Negotiating the Special Education Maze

Currently, only about 50% of American youths live in traditional two-parent, first-marriage families. This fact, combined with often bleak economic and social realities, creates the backdrop of interactions between families, children, and schools are examined in this probing volume. Answering a need for evaluative research in this area of increasing public interest, the contributors build a model for evaluation, focusing on the dynamics of family-school connections. How is school achievement influenced by parent-child interactions and the family environment? How do school, family, community, and peer-group connections affect early adolescents? What is the family’s role in the success of learning-disabled youth or in school truancy? What effect does parental discord and divorce have on a child’s learning?

These questions, as well as proposals for intervention and prevention, create the crux of this book designed to inform and motivate readers to respond to one of our country’s most fundamental social concerns. Vital reading for everyone who wants to better understand child-school-community interaction, this book especially warrants reading by students, researchers, and other professionals in developmental psychology, family studies, psychology, and social work.

Labeled “dyslexic and profoundly learning disabled with attention and behavior problems,” Jonathan Mooney was a short bus rider — a derogatory term used for kids in special education and a distinction that told the world he wasn’t “normal.” Along with other kids with special challenges, he grew up hearing himself denigrated daily. Ultimately, Mooney surprised skeptics by graduating with honors from Brown University. But he could never escape his past, so he hit the road. To free himself and to learn how others had moved beyond labels, he created an epic journey. He would buy his own short bus and set out cross-country, looking for kids who had dreamed up magical, beautiful ways to overcome the obstacles that separated them from the so-called normal world.

*This book contains adult language.

This practical volume is designed to help school practitioners and educators build stronger connections with families and enhance student achievement in grades K-12. Beyond simply getting parents involved in schoolwork, the book describes how positive family-school relationships can socialize and support children and adolescents as learners throughout their academic careers. Identified are key pathways by which professionals and parents can develop common goals for learning and behavior, a shared sense of accountability, better communication, and a willingness to listen to different perspectives. The focus is on assumptions, goals, attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that professionals can draw on both to assess school-home connections that are currently in place and to implement new, more productive practices. Grounded in theory and research, the book features case examples, self-reflective exercises, and discussion questions in every chapter.

In Ready to Learn, Stan Goldberg draws on thirty years of clinical experience (and personal experience as the father of two kids with learning differences) to provide an easy-to-use guide to helping children overcome any problems and improve their learning skills.

In the well-researched and compelling Standardized Minds, former journalist and economist Peter Sacks launches an exhaustive attack on the national obsession with testing — and lands a few hits. If you think you’ve heard every argument against standardized tests, think again. Sacks methodically picks away at our feeble attempts to measure the mind, reaching back into the history of testing with unsettling revelations about the creation of the first intelligence test and its many flaws. He deftly illustrates how the belief of inferior cultures motivated the creator of the SAT college entrance exam and takes on all that standardized testing has wrought: ability grouping, gifted programs, state accountability efforts — even the effect on parents whose perceptions of their own children are often shaken by scores on a sheet of paper. Standardized Minds is a persuasive must-read for parents, educators, and lawmakers that challenges our basic assumptions about intelligence and pays homage to the talented minds we may have overlooked in our fervor to rate the human brain.

This 2007 book covers key legal topics — Who is a person with a disability under the ADA and Rehabilitation Act? What accommodations are required? What documentation is necessary? How do the ADA and RA apply in higher education and in the workplace? What are the courts deciding? What about state law? How to advocate for your position?