Putting a good portion of the responsibility for societal transformation on our schools puts a lot of pressure on them. It’s hard enough to ensure the students get a quality education. As was mentioned earlier, most of these responsibilities have been placed on local schools through federal legislation and the courts. There’s no commitment from the communities or stakeholders who are funding the schools. [For instance, my school system actually qualifies to have a Title 1 program but we don’t because that would require someone formally admitting we are poor, which is obvious to all with eyes and ears.] I am the furthest one can get from a Trump supporter in rural America, but it’s policies like these that are pushing rural communities/institutions to their breaking point that is in part pushing rural Americans into the arms of autocrats (15 years ago my community didn’t have a single local elected Republican; today it’s the reverse].
I’m aware. But sometimes hard change has to come from the bottom up, especially when the top doesn’t have a direct stake in the systems that are meant to serve us all.
Sounds like on a local level, you and your students are being failed. In part because in more conservative parts of the country, right wing libertarians have often paid more attention to local elections, and have gotten into office and done all they can to gut public education. Betsy DeVos appointment as the top educator only cemented that ongoing shift that has been happening since the end of Jim Crow.
Part of this is defining what is a quality education. Back in the 19th/early 20th when we were starting to build our modern public school system, the goals were to create an American citizens (so immigrants were in mind), and to prepare them for the then modern work force (being able to read, write, and do math well enough to work in a factory and deal with the growing government bureaucracy). They asked big, theoretical questions to shape the system them, and if the educational system is failing students and teachers, we need to ask those same questions and think about retooling. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help people dealing with the current situation today.
I think it’s more than an ideological problem. The original article points to Illinois, after all. Perhaps society needs new structures and institutions outside of schools and the education system to address the needs of a society that is arguably very broken.
And, for admittedly the worse, because of our nation’s political structure, the opinions and perceived conditions of rural peoples matters more than those in the cities.
Agreed, but transforming education would be part of that and in could in fact be leading that.
you were making small government and state’s rights comments earlier.
elections have consequences. federal law directly contradicts your belief special education students should be separated, and i suspect if we swapped out special ed for another protected class the backlash would be swift and furious. separate but equal has been thoroughly debunked.
Done right, with good support, special needs kids can very much be integrated into a classroom, but teachers do need help and support for that if they’re not trained to work with special needs kids. It does sound like @Randy_Meier is not getting that, but I agree with you that it’s better to not separate them out - for both the special needs kids and the rest of the class.
That was Maryland in 2012
If you’ve ever been around special needs kids and seen or had to directly deal with one that lost control. Often you can’t simply talk them out of it, they can simply lack the ability to concentrate hard enough to listen. People need to realize that there is a big different between an average healthy child with all their faculties and a child with special needs.
Then you’d start to understand how someone can create god awful policies like this. (which makes me angry by the way, but does not surprise me. I grew up with this stuff) When you have people who aren’t trained and equipped to deal with the very special needs of these children, they’ll start to make up their own rules to cope with the problem.
It’s a failure of the system, rather than any specific individual. Punishing one or two people doesn’t make this kind of stuff stop in institutions. I’m going to say something that will very very unpopular with conservatives and libertarians: you have to spend a lot of tax dollars hiring trained, qualified people. Many more people, every small town district is short handed, almost without exception. And on top of all of this, we have to regularly audit the system for problems and have a plan in place to apply corrections.
We operate a federal system. States have some authority over internal matters, the national government has some authority beyond the state. It’s not a strict hierarchy, and there is significant overlap in State and federal responsibilities.
Expect interference from the federal government when you accept grant money. Also expect them to step in when child welfare or Constitutional rights is at stake. For example if a state or local school district doesn’t offer education that is equally available, then it’s not simply an internal matter. Recognized learning disabilities is a protected class, and you can violate Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 by not offering some public school education to a reasonable degree. (and that means even if it costs 10x more per student to educate special ed)
the problem is that definition gets twisted. tell a student to leave the room and they refuse?
In Maryland, at least, that would result in the room being evacuated. Part of the strategy is to remove the audience from the student-- much of the misbehavior is attention-seeking, and by removing the audience you can end the behavior. I’ve seen it work many times. The other part of the strategy is to remove human targets. Honestly, the LAST thing you want to do, at least in my experience, is put your hands on a kid. You can’t know what’s going to happen when you do, and you open yourself up to injuries physical, civil, and criminal. If I hadn’t figured that out myself, the days of training also point that out.
By law, students with IEPs have to be placed in the least restrictive environment where they can be successful. Figuring out where that is happens at the cost of students who have already found his or her own least restrictive environment. Students are placed in general ed classes. They don’t cope well. They are moved to a more restrictive environment. Repeat. At each step towards more restrictions, there are OTHER students who have their learning interrupted–sometimes for a whole school year, by the outbursts and “acting out” of the wrongly placed student. And in some cases, the best place for a student is a private school, but my county HATES it when teachers or other staff suggest such a placement because that costs buckets of money. The kid gets private placement, but the county pays for it. It is very, very expensive to educate some students compared to others. That’s why I hate it when charter schools get money based on head count. Some heads are cheaper to educate and charter schools appear to skim the cheap kids. But that’s another whole issue.
