagnosed LD’s. Conversely, the schools with the highest percentage of qualified teachers (suburbia) have the higest percentages of children identified as LD.

I tink that what some people on various sides of the debate over how many children have LD’s fail to appreciate is that there is a very distinct possiblity that the creeping escalation of children identified as LD may not have anything at all to do with artificial causation (i.e. pushing children with curriculum that is developmentally innapropriate, labeling children as LD because of teacher failure, parents seeking mods and accoms their children may not truly need or qualify for, diagnosis du jour, etc.). There is a very real possibility that there ARE more kids with LD’s today than there were 70 years ago, or 50 years ago or even 30 years ago.

We live in a damn-dirty world, and the levels of toxins which exist in our bodies, especially women of child-bearing age continues to grow. Mercury emissions from human activity are at an all-time high. Lead, cadmium, nickel, arsenic, antimony and aluminum are all widely prevalant and most work in synergistic ways with mercury. The latest is PBDE, widely used in the US as a flame retardant, banned for almost 10 years in Europe, suspected of being both a neuro-toxin as well as a carcinogenic.

Perhaps the true reason for so many kids being labeled LD is we place a higher value on industry and commerce than we do being good stewards for the world we live in.

“There is a very real possibility that there ARE more kids with LD’s today than there were 70 years ago, or 50 years ago or even 30 years ago.”

I don’t doubt this at all. It could be due to the microwaves in the air, the sugar substitutes or who knows what. I just believe that the school systems’ privary motivation for identifying them is empire building… a.k.a. mo’ money.

Richmond Public Schools - WE’RE NOT THE WORST !!!!

I’m glad somebody thinks they’re not the worst. I’ve tested dropouts from Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Fredericksburg, Petersburg and points in between who scored better than most of the RPS grads I’ve seen. Scary, scary, scary.

I work for the state, but I do live here and pay Richmond City taxes.

John

Dad, there may be all sorts fo unqualified teachers, the article was about the testing that teachers take after completing their coursework (this is recent as I had no tests many years ago). The tests were to make sure that teachers could do basic reading and math. There are also tests in “teaching” (though of course that is just on coursework in college).

I think the unqualified teacher bit is somewhat scattered in this country. I have been unable to get a teaching position in the middle of the year in NM. Maybe if I lived in a rural area, but I think it is my age. But it does mean there are enough qualified teachers here OR that they are happy to fill positions with long term subs.

BTW, I think that by 2007, according to NCLB, there will have to be fully qualified teachers in all schools. I believe this may lead to more subs, as the qualifications for high school (even ld) is really ridiculous, imo. An ld teacher would have to be “highly qualified” to teach literature *and* math as well as special ed. This means they would have to have an English and Math major or at least minor. I think they won’t find those people so they will fill them with nonld subs.

—des

Of course, what does “qualified” mean?

That you have gotten the right letters after your name — or have done enough inservice hours … so a state that has a shortage can simply make the dance to get those letters after your name a little easier, further lowering the genuine standards.

Picking on this word Qualified/ qualify.
It seems a bit odd to me that in the dictionary it precedes the word Quality?
It’s hard to see any relationship between the two?

Perhaps this underlines the whole problem, where the education system is focussed on providing a qualified education, instead of a quality education?
Geoff.